Page:Modern Japanese Stories.pdf/34

 pre-Meiji masters of realistic fiction, but from the recent literature of Europe and America.

The history of the modern story in Japan can be considered to date from the introduction of Maupassant’s work in the 1890’s1890s [sic]. One of the earliest writers to attempt to produce in Japanese the type of story that was current in Europe was Mori Ōgai, who after his return from Germany in 1888 did so much to familiarize Japanese readers with Western literary forms.

Of the two masters of the late nineteenth century short story in Europe, Maupassant exerted considerably greater influence in Japan than Chekhov. The reason is not far to seek: the introduction of Maupassant’s short stories coincided with the rise of Naturalism in Japanese literature and, indeed, was one of the important influences in this movement. It was Maupassant’s direct, realistic and often harsh approach to his material that affected Japanese writers, rather than his mastery of the short story form itself.

Although Maupassant, like Chekhov, regarded the short story as being a genre in itself and although he contributed so greatly to giving it the characteristic form with which we are now familiar, his early influence in Japan did not on the whole lead writers to make the clear differentiation between the novel and the short story that is accepted in the West. The line of demarcation in Japan between the two genres has always tended to be vague. This is reflected in the terminology. Both forms are known as shōsetsu, the word for short story being differentiated only by the prefix tampen (short piece). Shōsetsu is also used with the prefix chūhen (middle piece) to describe an intermediate length of work having about 40,000 to 60,000 words; this roughly corresponds to what is sometimes known as novelette, but the form is very much more popular in Japan than in the West. Thus there is a regular continuum from tampen-shōsetsu through chūhen-shōsetsu to shōsetsu. The only real differentiation is in the matter of length, which itself tends to be very indefinite. This is not simply a matter of