Page:The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Volume 13.djvu/23

Rh volumes containing many hundreds of poems. Moreover, these are mostly very short, mere scattered leaves from the forest of thought and music in which these early, suddenly inspired artists of Japan were joyously dwelling. The culture of the Japanese court, as shown in these thoughtful little poems, is in most striking contrast to the barbarism of the "Kojiki" composed only half a century before.

The Japanese critic, however, would tell you that the "Myriad Leaves" by no means represents the best form of Japanese poetry. He would rather reserve his praise for the "Kokinshu," which is quoted next in our volume. It is a collection of court odes gathered in the year 905. Japanese poets have been possessed by what we might almost call a mania for brevity, for extreme condensation of form and thought. The "Myriad Leaves" had contained poems sometimes of several stanzas; the "odes" of the "Kokinshu" are none of them more than a single stanza, a stanza of five lines. These are still accepted as models by the modern Japanese. From among them was recently selected the national anthem. The Japanese Emperor, deciding that as part of the modernizing of his country she should have, like European countries, a national hymn, turned naturally to select one from the admired "Kokinshu."

From this same tenth century of the "Kokinshu," the most polished age of Japan, we give also a prose work. Story-telling had become the fashion, and Japanese narratives, or monogatari, were as lengthy as Japanese poems were brief. Several such monogatari have come down to us, among which the one generally most admired both for style and thought is the one here given, the "Genji Monogatari," or "Story of Genji." It is so nearly akin to our modern novels that we must note, with some reduction of Western self-satisfaction, that a literary form which Europe did not invent until the fifteenth century and which did not reach its full development among us until the nineteenth, was carried by the Japanese to such a height as the "Genji Monogatari" in their first