Page:Modern Japanese Novels and the West.pdf/27

 . One reviewer dismissed my anthology of modern Japanese literature as “skilful exercises in imitation,” though I think he would have been at a loss to say precisely of what. Other critics have been quick to express regrets that the Japanese ever permitted themselves to become contaminated by Western influence, instead of holding fast to their own great traditions.

Such criticism fails to take into account the fact that borrowing from the West was not affectation but the only way a literature suited to a modern nation could be created. It also ignores the truth that such borrowings have been necessary for the survival of every literature at decisive times. Here, for example, is what Louis Kronenberger wrote of Restoration comedy. “A vast number of Restoration comedies are related to Latin comedies or Elizabethan comedies or French comedies. Some are related to two or three: Wycherley’s masterpiece, The Country Wife, is part descendant of Molière’s Ecole des femmes, part of his Ecole des maris. But for the most part this business of genealogy seems to me quite barren and unrewarding: to be