Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/93

Rh he had never taught him the secret. Yoshimitsu asked, ‘Do you have your Chinese flute with you?’ ‘Yes, it is here,’ and he took it from his breast pocket.

“ ‘You are already very good on the easy works. That must be why you were so determined to follow me.’ Yoshimitsu then taught the boy the two pieces. He said, ‘My mission is so grave a one, that I cannot tell if I shall survive. But if, one chance in a hundred, I do return to the capital, I hope I shall see you there. Now, your family has furnished the Court with musicians for many generations, and are an essential part of it. That is why I want you to return to the capital and become a master of the art.’ When he had thus spoken, the boy yielded to reason and went back.”

This is the tone of the medieval novels. It is one of loneliness, of single figures setting off for battle across landscapes which now seem destitute of the flowering trees and all the other charms they possessed some hundred years before. The music of The Tale of Genji was principally that of the sweet-toned lute. In the period of civil wars that followed, the sad notes of a solitary flute played by a soldier on some still battlefield sound again and again in the literature, particularly the novels. Many of the latter are war-tales, each with its burden of glory and ashes. The one with the most accounts of bitter fighting and disasters is ironically called The Chronicles of Great Peace. In such books the narrative is occasioned chiefly by the doings of the principal historical figures of the time, but there are numerous digressions telling of the deaths of other brave men, or of the fleeting moments of pleasure they enjoyed.

It would be misleading, however, to leave the impression that the medieval period, if so we may call the eleventh to sixteenth centuries, was a time of unrelieved gloom. Both