Page:Modern Japanese Novels and the West.pdf/28

 much concerned with it in life is to be a snob, and to be much concerned with it in literature is to be a pedant.” This judgment might well be applied to Japanese writing of the past eighty years. Futabatei’s Bunzô sprawled on the tatami, staring blankly at the ceiling, may be a spiritual descendant of Goncharov’s Oblomov reclining on his couch, but the characters in the two novels are as different as Russian and Japanese.

Even after the appearance of The Drifting Cloud had seemingly pointed a new direction, Japanese writers of the next twenty or thirty years did not give up their literary heritage easily. Far from flinging away old traditions in a mad rush to imitate the West (a picture we are all too often given of their activity), most of them clung to familiar styles and themes as long as it was decently possible. The worst features of the old novels—minute enumerations of clothing and personal adornments, lyrical but extraneous descriptions of the seasons, embarrassing accounts of weeping and fainting heroes and heroines—continued to dot the works of the new writers. There were even instances of authors who first accepted the form and content of European literature only