Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/94

82 the emperor’s court and that of the shogun knew years of prosperity, and there continued to be a fairly considerable amount of poetry turned out at these courts which, restricted as it is to the familiar clichés, scarcely shows that changes had occurred since the glorious days when Lady Murasaki wrote. But in the characteristic literary products of the period, such as the Nō plays and the linked-verse, we find the terrible sadness and loneliness which so mark the novels. Another feature of the literature of this time was its decentralization. In earlier days almost all of the important books were written in the capital by members of the aristocracy, but with the breakdown of the central government, and the retreat to hermitages and monasteries by many sensitive people, literature came to be written in distant parts of the realm, as well as at the courts. Such literature does not have local colour in any cheerful sense of the term, but reflects the loneliness and resignation of artists cut off from the poetry-making society.

In 1600 a great battle was fought on the plains of Sekigahara, as a result of which the Tokugawa family gained supreme power in Japan. From that date until 1868, this family exercised a rule of generally benevolent but increasingly ineffectual despotism. One of the results of the peace which the Tokugawa family established, was a general economic prosperity and, towards the close of the seventeenth century, a great flaring-up of all kinds of cultural activity. In the field of the novel, the medieval tales of warfare or of the life of itinerant monks no longer suited the spirit of the times. The greatest novelist of the new age, and the first important personality in this field since the Lady Murasaki of some six centuries before, was Saikaku (1642–93). The work with which he established his reputation as a novelist—he was already well known as a haiku poet—was The Man Who Spent His Life at Love-making, a gay,