Page:Modern Japanese Stories.pdf/35

 terminology, but extends to the conception—or rather, lack of conception—of the short story as a distinct literary form. Very frequently we find the same piece of fiction being described alternatively as a novel and as a short story.

One result of this vague differentiation is the absence from so many Japanese stories of certain stylistic qualities that we have come to regard as essential to the modern short story in the West. This is certainly not to suggest that the story is a narrow form with certain strictly defined rules or cannons. Far from it. A genre that so greatly antedates the novel is bound to have enormous flexibility. The history of the story in the West goes back to the Tales of the Magicians and traces its complex descent through Aesop, Boccaccio, Chaucer, the Bible and La Fontaine, to name only a few of the great landmarks. Any neat definition is both impossible and undesirable. As the well-known short-story writer, Kay Boyle, has said, “The only continuity it [the story] possesses is that it was isolated individuals, sometimes writing centuries apart, who spoke with freshness and vigour, in a short-winded rather than a long-winded form, of people, and ideas, and incidents, which seemed to the reader moving and true.”

Since the time of Gogol, however, the story has developed in a certain manner that we may characterize as the ‘style of the modern Western short story’. Its outstanding feature is an economy of means. This has involved a tendency to compression, to the dropping of inessentials. The tendency has continued until the present day and has been given particular short stories of Ernest Hemingway, whom Mr H. E. Bates describes as the “man with an axe … [who] cut out a whole forest of verbosity”. Without economy there can be no short story in the modern sense of the term. This, of course, does not preclude the existence of short stories of considerable length. The tendency since the time of Tolstoy has certainly been in the direction of brevity, but the modern story may vary from a few hundred words to 15,000 or even 20,000. What is