Page:Sketches of Tokyo Life (1895).djvu/21

Rh large hall where many young men are assembled at night with closed doors, a hundred wicks are lighted, one of which is blown out as soon as a ghost story is concluded; and when a hundred such tales have been told in turn, the room is in total darkness, whereupon, it is said, some of the ghosts, which figured in those tales, are sure to make their appearance there. Sometimes the process is varied, as when the more timid among the assembly are sent on sleeveless errands through graveyards and other equally uncanny places.

Though people in old times took kindly to story-telling, we seldom hear of any noted raconteur, or of professional men in that line. There are still extant works written half a dozen centuries or more ago, that contain anecdotes or short tales, but they are now read for their style and other literary qualities rather than for their intrinsic interest. The most attractive tales that have come down to us are now the sole property of children. Their authorship is unknown as well as the age that gave them birth. Some of the most popular nursery tales were first told as allegories or in allusion to passing events; but they lost their underlying meaning by degrees as they were handed down from generation to generation; some are, again, Japanese versions of Chinese tales, while others are quaint pictures of the unquiet times which called them into existence, and came in course of time to be implicitly taken for history by some and derided by others as old women’s tales for frightening children. Thus in Japan as everywhere else, myths took shape and grew by identical processes.

The history of Japan is full of intestine wars. Among the most important are the long feuds between the rival clans of Taira and Minamoto, which eventually ended in the establishment by the latter in 1185 of the Shogunate or that feudal system which lived through all its modifications until 1868. The fortunes of the Taira clan, its triumph and prosperity, its arrogance and pride of power, its final fall