Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/390

378 brevity needed to put any statement into so narrow a compass soon led to an elliptical and enigmatic style, which continually crosses the border-line of obscurity.

The twin stars of early Japanese poetry are Hitomaro and Akahito, both of whom loved and sang during the opening years of the eighth century. Perhaps the most illustrious next to them—illustrious not only in verse, but in prose—is Tsurayuki, a great noble of about the year 930, after which time the decline of Japanese poetry set in. There are many other well-known poets, and also poetesses. But the Japanese consider poetry more as the production of an epoch than of an individual. They do not, as a rule, publish separately the works of any single author, as we publish Chaucer, Spenser, and the rest. They publish anthologies of all the poetical works of an era. The Man-yōshū, or "Collection of a Myriad Leaves," was the first of these anthologies, and is therefore the most highly prized. It was compiled in the eighth century. The moderns have devoted a whole mountain of commentary to the elucidation of its obscurities. The Kokinshū, or "Songs Ancient and Modern, collected by Tsurayuki and including many of his own compositions, dates from the tenth century, a period whose style has remained the model which every later poet has striven to imitate. Other collections—all made by Imperial order—followed in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. These, together with the "Songs Ancient and Modern," are known under the general name of the "Anthologies of the One-and-Twenty Reigns" (Ni-jū-ichi Dai Shū). A much shorter collection, the Hyaku-nin Is-shu, or "Hundred Odes by a Hundred Poets," brought together by Teika Kyō, a nobleman of the thirteenth century, has long enjoyed exceptional favour with the public at large,—so much so that every one having a tincture of education knows it by heart; but the native critics justly refuse to endorse this superficial popular verdict. The acknowledged king of the seventeen-syllable style is Basho, who flourished at the end of the seventeenth century, and left ten principal followers, the so-called