Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/153

Rh it may be that she tortures a refined ear by "colloquialisms," but to me her words disclose this graphic thumb-nail sketch of a jealous wife, leaping in one miserable moment from surmise to certainty:

If the singing-girl's vulgar song can stir at times as keen a throb of sympathy as the ditties which celebrate a "coster's courtship" or a gigolette's captivity, yet this effect and colloquial phrasing are the only points of resemblance. The points of difference are so numerous that, before quoting other specimens from a geisha's répertoire, something should be said of the characteristics peculiar to this and all Japanese verse.

The most obvious trait of recognised and unrecognised poems is their brevity. The great majority of them consist of three, four, or five lines, in which the number of syllables is either five or seven. Even the so-called Naga-uta (long songs), which enjoyed a short period of popular favour, seldom ran to more than a few dozen lines. Oldest and most classical of metres is the Tanka, a stanza of thirty-one syllables, and a Tanka competition is held every New Year, for which a theme is chosen by the Emperor. In January 1896 thousands of amateur poets composed "Congratulations Compared to a Mountain"; in the following year they sang of "Pine-trees Reflected in Water." The Royal Family itself takes part, and the whole nation thus inaugurates the year with libations of lyrical enthusiasm. Motoöri's famous comparison