Page:Sketches of Tokyo Life (1895).djvu/24

8 in Yedo was Seizaemon, of the Castle-gate, as he was called. He had come from his native city of Kyoto to present a petition to the Feudal Government; but on its rejection after three years of waiting, he was ashamed to return home, and being a man of some culture, took up his position on a little knoll near one of the castle-gates, where he read the Taiheiki and explained its difficult passages. Daily he drew crowded houses and soon was followed by many imitators. Before long, however, the Taiheiki ceased to be the only text-book. Other and less known works on martial subjects were also read, and in time these readers did not hesitate to draw more freely upon their imagination and publish works of their own, in which fiction far outweighed fact. The more fictitious the works, the greater was the avidity with which they were read by the public. The Taiheiki was eventually superseded by such worthless romances, the popularity of which, however, was next threatened by a new style of story-telling.

While stories of war and warriors did much to foster and maintain a military spirit in the nation, the effect of which is still great at the present day, and their public recital was in demand with the military class and the stouter hearts among the people, they could not appeal with equal force to the masses generally, as in the peace the country enjoyed under the Tokugawa family, there was nothing to arouse their interest in such subjects. Most people, moreover, frequented the story-tellers’ booths for mere amusement and not for instruction. There arose, then, a new class of story-tellers who avoided serious subjects and made it their sole object to amuse and excite laughter. These are called rakugoka or narrators of stories ending in a word-play. The elasticity of an agglutinative language like the Japanese makes it a very easy vehicle for the punster’s wit. The word-play often takes an important part in a serious poem or a prose passage, which sometimes owes its whole pathos to the aptness of the double-entendre it contains. By