Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/89

Rh that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart. Again and again something in his own life or in that around him will seem to the writer so important that he cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion. There must never come a time, he feels, when men do not know about it. That is my view of how this art arose.

“ ‘Clearly then, it is no part of the storyteller’s craft to describe only what is good or beautiful. Sometimes, of course, virtue will be his theme, and he may then make such play with it as he will. But he is just as likely to have been struck by numerous examples of vice and folly in the world around him, and about them he has exactly the same feelings as about the pre-eminently good deeds which he encounters: they are important and must all be garnered in. Thus anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken.’ ”

The ideas in this passage are so familiar to us because of the works of modern writers, particularly Proust, that we cannot perhaps immediately see how extraordinary they actually are. Clearly, neither the strange story nor the poem-tale, the two forerunners of the Japanese novel, attempted to give us any coherent idea of the past in a desire to preserve it from oblivion. Nor, for that matter, do we find any such intent in The Decameron, Tom Jones, nor in many other European novels before the nineteenth century. To tell a good story in such a way as to keep the reader’s attention from page to page is an essential feature of every novel, but to make this story the vehicle for one’s own thoughts, one’s own memories and impressions, one’s own feeling for the past, seems a strikingly modern method.