The spirit of Japanese poetry

THE SPIRIT

OF

JAPANESE POETRY

THE CANADIAN

The George A. Warburton
Memorial Collection

Presented to

The Canadian School of Missions
by A. A. Hyde, Esq., Wichita, Kansas.

Bax

Wisfcom of tbe East Series

EDITED BY

L. CRANMER-BYNG

Dr. S. A. KAPADIA

THE SPIRIT OF JAPANESE POETRY

WISDOM yOF THE EAST

THE SPIRIT OF
JAPANESE POETRY

BY YONE NOGUCHI

LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1914

NOTE. — The cover design of this book repre-
sents the Cuckoo in connection with the
Japanese Uta poem which will be found on
page 30.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

CONTENTS

rie*

INTRODUCTION 9

JAPANESE POETEY 15

II

THE JAPANESE HOKKU POETRY . . 33

III

No : THE JAPANESE PLAY OF SILENCE . 54

IV

THE EARLIEST JAPANESE POETRY . . 71

V

THE POETS OF PRESENT JAPAN . . 90

VI

SOME SPECIMENS 112

TO

ARTHUR SYMONS

THE POET

Out of the deep and the dark,

A sparkling mystery, a shape,

Something perfect,

Comes like the stir of the day ;

One whose breath is an odour,

Whose eyes show the road to stars,

The breeze on his face,

The glory of Heaven on his back.

He steps like a vision hung in air

Diffusing the passion of eternity ;

His abode is the sunlight of morn,

The musio of eve hia speech ;

In his sight

One shall turn from the dust of the grave

And move upward to the woodland.

YONB NOQUCHI.

EDITORIAL NOTE

THE object of the Editors of this series is a very
definite one. They desire above all things that,
in their humble way, these books shall be the
ambassadors of good-will and understanding
between East and West — the old world of Thought
and the new of Action. In this endeavour, and
in their own sphere, they are but followers of the
highest example in the land. They are confident
that a deeper knowledge of the great ideals and
lofty philosophy of Oriental thought may help to
a revival of that true spirit of Charity which
neither despises nor fears the nations of another
creed and colour.

L. CRANMER-BYNG.

S. A. KAPADIA.

NORTHBROOK SOCIETY,
21 CROMWELL ROAD,
S. KENSINGTON, S.W.

INTRODUCTION

THERE are beauties and characteristics of poetry
of any country which > cannot be plainly seen by
those who are born with them ; it is often a
foreigner's privilege to see them and use them,
without a moment's hesitation, to his best advan-
tage as he conceives it. I have seen examples
of it in the work of Western artists in adopting
our Japanese traits of art, the traits which turned
meaningless for us a long time ago, and whose
beauties were lost in time's dust ; but what a
force and peculiarity of art Utamaro or Hiroshige,
to believe the general supposition, inspired in
Monet, Whistler and others ! It may seem
strange to think how the Japanese art of the
Ukiyoye school, nearly dead, commonplace at
its best, could work such a wonder when it was
adopted by the Western hand ; but after all
that is not strange at all. And is it not the
same case with poetry ? Not only the English
poetry, but any poetry of any country, is bound
to become stale and stupid if it shuts itself up
for too long a time ; it must sooner or later be

9

10 INTRODUCTION

rejuvenated and enlivened with some new force.
To shake off classicism, or to put it more abruptly,
to forget everything of history or usage, often
means to make a fresh start ; such a start often
begins being suggested by the poetry of some
foreign country, and gains a strength and
beauty. That is why even we Japanese, I dare
say, can make some contribution to English
poetry. The English poem, as it seems to me,
is governed too greatly by old history and too-
respectable prosody ; just compare it with the
English prose, which has made such a stride in
the recent age, to see and be amazed at its un-
changing gait. Perhaps it is my destitution of
musical sense (a Western critic declared that
Japanese are for the most part unmusical) to
find myself more often unmoved by the English
rhymes and metres ; let me confess that, before
perceiving the silver sound of a poet like Tennyson
or Swinburne, born under the golden clime, my
own Japanese mind already revolts and rebels
against something in English poems or verses
which, for lack of a proper expression, we might
call physical or external. As my attention is
never held by the harmony of language, I go
straightforward to the writer's inner soul to
speculate on it, and talk with it ; briefly, I am
sound-blind or tone-deaf — that is my honest
confession. It is not only my own confession,
but the general confession of nearly all Japanese ;

INTRODUCTION 11

our Japanese minds always turn, let me dare say,
to something imaginative.

It is my own opinion that the appearance of
Basho, our beloved Hokku master, was the
greatest happening of our Japanese annals ; the
Japanese poetry, which had been degenerating
for centuries, received a sudden salvation through
his own pain and imagination. His greatest
hope, to become a poet without words, was finally
realised ; he was, as I once wrote on the Buddha
priest in meditation :

" He feels a touch beyond word,
He reads the silence's sigh,
And prays before his own soul and destiny :
He is a pseudonym of the universal Consciousness,
A person lonesome from concentration."

When the Japanese poetry joined its hand
with the stage, we have the No drama, in which
the characters sway in music, soft but vivid,
as if a web in the air of perfume ; we Japanese
find our own joy and sorrow in it. Oh, what a
tragedy and beauty in the No stage ! I always
think that it would be certainly a great thing if
the No drama could be properly introduced into
the West ; the result would be no small protest
against the Western stage, it would mean a real
revelation for those people who are well tired of
their own plays with a certain pantomimic spirit
underneath.

12 INTRODUCTION

We started our country as the land of poetry ;
our forefathers were poets themselves. They
were free as the winds are free. When our
modern young poets cry to go back to the age
of their forefathers, they think that it is only the
way to escape from the so-called literature
and gain this poetical strength and beauty ;
it is their opinion that they find all the Western
literary ideals in our Japanese ancient life and
poetry. But I often quarrelled with them on the
point that the real poetry of any country should
be an expression of beauty and truth ; we must
build, I always insist, our poetry on our own true
culture, which we formed through the pain and
patience of centuries. It is my own opinion
that the true Japanese poetry should be, as I
once wrote, a potted tree of a thousand years'
growth ; our song should be a Japanese tea-
house— four mats and a half in all — where we
burn the rarest incense which rises to the sky ;
again our song should be an opal with six colours
that shine within.

People who are already familiar with the
Japanese poetry would ask me why I did not
dwell on our Uta poetry at some length ; I confess
that my poetical taste desires far more intensity
than the Uta poems, whose artificial execution
often proves, in my opinion, to be their weak-
ness rather than strength. Besides, they should
be treated independently in a separate volume ;

INTRODUCTION 13

they have their own poetical history of more
than two thousand years.

" The Japanese HoTcku Poetry " is the lecture
delivered in the Hall of Magdalen College at the
invitation of Mr. Robert Bridges, the Poet
Laureate, and Dr. T. H. Warren, President of
the College and Professor of Poetry in the Uni-
versity ; and my lectures at the Japan Society,
the Royal Asiatic Society, and the Quest Society
have been based more or less on the other chapters
in the book.

Y. N.

LONDON,

March 10th, 1914.

THE SPIRIT OF
JAPANESE POETRY

JAPANESE POETRY

I COME always to the conclusion that the English
poets waste too much energy in " words, words,
words," and make, doubtless with all good in-
tentions, their inner meaning frustrate, at least
less distinguished, simply from the reason that
its full liberty to appear naked is denied. It is
the poets more than the novelists who not only
misinterpret their own meaning, but often deceive
their own souls. When I say it seems that they
take a so-called poetical licence, I mean that what
they write about, to speak slangily, by the yard, is
not Life or Voice itself. ; from such a view-point I
do not hesitate to declare that the English poets,
particularly the American poets, are far behind
the novelists. I can prove with many instances

15

16 JAPANESE POETRY

that there are books and books of " poems " in
which one cannot find any particular design of
their authors ; it is never too much to say that
they have a good intention, though not wise at
best ; but, after all, to have only that good inten-
tion is not the way to make art or literature
advance.

I always insist that the written poems, even
when they are said to be good, are only the
second best, as the very best poems are left
unwritten or sung in silence. It is my opinion
that the real test for poets is how far they resist
their impulse to utterance, or, in another word,
to the publication of their own work — not how
much they have written, but how much they
have destroyed. To live poetry is the main thing,
and the question of the poems written or pub-
lished is indeed secondary ; from such a reason I
regard our Basho Matsuwo, the seventeen-sy liable
Hokku poet of three hundred and fifty years ago,
as great, while the work credited to his wonderful
name could be printed in less than one hundred
pages of any ordinary size. And it is from the
same reason that I pay an equal reverence to
Stephane Mallarme, the so-called French symbo-
list, though I do not know the exact meaning of
that term. While they are poets different in
nature, true to say, as different as a Japanese
from a Frenchman (or it might be said, as same
as the French and the Japanese), it seems to

THE POETICAL REALISTS 17

me that they join hands unconditionally in the
point of denying their hearts too free play, with
the result of making poetry living and divine,
not making merely " words, words, and words,"
and further in the point that both of them,
the Japanese and the Frenchman, are poetical
realists whose true realism is heightened or
" enigmatised " by the strength of their own
self-denial, to the very point that they have often
been mistaken for mere idealists. Putting aside
the question whether they are great or not, the
fact that they have left little work behind is the
point that I should like to emphasise ; blessed be
they who can sing in silence to the content of
their hearts in love of perfection. The real
prayer should be told in silence.

For a poet to have few lines in these prosaic
days would be at least an achievement truly
heroic ; I think that the crusade of the Western
poetry, if it is necessary, as I believe it is most
momentous, should begin with the first act of
leaving the " words " behind, or making them
return to their original proper places. We have
a little homely proverb — " The true heart will be
protected by a god, even though it offer no
prayer at all." I should like to apply it to
poetry and say that poetry will take care of
itself all by itself without any assistance from
words, rhymes, and metres. I flatter myself that
even Japan can do something towards the reforma-

2

18 JAPANESE POETRY

tion or advancement of the Western poetry, not
only spiritually, but also physically.

Japanese poetry, at least the old Japanese
poetry, is different from Western poetry in the
same way as silence is different from a voice,
night from day ; while avoiding the too close
discussion of their relative merits, I can say that
the latter always fails, naturally enough through
being too active to properly value inaction,
restfulness, or death ; to speak shortly, the
passive phase of Life and the World. It is
fantastic to say that night and day, silence and
voice, are all the same ; let me admit that they
are vastly different ; it is their difference that
makes them so interesting. The sensitiveness of
our human nature makes us to be influenced by
the night and silence, as well as by the day and
voice ; let me confess, however, that my suspicion
of the Western poetic feeling dates from quite far
back in the days of my old California life, when I
was quite often laughed at for my aimless loitering
under the moonbeams, and for my patient atten-
tion to the voice of the falling snow. One who
lives, for instance, in Chicago or New York, can
hardly know the real beauty of night and silence ;
it is my opinion that the Western character,
particularly of Americans, would be sweetened,
or at least toned down, if that part of the beauty
of Nature might be emphasised. Oh, our Japanese
life of dream and silence ! The Japanese poetry

THE REAL VALUE 19

is that of the moon, stars, and flowers, that of a
bird and waterfall for the noisiest. If we do not
sing so much of Life and the World it is not from
the reason that we think their value negative,
but from our thought that it would be better, in
most cases, to leave them alone, and not to sing
of them is the proof of our reverence toward them.
Besides, to sing the stars and the flowers in Japan
means to sing Life, since we human beings are
not merely a part of Nature, but Nature itself.
When our Japanese poetry is best, it is, let me
say, a searchlight or flash of thought or passion
cast on a moment of Life and Nature, which, by
virtue of its intensity, leads us to the conception
of the whole ; it is swift, discontinuous, an
isolated piece. So it is the best of our seventeen-
syllable Hokku and thirty-one syllable Ufa poems
that by their art, as Tsurayuki remarks in his
Kokinshiu preface " without an effort, heaven
and earth are moved, and gods and demons
invisible to our eyes are touched with sympathy " ;
the real value of the Japanese poems may be
measured by what mood or illusion they inspire
in the reader's mind.

It is not too much to say that an appreciative
reader of poetry in Japan is not made, but born,
just like a poet ; as the Japanese poetry is never
explanatory, one has everything before him on
which to let his imagination freely play ; as a
result he will come to have an almost personal

20 JAPANESE POETRY

attachment to it as much as the author himself.
When you realise that the expression or words
always mislead you, often making themselves an
obstacle to a mood or an illusion, it will be seen
what a literary achievement it is when one can
say a thing which passes well as real poetry in
such a small compass mentioned before ; to say
" suggestive " is simple enough, the important
question is how ? Although I know it sounds
rather arbitrary, I may say that such a result
may be gained partly (remember, only partly)
through determination in the rejection of in-
essentials from the phrase and the insistence upon
economy of the inner thought ; just at this
moment, while I write this article, my mind is
suddenly recalled to the word which my old
California poet-friend used to exclaim : " Cut
short, cut short, and again cut short ! "

The other day I happened to read the work of
Miss Lizette Wordworth Reese, whose sensitive-
ness, the sweetest of all femininity for any age
or race, expressed in language of pearl-like
simplicity, whether studied or not, makes me
think of her as a Japanese poet among Americans.
When I read " A White Lilac " from A Quiet
Road (what a title with the sixteenth-century
dreaminess) I was at once struck by her sensi-
tiveness to odour ; as a better specimen let me
give you the following :

EXPLANATION IS FORBIDDEN 21

" Oh, gray and tender is the rain,
That drips, drips on the pane ;
A hundred things come in at the door,
The scent of herbs, the thought of yore.

" I see the pool out in the grass,
A bit of broken glass ;
The red flags running wet and straight,
Down to the little flapping gate.

" Lombardy poplars tall and three,
Across the road I see.
There is no loveliness so plain,
As a tall poplar in the rain.

" But oh, the hundred things and more
That come in at the door ;
The smack of mint, old joy, old pain,
Caught in the gray and tender rain."

With all due respect, I thought afterwards
what a pity to become an American poetess if
she has to begin her poem with " Oh, gray and
tender is the ram " — such a commonplace be-
ginning. I declared bluntly that I, "as a
Japanese poet," would sacrifice the first three
stanzas to make the last sparkle fully and unique
like a perfect diamond. Explanation is forbidden
in the House of Poesy for Japanese, where, as in
the Japanese tea-house of four mats and a half,
the Abode of Imagination, only the hints tender
and gray, like a ghost or Miss Reese's rain, are
suffered to be dwelling. Although of this Ameri-
can poetess it is said that her rejection of in-
essentials is tho secret of her personality and style,
it seems that that rejection is not sufficient for

22 JAPANESE POETRY

my Japanese mind. If I be blamed as unin-
telligible from too much rejection, I have only
to say that the true poetry should be written only
to one's own heart to record the pain or joy, like
a soul's diary whose sweetness can be kept when
it is hidden secretly, or like a real prayer for which
only a few words uttered are enough. Here I am
reminded of a particular Hokku, a rain-poem like
Miss Reese's, by Buson Yosano of the eighteenth
century :

" Of the samidare rain

List to the Utsubo Bashira pipe !
These ears of my old age ! "

Is it unbelievable to you when I tell you that
such is a complete Japanese poem, even a good
poem ? The poem, as you see, in such a Lilli-
putian form of seventeen syllables in the original,
carries my mind at once to the season's rain
and the Utsubo Bashira, or Pipe of Emptying,
that descends from the eaves (how like a
Japanese poem with a singular distinction of
inability to sing !), to which the poet Buson's
world-wearied old ears awakened ; you will see
that the " hundred things and more that come
in at the door " of his mind should be understood,
although he does not say it. Indeed, you are
the outsider of our Japanese poems if you cannot
read immediately what they do not describe to
you.

THE MAN WITH A HOE 23

My Japanese opinion, shaped by hereditary
impulse and education, was terribly shattered
quite many years ago when Edwin Markham's
The Man with a Hoe made a furore in the American
Press. I exclaimed : " What ! You say it is
poetry ? How is it possible ? " It appeared to
me to be a cry from the Socialist platform rather
than a poem ; I hope I do not offend the author
if I say that it was the American journalist whose
mind of curiosity always turns, to use a Japanese
expression, to making billows rise from the
ground. Putting aside many things, I think I
can say that Mr. Markham's poem has an in-
excusable error to the Japanese mind ; that is
its exaggeration, which, above all, we cannot
stand in poetry, and even despise as very bad
taste. Before Edwin Markham there was Whit-
tier, who sent out editorial volleys under the
guise of poetry ; it is not too much to say, I dare
think, that An American Anthology by Mr.
Stedman, would look certainly better if it were
reduced to one hundred pages from its eight
hundred ; we are bewildered to see so many
poet- journalists perfectly jammed in the pages.
One cannot act contrary to education ; we are
more or less the creation of tradition and circum-
stance. It was the strength of the old Western
poets, particularly Americans, that they preached,
theorised, and moralised, besides singing in their
own days ; but when I see that our Japanese

24 JAPANESE POETRY

poetry was never troubled by Buddhism or
Confucianism, I am glad here to venture that
the Western poet would be better off by parting
from Christianity, social reform, and what not. I
think it is time for them to live more of the
passive side of Life and Nature, so as to make
the meaning of the whole of them perfect and
clear, to value the beauty of inaction so as to
emphasise action, to think of Death so as to make
Life more attractive, although I do not insist
upon their conforming themselves, as we Japanese
poets, with the stars, flowers, and winds.

We treafc poetry, though it may sound too
ambitious to the Western mind, from the point
of its use of uselessness ; it rises, through a
mysterious way, to the height of its peculiar
worth, where its uselessness turns, lo, to useful-
ness. When one knows that the things useless
are the things most useful under different cir-
cumstances (to give one example, a little stone
lazy by a stream, which becomes important when
you happen to hear its sermon), he will see that
the aspect of uselessness in poetry is to be doubly
valued since its usefulness is always born from
it like the day out of the bosom of night ; you
cannot call it, I trust, merely a Japanese freakish-
ness or vagary if we appear to you in the matter
of poetry to make much ado about nothing. I
dare say we have our own attitude toward poetry.
I have no quarrel with one who emphasises the

NOT TORMENTED BY CRITICISM 25

immediate necessity of joining the hand of poetry
and life ; however, I wish to ask him the question
what he means by the word life. It is my opinion
that the larger part is builded upon the unreality
by the strength of which the reality becomes
intensified ; when we sing of the beauty of night,
that is to glorify, through the attitude of reverse,
in the way of silence, the vigour and wonder of the
day. Poetry should be meaningful ; but there
is no world like that of poetry, in which the word
" meaning " so often baffles, bewilders, disap-
points us. I have seen enough examples of
poems which appealed to me as meaningful and
impressed another as hopelessly meaningless.

I deem it one of the literary fortunes, a happy
happening, but not an achievement, that till
quite recently our Japanese poetry was never
annoyed, fatigued, tormented by criticism ; it
was left perfectly at liberty to pursue its own
free course and satisfy its old sweet will. The
phenomenon that the literary part of criticism
could find a congenial ground in Japan might
make one venture to explain it from the point of
our being whimsical, not philosophical ; emo-
tional, not intellectual. I have often thought
that this mental lack might be attributed to the
inconsistency of climate and sceneries, the general
frailty and contradictions in our way of living.
What I am thankful for is that it has never de-
generated into mere literature ; when the Western

26 JAPANESE POETRY

poetry is in the hand, so to say, of men of letters,
the greatest danger will be found in the fact that
they are often the prey of publication ; it is true
that the Western poets, minor or major, or what
not, have had always the thought of pr hi ting
from early date till to-day. I know that at least
in Japan the best poetry was produced in the age
when publication was most difficult ; I dare say
that the modern opening of the pages for poets
in the press, and the easy publication of their
work in independent books, both in the West and
the East, would never be the right way for the
real encouragement of poetry. I read somewhere
that a certain distinguished European actress
declared that the true salvation of the stage
should start with the destruction of all the
theatres in existence ; I should like to say well-
nigh the same thing in regard to the real revival
of poetry. Let the poets forget for once and all
about publication, and let them live in poetry as
the true poets of old days used to live. Indeed,
to live in poetry is first and last. When one
talks on the union of poetry and life, I am sure
that so it should be in action and practice, not
only in print. I have seen so many poets who
only live between the covers and die when the
ink fades away.

I often open the pages of Hokku poems by
Basho Matsuo and his life of fifty years. He
gained moral strength from his complete rejection

SEISHIN OR PURE POVERTY 27

of worldly luxuries. He lived with and in
poverty, to use the Japanese phrase, aeishin or
pure poverty, by whose blessing his single-
minded devotion was well rewarded ; of course
it was the age when material poverty was not a
particular inconvenience, as to-day. I read some-
where in his life that he declined in the course of
his pilgrimage to accept three ryo (equivalent to
seven or eight pounds in the present reckoning),
the parting gift by his students, as he was afraid
his mind would be disturbed by the thought that
his sudden wealth might become an attraction
for a thief ; oh, what a difference from the modern
poets who call for a better payment ! He had
one of his poetical students at Kaga, by the name
of Hokushi, who sent him the following Hokku
poem when his house was burned down 5

" It has burned down :
How serene the flowers in their falling ! "

The master Basho wrote to Hokushi, after
speaking the words of condolence, that Kyorai
and Joshi (his disciples), too, had been struck
with admiration by the poem beginning " It
has burned down," and he continued » " There
was in ancient time a poet who paid his own life
as the price of a poem. I do not think that you
will take your loss too much to heart when you
get such a poem." When Basho said the above,
I believe that his admiration for Hokushi was

28 JAPANESE POETRY

more on account of his attitude toward life's
calamity than for the Hokku poem itself. Hokushi
did not study poetry in vain, I should say, when
his own mind could keep serene like the falling
flowers, while seeing his house burn to ashes.
That is the real poetry in action. With that
action as a background, his poem, although it is
slight in fact, bursts into a sudden light and
dignity.

Indeed the main question is : what is the real
poetry of action for which silence is the language ?
To say the real poet is a part of Nature does no
justice, because he is able more often to under-
stand Nature better through the very reason of
his not being a part of Nature itself. It is his
greatness to soar out of Nature and still not ever
to forget her — in one word, to make himself art
itself. And how does he attain his own aim ?
Is it by the true conception of Taoism, the
doctrine of Cosmic change or Mood of the Uni-
verse, of the Great Infinite or Transition ? Or
is it through the Zennism, of whose founder,
Dharuma, I wrote once as follows ?

"Thou lures t one into the presence of tree and hill ;
Thou blondest with the body of Nature old ;
List, Nature with the human shadow and song,
With thee she seems so near and sure to me,
I love and understand her more truly through thee ;
Oh magic of meditation, witchery of silence, —
Language for which secret has no power !
Oh vastness of the soul of night and death,
Where time and pains cease to exist."

OUR OLD TEA-MASTERS 29

The main concern is how to regulate and arrange
Nature ; before arranging and regulating Nature,
you have to regulate and arrange your own life.
The thoughts of life and death, let me say, do
not approach me ; let me live in the mighty
serenity of the Eternal ! By the virtue of death
itself, life grows really meaningful ; let us wel-
come death like great Rikiu who, being forced to
harakiri by his master's suspicion, drank the
" last tea of Rikiu " with his beloved disciples,
and passed into the sweet Unknown with a smile
and song on his face for the very turn of the page.

When I think on my ideal poet, I always think
about our old Japanese tea-masters who were the
true poets, as I said before, of the true action ;
it was their special art to select and simplify
Nature, again to make her concentrate and
emphasise herself according to their own thought
and fancy. Let me tell you one story which
impresses me still as quite a poetical revelation
as when I heard it first.

Three or four tea-masters, the aestheticists of
all aestheticists, headed by famous Rikiu, were
once invited by Kwanpaku Hidetsugu, a feudal
lord of the sixteenth century, to his early morning
tea ; the month was April, the day the twentieth,
whose yearning mind was yet struggling to shake
off the gray-haired winter's despotism. The
dark breezes, like evil spirits who feared the
approach of sunlight, were huddling around under

30 JAPANESE POETRY

the eaves of Hidetsugu's tea-house ; within,
there was no light. And the silence was com-
plete ; then it was found that its old rhythm
(" Oh, what a melody ! ") was now and then
broken, no, emphasised, by the silver voice of the
boiling tea-kettle. No one among the guests
ever spoke, as the human tongue was thought to
be out of place. The host, Kwanpaku Hidetsugu,
was slow to appear on the scene ; what stepped
in most informally, with no heralding, was the
Ariake no Tsuki, the faint shadow of the falling
moon at early dawn, who came a thousand miles,
through the perplexity of a thousand leaves, just
enough to light a little hanging by the tokonoma,
the shikishi paper tablet on which the following
Uta poem was written :

" Where a cuckoo a-singing swayed,
I raised my face, alas, to see
The Ariake no Tsuki only remaining."

All the guests were taken at once with admiration
of the poem and the art of the calligrapher,
famous Teika, who wrote it, and then of the art
of the host, this feudal lord, whose aesthetic mind
was minute and most fastidious in creating a
particular atmosphere ; and they soon agreed,
but in silence, that the tea-party was especially
held to introduce the poem or the calligrapher's
art to them. And I should like to know where
is a sweeter, more beautiful way than that to
introduce the poem or picture to others ; again,

THE GARDEN PATH 31

I should like to know where is a more beautiful,
sweeter way than that to see or read the picture
or poem. Great is the art of those old tea-masters
who were the real poets of action.

There is the garden path called roji, so to say, the
passage into self-illumination, leading from the
without to the within, that is to say, the tea-house
under the world- wearied grayness of age-unknown
trees, by the solitary granite lanterns, solitary like
a saint or a philosopher with the beacon light in
heart ; it is here that you have i^o forget the
tumultuous seas of the world on which you must
ride and play at moral equilibrium, and slowly
enter into the teaism or the joy of aestheticism.
Now I should like to know if our lives are not one
long roji where, if you are wiser, you will attempt
to create the effects or atmosphere of serenity or
poetry by the mystery of silence. There are
many great tea-masters who have left us words
of suggestion how to beguile and lead our minds
from the dusts and ruin of life into the real roji
mood that is the blessing of shadowy dreams
and mellow, sweet unconsciousness of soul's
freedom ; I agree at once with Rikiu who found
his own secret in the following old song 5

" I turned my face not to see
Flowers or leaves ;
"Tis the autumn eve
With the falling light :
How solitary the cottage stand*
By the sea ! "

32 JAPANESE POETRY

Oh, vastness of solitariness, blessing of silence !
Let me, like that Rikiu, step into the sanctuary or
idealism by the twilight of loneliness, the highest
of all poetry !

This same Rikiu left us another story which
pleases my mind greatly. Shoan, his son, was
once told by his father to sweep or clean the
garden path as Rikiu, the greatest aestheticist
with the tea-bowl, doubtless expected some guest
on that day ; Shoan finished in due course his
work of sweeping and washing the stepping-
stones with water. "Try again," Rikiu com-
manded when he had seen what he had done.
Shoan again swept the ground and again washed
the stones with water. Rikiu exclaimed again :
" Try once more." His son, though he did not
really understand what his father meant, obeyed,
and once more swept the ground and once more
washed the stepping-stones with water. " You
stupid fool," Rikiu cried almost mad ; " sweeping
and watering are not true cleaning. I will show
you what is to be done with the garden path."
He shook the maple-trees to make the leaves fall,
and decorate the ground with the gold brocade.
" This is the real way of cleaning," Rikiu ex-
claimed in satisfaction. This little story always
makes me pause and think. Indeed, the approach
to the subject through the reverse side is more
interesting, often the truest. Let me learn of
death to truly live ; let me be silent to truly sing.

n

THE JAPANESE HOKKU POETRY

WALTER PATER, in one of his much-admired
studies, The School of Oiorgione, represents art
as continually struggling after the law or prin-
ciple of music, toward a condition which music
alone completely realises; "lyrical poetry," he
thinks, " approaches nearest to that condition,
hence is the highest and most complete form of
poetry ; and," he adds, " the very perfection
of such poetry often appears to depend, in part,
on a certain suppression or vagueness of mere
subjects, so that the meaning reaches us through
ways not distinctly traceable by the under-
standing. ..."

I should like to develop Pater's literary ideal
a little further through Lao Tze's canon of
spiritual anarchism (it's nothing so strange to
speak sometimes the names of this ancient
Chinese sage and the modern English critic side
by side) ; is it not that to mean nothing means
all things ; again, not to sing at all means to sing
everything ? Lao Tze says j " Assert non-asser-
3 33

34 THE JAPANESE HOKKU POETRY

tion. Practise non-practice. Taste non-taste " ;
let me here add one more line : " Express in
non-expression." To attach too closely to the
subject matter in literary expression is never a
way to complete the real saturation ; the real
infinite significance will only be accomplished
at such a consummate moment when the end
and means are least noticeable, and the subject
and expression never fluctuate from each other,
being in perfect collocation ; it is the partial
loss of the birthright of each that gains an artistic
triumph. I have a word which is much used
carelessly in the West, but whose true meaning
is only seldom understood, that is the word of
suggestion. I have an art ; that is the art of
suggestion. What suggestion ? you might ask.
I will point the way, if you are given a right sort
of artistic susceptibility, where the sunlight falls
on the laughter of woods and waters, where the
birds sing by the flowers ; again I will point, if
you are able to read the space between the lines,
to the pages of the Japanese seventeen-syllable
Hokku poems, the tiniest poems of the world.

I do never mean that the Hokku poems are
lyrical poetry in the general Western under-
standing ; but the Japanese mind gets the effect
before perceiving the fact of their brevity, its
sensibility resounding to their single note, as if
the calm bosom of river water to the song of a
bird. One of the English critics exclaims from

THE EVOCATION OF MOOD 35

his enthusiasm over Hokku •; " That is valuable
as a talisman rather than as a picture. It is a
pearl to be dissolved in the wine of a mood.
Pearls are not wine, nor in themselves to be
thought of as a drink, but there is a kind of
magic in the wine in which they are dissolved."
That magic of the Hokku poems is the real
essence of lyrical poetry even of the highest order.
I do not see why we cannot call them musical
when we call the single note of a bird musical ;
indeed, they attain to a condition, as Pater
remarked, which music alone completely realises,
because what they aim at and practise is the
evocation of mood or psychological intensity, not
the physical explanation, and they are, as I once
wrote :

" A creation of surprise (let me say ao)
Dancing gold on the wire of impulse."

And even from the narrow scientific under-
standing of the term they are musical, as they
are the first seventeen syllables out of the euphonic
thirty-one-syllable Uta poem, whose birth, accord-
ing to the mythological assumption, was in the
same time when heaven and earth were created ;
a reader who knows no Japanese will find his ears
softened, to take one at random, on hearing the
following Hokku poem :

" Osoki hi no
Tsumorite toki
kana,"

36 THE JAPANESE HOKKU POETRY

Or again in the following by the same author,
Buson Yosano (1716-1783) :

" Kindachi ni
Kitsune bake tari
Yoi no Haru." 1

Such brevity of poetical form might be well
compared with an eight-coloured butterfly or a
white dew upon summer grasses ; again, with a
tiny star carrying the whole large sky at its back.
When I say that the HoJcku poet's chief aim is
to impress the readers with the high atmosphere
in which he is living, I mean that the readers
also should be those living in an equally high
poetical atmosphere ; such readers' minds will
certainly respond to the wistfulness and delicacy
of the Hokku, a wistfulness and delicacy not to
be met with in the general run of English poetry.

1 " Kindachi ni

Kitsune bake tari
Yoi no Haru."

(Prince young, gallant, a masquerading fox goea
this spring eve.)

You must have seen somewhere a humorous Japanese
sketch in which a fantastic young prince wearing a hunting
dress of potato leaves (why, he is a masquerading fox ; see
his tail, which assumes the place of a back-sword), and having
his hair dressed with two or three wheat-straws after an old
fashion, is lightly drawn under the new moon of a spring eve ;
the evening in Japan's April or May, rich, misty, perhaps at
Kyoto, has such charm to make the mind of a fox beautifully
unbalanced. Buson's love of an irresistibly pretty gesticula-
tion of life and nature lets him excel in such a subject as a
spring night, whose soul is that of poetry.

FRIENDS OF WINDS AND MOON 37

I admit that they will appear first, at once, to
you to be the vagrant utterances of a primitive
man who, uneducated, sings of whatever his
fancy or whim finds fair and striking. But I
should like to ask what poet is not primitive in
heart when he is true. The real poet in the
Japanese understanding is primitive, as primitive
are the moon and flowers ; the voice of a wind
we hear to-day is the same voice which echoed,
let me say, to the ears of Adam and Eve through
the valley and trees. I think it is quite a happy
epithet to call the poets the friends of winds and
moon. You may think it a pantheism if you will,
when our Japanese poets go to Nature to make
life more meaningful, sing of flowers and birds
to make humanity more intensive ; it was from
the sense of mystical affinity between the life
of Nature and the life of man, between the beauty
of flowers and the beauty of love, that I wrote as
follows :

" It's accident to exist as a flower or a poet ;
A mere twist of evolution but from the same force :
I see no form in them but only beauty in evidence ;
It's the single touch of their imagination to get the

embodiment of a poet or a flower :
To be a poet is to be a flower,
To be the dancer is to make the singer sing."

Basho, the most famous Hokku poet of the
seventeenth century, in fact, the real creator of
the seventeen-syllable form of poetry, spent the

38 THE JAPANESE HOKKU POETRY

best part of his life of fifty years in travelling ;
travelling, or to use a better word, pilgrimage,
for this Basho (" Basho " is his nom de plume,
meaning banana-leaves whose flexibility against
winds and autumn, he imagined, was that of his
ephemeral life) was never searching after life's
selfish joy ; it was a holy service itself, as if a
prayer-making under the silence of a temple ;
is there a more holy temple than the bosom of
Nature ? He travelled East and West, again
South and North, for the true realisation of the
affinity of life and Nature, the sacred identifica-
tion of himself with the trees and flowers ; he
could not forget Nature even at the final death
moment when he wrote a Hokku poem saying :

" Lying ill on journey,
Ah, my dreams
Run about the ruin of fields."

The thought of Basho makes me think of Walt
Whitman ; the above poem of Basho 's recalls
to my mind Whitman's pathos of his last years :
" I am an open-air man : winged. I am an open-
water man : aquatic. I want to get out, fly,
swim — I am eager for feet again. But my feet
are eternally gone." I read somewhere of Whit-
man denying the so-called " literature " (ac-
cidentally laughing, scorning, jeering at his
contemporaries). " I feel about literature what
Grant did about war. He hated war. I hate

literature. I am not a literary West Pointer j
I do not love a literary man as a literary man,
as a minister of a pulpit loves other ministers
because they are ministers : it is a means to an
end, that is all there is to it : I never attribute
any other significance to it." Basho always
spoke from the same reason that there was no
other poetry except the poetry of the heart ; he
never thought literature or so-called literature
to be connected with his own poetry, because it
was a single noted adoration or exclamation
offhand at the almost dangerous moment when
his love of Nature suddenly turned to hatred
from the too great excess of his love. It is the
word of exclamation ; its brevity is strength of
his love. Hokku means literally a single utter-
ance or the utterance of a single verse ; that
utterance should be like a " moth light playing
on reality's dusk," or " an art hung, as a web, in
the air of perfume," swinging soft in music of a
moment. Now again to return to Whitman.
He remarks somewhere j " New York gives the
literary man a touch of sorrow ; he is never
quite the same human being after New York has
really set in ; the best fellows have few chances
of escape." Although Basho never expressed
his hatred of city life in such a bold emphasis of
words as Whitman, as his were the days when
politeness of language was inculcated, the fact
of his spending the greater part of his life, now

on the sleepy back of a horse by a whispering
stream, then seeing the fallen petals in deep sigh
with country rustics, is proof enough that he
regarded a city life as fatal to his poetry ; he was,
with Whitman, a good exemplar to teach us how
to escape the burden of life ; and again the
Hokku poems, if intelligently translated into
English (indeed that is an almost impossible
literary feat to accomplish), will give the most
interesting example to encourage the modern
literary ideal of the West which seeks its salva-
tion in escape from the so-called literary.

My literary mind of Hokku love often finds
itself highly pleased, as if when a somewhat
familiar face is disclosed out of the crowd under
a strange flash of light, to discover a Hokku
touch in English poetry in my casual reading
of my beloved poet's pages ; I will call Landor
a Hokku poet when he wrote the following ;

" I -warmed both hands before the fire of life ;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart."

This poetical atmosphere is the atmosphere in
which Buson wrote, as I mentioned before,

" Osoki hi no
Tsumorite toki
Mukashi kana,"

which might be translated as follows :

" Slow-passing days
Gathered, gathering, —
Alas, past far-away, distant ! "

PATMORE AND CHIYO 41

Although the poet simply appears to recollect
the past (making objectivity in poetical ex-
pression reveal his subjectivity clearer through
the virtue of the poem's being a good Hokku},
the meaning that he is ready to depart when fate
calls upon him will be well understood by those
whose spiritual endowment is rich enough to read
the part of silence. I can point out sometimes a
Hokku effect of poetry even from the works of
Tennyson and Browning ; it is not too much to
say that many of Wordsworth's poems could be
successfully turned as series of Hokku poems.
My humanity always thrills, trembles in reading
"The Toys," from Coventry Patmore's The
Unknown Eros, as if, when I read Chiyo's lamenta-
tion over her dead boy, a little thing really worthy
of a place in any Greek Anthology «

" The hunter of dragonflies,
To-day, how far away
May he have gone I "

Now let me contrast one of the well-known
poems by Rossetti, " The Woodspurge," with a
Hokku poem by Basho. " In moments of intense
sorrow or grief," Lafcadio Hearn was wont to
repeat in his class-room, " when all the energies
are paralysed, all the mental faculties being
stricken into inaction, any new or strange thing,
however small, seen accidentally, will be re-

42 THE JAPANESE HOKKU POETRY

membered for all the rest of one's life." Rossetti
has the following :

" From perfect grief there need not be
Wisdom or even memory :
One thing then learnt remains to me,
The woodspurge has a cup of three."

And Basho's poem to which I invite your atten-
tion has the following :

" Being tired, —

Ah, the time I fall into the inn, —
The wistaria flowers."

Our Japanese HoTcku master, the lone poet on
a certain forgotten highway, found the beauty of
the wistaria flowers most strikingly appealing to
his poetic mind now simplified, therefore in-
tensified, through the physical lassitude resulting
from the whole day's walk ; if Basho had been a
man of more specialised mind, in the modern
sense, he might have taken notice of some for-
gotten flower with its peculiarity by his feet,
when he rested himself on the bamboo porch of
a country inn, perhaps facing the open garden
where the evening silence already had begun to
steal.

When I say the best Hokku poems do never
know their own limitations, (remember, they are
only seventeen syllables), that is because they
are of the most essential of all the essential
languages, which is inwardly extensive and out-

THE VOICE OF SPONTANEITY 43

wardly vague ; a severe restraint imposed on one
side will be well balanced by the large freedom
on the other. As in any poem of any other
country, the Japanese poet's work also rests on
the belief that poetry should express truth in its
own way ; by that truth we Japanese mean
Nature ; again by that Nature the order of
spontaneity. Lao Tze says : " Man takes his
law from the earth ; the Earth its law from
Heaven ; Heaven its law from Tao ; but the law
of Tao in its own spontaneity." It was the
Chinese sage's greatness to interpret, you might
say, psychologically God by the single word of
spontaneity. When I measure our Japanese
poetical truth by the said spontaneity, my mind
dwells on the best Hokku poems as the songs
" with no word, not tyrannised by form," on
which I wrote as follows :

" A birth of genius,
Ascension of creative life,
Passion indefinable,
Accident inevitable :
A song, thou art phenomenon but not achievement."

They are the voice of spontaneity which makes
an unexpected assault upon Poetry's summit ;
the best expression for it would be, of course,
suggestion or hint of its eccentricity or emphasis.
As the so-called literary expression is a secondary
matter in the realm of poetry, there is no strict
boundary between the domains generally called

44 THE JAPANESE HOKKU POETRY

subjective and objective ; while some Hokku
poems appear to be objective, those poems are
again by turns quite subjective through the great
virtue of the writers having the fullest identifica-
tion with the matter written on. You might
call such collation poetical trespassing ; but it
is the very point whence the Japanese poetry
gains unusual freedom ; that freedom makes us
join at once with the soul of Nature. I admit
that when such poetical method is carried to the
extreme, there will result unintelligibility ; but
poetical unintelligibility is certainly better than
the imbecility or vulgarity of which examples
abound, permit me to say, in English poetry.
It is the aim of this Japanese poetry that each
line of the poem should appeal to the reader's
consciousness, perhaps with the unconnected
words, touching and again kindling on the
particular association ; there is ample reason to
say that our poetry is really searching for a far
more elusive effect than the general English
poetry.

As I said before, the Hokku poems are, unlike
the majority of English poems, the expression of
the moods or forces of the writer's poetical
exertion, and their aim, if aim they have, is hardly
connected with the thing or matter actually
stated, but it casts a light on the poetical position
in which the writer stands ; although the phrase
might be taken wrongly hi the West, our Japanese

THE POETS OF ATTITUDE 46

poets at their best, as in the case of some work of
William Blake, are the poets of attitude who
depend so much on the intelligent sympathy of
their readers. Their work is like a silent bell of a
Buddhist temple ; it may not mean anything for
some people, like that bell which has no voice at
all. But the bell rings out, list, in golden voice,
when there is a person who strikes it ; and what
voice the bell should have will depend on the
other. And again the Hokku poem is a bell
helpless, silent, when v with no reader to co-
operate ; when I say that the readers of Japanese
poetry, particularly this Hokku poem, should be
born like a poet, I count, I should say, their
personal interest almost as much as that of the
writers themselves. Therefore in our poetry the
readers assume an equally responsible place ;
and they can become, if they like, creators of
poems which in fact are not their own work, just
as if one with a bell-hammer did create the bell
hi the real sense. We have one very famous
Hokku in the following ;

" Furu ike ya
Kawazu tobikorau
Mizu no oto."

(" The old pond 1
A frog leapt into —
Liat, the water sound ! ")

I should like, to begin with, to ask the Western
readers what impression they would ever have

46 THE JAPANESE HOKKU POETRY

from their reading of the above ; I will never be
surprised if it may sound to them to be merely a
musician's alphabet ; besides, the thought of a
frog is even absurd for a poetical subject. But
when the Japanese mind turns it into high poetry
(it is said that Basho the author instantly awoke
to a knowledge of the true road his own poetry
should tread with this frog poem ; it has been
regarded in some quarters as a thing almost
sacred although its dignity is a little fallen of
late), it is because it draws at once a picture of
an autumnal desolation reigning on an ancient
temple pond whose world-old silence is now broken
by a leaping frog. But a mind of philosophical
turn, not merely a lover of description, would
please to interpret it through the so-called
mysticism of the Zen sect Buddhism. Basho is
supposed to awaken into enlightenment now
when he heard the voice bursting out of voiceless-
ness, and the conception that life and death were
mere change of condition was deepened into faith.
It is true to say that nobody but the author
himself will ever know the real meaning of the
poem ; which is the reason I say that each reader
can become a creator of the poem by his own
understanding as if he had written it himself.
Take the following poem by Buson :

" Katamari ni
Muchiutsu

no aruji kaixa."

BUSON AND BROWNING 47

(" The lump of clay

He beats with a stick, —

He, the master of the plum-orchard.")

There might be many people, I believe, who will
wonder where in the world poetry will come in
from a piece of clay beaten by a stick. But be
patient, my friends. This is quite an excellent
Hokku poem ; here we have a scene of some old
retired master of a plum-orchard now in a stroll
(" And day's at the morn ; morning's at seven,"
perhaps as in Robert Browning's song in Pippa
Passes), who beats a lump of clay playfully while
walking lazily. And go again to the lines of great
Browning :

" God's in His Heaven —
All's right with the world."

Do you still call the above Hokku nonsense ?
Take one more poem by Buson in the following :

" Suzushisa ya
Kanewo hanaruru
Kaneno koyo."

(" Oh, how cool —
The sound of the bell
That leaves the bell itself.")

Some little amplification would perhaps help
in understanding the beauty of the above poem ;
but if your sensitive ears can differentiate the
sounds of a bell in the daytime and during the

48 THE JAPANESE HOKKU POETRY

night it is certainly futile to dwell on it. Although
the author never tells when he heard the bell, I
would understand it to be the bell of very early
Summer morning, when the whole world and life
are in perfect silence ; if you awake at such an
hour, your bodily composure making your ears
doubly susceptible to any sound, I am sure your
mind will become at once cooler with the sound
of a bell which, with the finest feeling, leaves the
wooden bell-hammer, and bids good-bye. And
take still one more poem by the same author in
the following 3

" Haru no voya
Yoi akebono no
Sono Nakani."

(" The night of the Spring, —
Oh, between the eve
And the dawn.")

The old Chinese poets sang on the Spring eve,
prizing it above many thousand pounds in gold,
while the Japanese Uta poets of ancient days
admired the purple-coloured dawn of Spring ; in
the opening passages of Sei Shonagon's Mdkura
Zoshi or Pillow Sketches we have the follow-
ing g "In Spring," to use Aston's translation,
" I love to watch the dawn grow gradually white
and whiter, till a faint rosy tinge crowns the
mountain's crest, while slender streaks of purple
cloud extend themselves above," Such is the

THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION 49

beauty of a Spring dawn. Now Buson is pleased
to introduce the night of the Spring which should
be beautiful without questioning, since it lies
between those two beautiful things, the eve and
the dawn ; and we are thrice glad with this
Buson's Hokku.

I have quite an interest in the pages of English
translation or free rendering of our Japanese
poetry, because I learn from them the point of
the Western choice of the subjects, and where
the strength or weakness of the English mind lies
in poetical writing ; take the following Hokku
poem with the translation by Edwin Arnold and
Miss Walsh :

" Asagawo ni
Tsurube torarete
Moral mizu."

(" The morning-glory

Her leaves and bells has bound

My bucket handle round.

I could not break the bands

Of these soft hands.

The bucket and the well to her left,

' Let me some water, for I come bereft.' ")

(" All round the rope a morning glory clings ;
How can I break its beauty's dainty spell T
I beg for water from a neighbour's well.")

With due respect to these translators, I ask
myself why the English mind must spend so
much ink while we Japanese are well satisfied
with the following ;

4

50 THE JAPANESE HOKKU POETRY

" The well-bucket takon away
By the morning-glory —
Alas, water to beg ! "

Is it not the exact case as when the Western
fountain-pen attempts to copy a Japanese picture
drawn with bamboo brush and incensed Indian ink
on a rice paper, in which formlessness, like that of
a summer cloud, is often a passport into the sky
of the higher art of Japan ? When the English
poet must cling to such an exactitude, let me
dare say, as if a tired swimmer with a life-belt,
I have only to wonder at the general difference
between East and West in the matter of poetry.
Take another example to show in what direction
the English poetical mind pleases to turn i

" I thought I saw the fallen leavea
Returning to their branches :
Alas, butterflies were they."

What real poetry is in the above, I wonder,
except a pretty, certainly not high ordered, fancy
of a vignettist ; it might pass as fitting specimen
if we understand HoTcku poems, as some Western
students delight to understand HoJcku poems,
by the word "epigram." Although my under-
standing of that word is not necessarily limited
to the thought of pointed saying, I may not be
much mistaken to compare the word with a still
almost dead pond where thought or fancy, nay
the water, hardly changes or procreates itself ; the

MAGIC OP POTENTIAL SPEECH 51

real Hokkus, at least in my mind, are a running
living water of poetry where you can reflect
yourself to find your own identification. (There-
fore the best Hokku poem is least translatable in
English or perhaps in any language.) It is, as I
wrote already somewhere, " like a dew upon lotus-
leaves of green, or under maple-leaves of red,
which, though it is nothing but a trifling drop of
water, shines, glitters, and sparkles now pearl-
white, then amethyst-blue, again ruby-red,
according to the time of day and situation ;
better still to say this Hokku is like a spider-
thread laden with the white summer dews, sway-
ing among the branches of a tree like an often
invisible ghost in the ah1, on the perfect balance ;
that sway indeed, not the thread itself, is the
beauty of our seventeen-syllable poem."

But you must know that such language can
only apply to the very best Hokkus, which, when
introduced with sympathy rather than mere
intelligence, will serve, through their magic of
potential speech, using Arthur Ransome's phrase,
or, let me say, potential effect, the modern
Western writers or poets, as I said before, in
search of an escape from the so-called literature ;
and these very best Hokku poems cannot be, in
my opinion, more than half a thousand, nay,
perhaps not more than two hundred and fifty in
number from all works written in the last three
hundred years. As there are indeed a, most

prodigious number of productions, my estimate
will show, I believe, that even a dozen good
Hokkus in one's whole life would not be regarded
as a bad crop. In fact, the Hokku poems pro-
duced in the time before great Basho's appearance
(1644-1694), when, under the influence of Teitoku,
Teishitsu, and Soin Nishiyama, the school of art
for art's sake, from the point of intricacy, manner-
ism, and affectation, was finally formed under the
name of Danrin or " Forest of Consultation," are
certainly not better than the butterfly poem
quoted above ; although Basho and his disciples
(it is said that this Basho had three thousand
disciples or followers hi his life's days) rescued
poetry from the hands of such a school of artistic
vulgarity, the Shofu or " The School of Righteous
Wind " which he established, we might say,
with the power of faith and prayer, became soon
again sadly degenerated ; and it was Buson
Yosano, who, now putting aside the brush for
the picture, as he was an eminent artist of his
own days, cried out for the so-called poetical
revival of the Tenmei period. There was no
more popular poetry once than this Hokku form,
and still popular it is even to-day, when our
insularity, poetical or otherwise, has been irre-
vocably broken. It goes without saying that
where was a great master was a great Hokku
poem which never makes us notice its limitation
of form, but rather impresses us by the freedom

HOKKU POEMS AT THEIR BEST 53

through mystery of its chosen language as if a
sea-crossing wind blown in from a little window.
There have been, since the Grand Restoration, a
few bold attempts at a Hokku revival, notably
that of the late Shiki Masaoka ; but it is not my
present aim to follow after their historical record.
What I hope to do at this moment is to point out
to you the very value of the Japanese poetry of
this peculiar form.

Arthur Ransome says somewhere in his paper
called " Kinetic and Potential Speech " : " It is
like a butterfly that has visited flowers and
scatters their scent in its flight. The scent and
the fluttering of its bloom-laden wings are more
important than the direction or speed of its flying."
Such language applies to the Hokku poems at
their best. I agree with Ransome in saying :
" Poetry is made by a combination of kinetic
with potential speech. Eliminate either, and the
result is no longer poetry." But you must know
that the part of kinetic speech is left quite un-
written in the Hokku poems, and that kinetic
language in your mind should combine its force
with the potential speech of the poem itself, and
make the whole thing at once complete. Indeed,
it is the readers who make the Hokku's imper-
fection a perfection of art.

Ill

NO: THE JAPANESE PLAY OF
SILENCE

THE word dignity, applied to the dramatic art,
may mystify you, though it may not necessarily
mislead you, because it is often mistaken for the
pessimism which is apology at best. In em-
phasising the independence of the Japanese No
drama, I have in mind the special audience it
created with the patience of centuries. When
I say that it has no need to wait on its audience,
I have in my mind the fact that it was that very
audience which originated and perfected it as
we see it to-day on the stage of Kanze, or Hosho,
or Umewaka, or Yamashina, or Kudan, of
Tokyo. It is not too much to say that the
audience, not more than three hundred in number
for each performance — is that not a large enough
audience ? — are all of them No actors themselves.
It is beautiful to see them, like fully flowed water
blessed by sunlight, in the appreciation which

54

DEDICATED TO POETRY AND SONG 55

is realised through silence, its highest reach seen
in their motionlessness of posture. It is true,
though it may sound arbitrary to say it, that the
real actors on the stage — not more than three in
one play, as it is the simplest affair, this No
(is that not enough characters, again I ask, to
make poetry move ?) — find their secret of fire or
passion where the audience lose themselves.
This No house is a sacred hall dedicated to
poetry and song, where the actors and audience
go straight into the heart of prayer in creating
the most intense atmosphere of grayness, the
most suggestive colour in all Japanese art, which
is the twilight soared out of time and place ; it
is a divine sanctuary where the vexation of the
outer world and the realism of modern life leave
to follow, when on the stage, the eight persons of
the chorus in two rows, with profile to the audience,
and the musicians, a flute and two tambourines,
with their backs to the wooden end wall at the
back of the stage, take their own proper places,
and the flute sends out, as the beginning of the
performance, the thrill of invocation ages old, as
if a cicada whose ghost-voice curses the present
Japanese " civilisation." It is an oasis in the
human desert of modern life, this little hall of the
No play, where I often spend the whole day, as
the performance begins usually as early as nine
o'clock in the morning, and gain the thought that
artistic Japan is not wholly lost ; and I feel there

56 NO : JAPANESE PLAY OF SILENCE

happiness and sorrow rhythmically commingled,
a human feeling already joined with deathlessness,
seeing right before me the great ghost of the Past
and Eternity, because the Present slips away like
a mouse chased by sunlight.

You know well enough there is a great deal of
cant in the term " appreciative audience " of
modern usage in theatrical reviews or papers.
When we must spend two or three years in
realising how many others fail in becoming No
appreciators, it means that those elected in this
particular art, where appreciation is not less,
perhaps is greater, than the acting itself, will find
their own lives vitalised with the sense of power
in Japanese weariness. When we feel the beauty
of the monotony of the No drama that is gained
by the sacrifice of variety, I think that our work
of appreciation is just started. I cannot forget
the impression carved on my mind, which was
then roughened, stiffened, by the toss of Western
life of quite many years, when I first entered
Hosho's No house some ten years ago. It was
the month of October, with maple-leaves and
passion-flowers fallen, with birds and love flung
away, whose gray heart was in perfect accord
with this No performance. I smiled to my
friend, who was a great appreciator, playfully but
none the less delightedly, when I noticed the
" honourable names " of those occupants, lords
or barons or what not, written on the wooden

THE NON-EXISTENCE OF SPACE 57

tablets stuck on each box. I think I must have
felt even uncomfortable on seeing myself among
the select few. My plebeian mind, which was
familiar with the general theatre-goers of other
common houses created by advertisements, was
struck by the sight of the dresses in quieter shade
of the lady audience, even those of the younger
ladies who put aside their wild whims to satisfy
and not to break the quiet atmosphere of the
No house ; and I was surprised at the general
quietude that overflowed from the hearts of
artistic sensibility. The audience make me think
of the people in the tea-room or Sukiya for a
ceremonial sip of tea, wrapped in silence and
grayness ; what difference is there between the
three hundred people in the hall, and the five
persons that are the usual number to be put in
the tea-room, since the theory of the non-ex-
istence of space to the enlightened has much
meaning ? When I saw the people here in the
hall move in and out of the boxes, without spoken
words, like silent birds from twig to twig, with
a slight bow that was beautiful, the web-like
passways again reminded me of a roji or garden
path connecting the portico where the guests
wait, with the tea-room where, you have to break
away from the dust and din of the world, to
prepare yourself for the aesthetic enjoyment of
the tea. Such a comparison, I admit, may
sound too elaborate or even improbable. But

58 NO : JAPANESE PLAY OF SILENCE

the point I wish to make is that the passways
of the No hall mean more than the pathways
of the pits of common theatres. If you cannot
connect them with the " garden path " I would
be glad to suggest to you, as a tea-master might
when you step through the twilight by the moss-
covered granite lantern in the roji, to think for
a while of the shadow of summer foliage, or the
stretch of a sea, or the slow fall of the evening
moon, even after you have entered your own
box, and be ready to enter the artistic world
created by your heart gray and cold, and then
you have to open the book of the libretto on your
knees as the others do, with the sight of the
chorus taking their own seats on the stage.

There is no other stage like this No stage, so
small, being twenty-five feet square at the largest,
all opened except the wall facing to the audience,
where the painted old pine-tree, as old as the
world, as gray as poetry, looms as if a symbol
of eternity out of the mist — (think of the play of
Takasago, the hosts of pine-trees in the shapes
of an old man and woman singing deathlessness
and peace) — the long gallery or bridge on the
same level connected with the stage on the right,
along which the No actors move as spectres and
make the performance complete, the passage of
a beginning and ending, I might say Life and
Death. When you see the roof, you will be im-
pressed by the dignity of existence itself which

IMAGINATION IS EVERYTHING 59

the Western stage has not ; but, as you can
create the portion called Kakoi or enclosure for
the temporary purpose of a tea-gathering by the
device of screens, so you can build the No stage
at any time in your Japanese house, three or four
rooms being combined when the most obedient
screens slip away. And it is your poetical
imagination — thank Heaven, imagination is every-
thing for this No — to perfectly fill in the utter
lack of stage scenery an<i furniture ; though there
are many occasions, to be sure, when you might
be doubtful of your power of imagination as to
imagine the deep valley of Arashiyama of cherry-
tree fame with a few paper-made cherry-blossom
twigs, the big bell-tower with the paper-made
bell hung from a shaking wooden frame, and, too
extraordinary still, to fancy the ship, water,
oars, of course, from a bamboo pole. I dare say,
however, it will delight minds tired from the
burden of the spectacular show in the West ;
indeed, the time may be already at hand, or at
any rate quite near, when the Western stage will
heed the lesson of Japanese simplicity, particularly
of this No drama, whose archaism might give a
divine hint how to sift the confusion and to
rhyme beauty and life with emphasis. I believe
you will be moved, as I have been moved, and
again will be on future occasions, now to smile
and then to cry with the actors wearing the self-
same mask of painted wood — (you know that No

60 NO s JAPANESE PLAY OF SILENCE

is the mask play to speak directly, although that
is not an exact translation) — which, marvellously
enough, seems to differentiate the most delicate
shades of human sensibility ; we should thank
our own imagination which turns the wood to a
spirit more alive than you or I, when neither the
actors nor the mask-carvers can satisfactorily
express their secret. I know that the mask is
made to reserve its feeling, and the actors wonder-
fully well protect themselves from falling into
the bathos of the so-called realism through the
virtue of poetry and prayer ; and when I realise
it is from the same old humanity that tears and
smiles, brothers or sisters by blood relation,
spring forth, their difference being only a little
shade of colour, the mystery that the No hall
performs on our human minds will be explained
to a great measure. This is the house of fancy
where those who can only find strength from the
crudity of their five senses have no right to step
in, but the silent worshippers of the Imperfect
will congregate for the holy exercise of ritual of
their imagination ; it is not the whole truth to
say that it is the No's dignity to command you
to believe in its representation, though you may
incline to think otherwise, as for instance in the
case where a No character of a lady, whose voice
and posture are not different from a man's, is
resented on the stage, but it is for your poetical
mind flatly to object to seeing the superficial

THE ASHIKAGA LORDS 61

reality, and to surrender all criticisms for the sake
of appreciation. Indeed, the actual expression of
the No stage is ever so slight and ephemeral, like
many other artistic expressions, the sighs of
crickets or shivers of flowers ; we have gained, as
we behold it, great brevity at an almost astonish-
ing cost of human energy. It goes without
saying that the plays themselves are brief ; and
I have many reasons to be thankful that the
stage has never been troubled with the dropping
curtain from the beginning till to-day, because
the curtain only serves, in my opinion, to bar
the stage, to remind us always that we have to
restrain ourselves and not come into too close
communication with the actors. And what use
is the No hall if you cannot drop the curtain in
your imagination ? although it may not be so
often as in other theatres even at this No hall,
you have sometimes to drop the curtain yourself
before the play is finished.

I have had occasion before to associate the
No hall with the tea-room where, through the
fragrance of tea, the melody of the boiling kettle,
and the curl of incense, you will slowly but surely
enter the twilight land of the Unknowable ;
when you are told that both of them were prac-
tically formed, encouraged, and developed under
the rule of the Ashikaga lords from the early
fourteenth century down to the close of the
sixteenth century, who attempted, and even

62 #0 : JAPANESE PLAY OF SILENCE

succeeded in their attempt, to invigorate human
lives with that simple lesson of simplicity, the
comparison, I think, will not seem a mere spiritual
speculation. And was there ever a time like
to-day when the complex is replacing the homo-
geneous, when we need such a lesson in all the
aspects of life ? What variety and richness
have we earned, I ask, from making the entire
sacrifice of that simplicity ? I am glad to say
that the No drama has fully revived from the
temporary oblivion of fifty years ago, and has
two or three hundred appreciators at each
performance ; if we treat it as a case of protest,
I would say that protest is the thing we need
most to-day. Whenever we think of the No
plays, our thanks are first turned to Yoshimitsu,
the third great lord of the Ashikaga government,
the mighty propagandist of the tea-ceremonies
and the No drama ; and we must not forget
Yoshimasa, the eighth lord who almost completed
the drama as we have it to-day. It was the
greatness of Hideyoshi Toyotomi, the wonderful
fighter of Japan, to leave his name associated
with Soyeki or Rikyu, the greatest of all tea-
masters, and also with the No actors. When
we remember that the simplicity and archaism
of the so-called tea-ceremony grew out of the
purism of the Zen monastery or priest hall of
meditation, it will be clear enough that the No
drama must have an equal connection with

BORN LIKE A MYSTERY 63

Buddhism ; in fact, there is no play among those
three hundred plays in existence which has no
appearance of a priest whose divine power of
meditation or prayer invariably leads the ghost
of a warrior or a lady, or a flower, or a tree into
the blessing of Nirvana. To call the No the
ghost play has no real meaning, any more than
to call it a priest play ; the main point is to tell
the human tragedy rather than comedy of the
old stories and legends seen through the Bud-
dhistic flash of understanding, as most of the
plays were written by priests or by those people
most influenced by Buddhism, as was quite natural
in those days. The names of the authors, alas,
are forgotten, or they hid their own names by
choice. Even when some of their names, Seami
and Otoami for instance, are given, it is said
by an authority that they are, in fact, only
responsible for the music, the dance, and the
general stage management. It was the time when
nobody asked who wrote them, if the plays
themselves were worthy. What a difference
from this day of advertisement and personal
ambition ! When I say that these plays were
born like a mystery from the national impulse
and love of literature, I mean that they are not
the creation of one time or one age ; it is not far
wrong to say that they wrote themselves, as if
flowers or trees rising from the rich soil of tradition
and Buddhistic faith, As literature, they are

64 #0 : JAPANESE PLAY OF SILENCE

things apart from the aristocratic writing en-
couraged by the Kyoto court in the former age,
being democratic in sentiment, though not in the
style of the lines and phrases, which are in truth
the noblest expression of poetry, and might be
compared with the magnificent dresses of stiff
brocade the actors wear as they move along to
the deep cadence of music ; there are no better
examples of epic poetry in our Japanese literature
than the No plays ; it is not too much to say
that there is not a phrase, an image, an incident
too much or too little, not a false note of at-
mosphere or feeling ; they are exquisite and
deathless, these most proud, most living, most
un wasted rhythms of human song and heart-cries.

H

This No, already strongly encouraged by the
said Hideyoshi (many new pieces were added, in
his time, to the already large repertory, and
alterations were made to those already in practice)
had become the most important factor of the
nation's life, when the time came down to the
Tokugawa feudal age. To recite lines from the
No, and to act on the stage if possible, was
regarded to be one of a gentleman's accomplish-
ments ; the No play, in contrast to the common
theatre, held the most noble, dignified place of
entertainment. And so it is to-day. It was

THE ROBE OF FEATHERS 65

thought even sacred ; it began to assume the
most necessary role at a wedding ceremony.
With the singing of a passage from " Takasago,"
it is believed your wedlock will be sealed . ' ' Taka-
sago," the happy play celebrating constancy,
endurance, health and longevity, is represented
by an old man and an old woman busy hi the
work of raking up the pine-needles under the
pine-trees. The passage says : " True it is that
these pine-trees shed not all their leaves ; their
verdure remains fresh for ages long ; even among
evergreen trees — the emblems of unchangeable-
ness — exalted is their fame to the end of time —
the fame of the two pine-trees that have grown
old together." What are these two pine-trees ?
Who are the old man and woman ? The ghosts
of the trees are nothing, but the old man and
woman singing the age of golden and happy life.
Among some three hundred plays now in exis-
tence, there is no other like " The Robe of
Feathers " that gracefully carries the delicate,
statuesque beauty of composition and sentiment.
It is the play of a fairy whose feather-robe was
stolen by a fisherman at Mio's pine-clad shore,
while she was bathing, and was finally given back
upon her promise to dance. Not to go to ex-
tremes, even in sadness, is taught in Japan to be
the height of cultured manners ; here we have
every Oriental beauty and lamentation in the song
of this fairy who could not fly back to the sky i

5

66 NO i JAPANESE PLAY OF SILENCE

" Vainly my glance doth seek the heavenly plain,
Where rising vapours all the air enshroud,
And veil the well-known paths from cloud to cloud."

She promised that she would dance the dance
that makes the Palace of the Moon turn round,
and would leave her dance behind as a token to
mortal men, if her robe were restored to her.
However, the fisherman doubted lest she might
return home to heaven without dancing at all ;
then the fairy said :

" Fie on thee ! The pledge of mortals may be doubted, but
in heavenly beings there is no falsehood."

As I said, the No is the creation of the age
when, by virtue of sutra or the Buddha's holy
name, any straying ghosts or spirits in Hades
were enabled to enter Nirvana ; it is no wonder
that most of the plays have to deal with those
ghosts or Buddhism. That ghost liness appeals
to the poetical thought and fancy even of the
modern age, because it has no age. It is the
essence of the Buddhistic belief, however fantastic,
to stay poetical for ever. Although the No's
repertory does not change, our conception and
understanding will be altered ; it is thus that
they can keep always fresh themselves. Here we
have one play called " Yama Uba " or "Moun-
tain Elf " ; the author, undoubtedly a learned
priest, attempts to express by the play that we
are souls much troubled in a maze of transmigra-

HYAKUMA YAMA UBA 67

tion, indeed, like the Mountain Elf, who, it is
said, spends all the dark night circling round the
mountain. That mountain is a symbol of life
itself. The plot grows intense at the point
where enters a famous dancer called Hyakuma
Yama Uba, a woman who has earned such a
name from her dancing of the Mountain Elf
circling round the mountain. She has lost her
way in Kagero no Yama, or the Hill of Shadow, in
a pilgrimage toward Zenkoji, the Holy Buddhist
Temple ; and here she meets the real Elf or
Yama Uba, with large star-like eyes and fearful
snow-white hair, who demonstrates to her the
way how she encircles the mountain, nay the
mountain of Life. The play ends as may be
expected of this No play ; after making her
prayer to the Elf, the dancer disappears over
mountains and mountains, as her life's cloud of
perplexity is now cleared away, and the dusts of
transmigration are well swept. This little play
would certainly make a splendid subject for a
modern interpretation. For some long while my
mind dwelt on it, wishing to write something.
And also a play called " Morning-Glory " is
interesting ; the flower, in the play, cannot
enter Nirvana on account of her short life of only
one morning, and her jealousies that burn on
seeing the other flowers who enjoy a longer life.
However, her ghost will disappear with satis-
faction when she listens to a sermon from the

68 NO : JAPANESE PLAY OF SILENCE

priest. I have written a dramatic fragment
on the subject after my own fashion as follows :

THE MORNING-GLORY

(A DRAMATIC FRAGMENT)

Priest.

" Who is the guide in Life's chartless field ?
See the black robe of the priest for the changeless love of the

Lord

(The robe is black, as black night, with mercy's depth) :
I count my rosary, I count the sins of the world and life ;
My prayer is the evening bell to turn them to rest.
My face is ever turned to joy and the West —
To the West, where lies Heaven, the only real place.
'Tis mine to make the suffering souls obedient to Law and

Truth,

And then regain the song of dissolution and rest.
What is the flower that I see before my eyes ?
Is it not the Morning-Glory, the flower of Summer's dream

and dews ?

It is strange to see it now when Autumn's silence
Has calmed down the fire and heart of Nature and song ;
It is like a lyric forgotten and unsung —
Villager, tell me what flower it is."

Villager.
" Father, it is none other than the Morning-Glory."

Priest.

" Is it the custom here to see it blooming under the pale
October sky ? "

Villager.
"No, father. It is the first time I have seen it."

THE MORNING-GLORY 69

Priest.

" See the tremor of the cup of the flower, as if it fears to

exist ;

Oh, bareness of beauty that has soared out of life ;
Is it a real morning-glory ?
Is it not only imagination or pain itself ?
I hear in its tremor a certain human speech, but voiceless.
What a mystery, what moumfulness, what tragic thrill !
I am a priest for whom stones and grasses prepare a nightly

bed,

A companion of water, trees, stars, and night ;
Here will I sleep and solve the mystery with the power of

prayer.
Oh, flower, whatever name thou bearest, take me thia night

as thy guest."

(The villager goes out. It becomes dark ; the first
night-bell rings. The priest recites the holy
words. The lady enters as a waft of autumnal
wind. )

Lady.

" How my heart burns in madness and pain :
Oh, misery to be a prey to fire and unrest !
I am a wandering spirit of discontent from Hades,
After the Life that ascends, the Life of whiteness and the

sun ;
Oh, my hatred of dissolution and death ! "

Priest.

" Who art thou, lady ? Thou seemest to be a soul dead, but

not dead,
Cursor of Nirvana, straying soul of unrest."

Lady.
" Father, I am the spirit of the Morning-Glory."

70 NO : JAPANESE PLAY OF SILENCE

Priest.

" Dear child of dews and summer's impulse,
Why wanderest thou as a spirit of malice and evil ? "

Lady.

" I crave for the longer life of the many other flowers
That have only to grow with the sun and the day :
Oh, shortness of my life that ended before its day began !
How I long to feel the joy of life and the sun that was not
mine ! "

Priest.

" Poor child, there is no life where is no death :
Death is nothing but the turn or change of note.
The shortest life is the sweetest, as is the shortest song :
How to die well means how to live well.
Life is no quest of longevity and days :
Where are the flowers a hundred years old ?
Oh, live in death and Nirvana, live in dissolution and rest,
Make a life out of death and darkness ;
Lady or flower, be content, be finished as a song that is
sung ! "

Lady.

" Happy am I to hear such words, holy father,
Pray, pray for my sad soul that it may return to Hades and
rest ! "

Priest.
** Namu, amida butsu ..."

(The lady disappears at once into the Morning-Qlory.
The moon rises. The flower withers. The mid
night bell rings.)

IV

THE EARLIEST JAPANESE POETRY

I USED to linger around the spot at Kamakura
marked by a stone commemorating the street
preaching of Nichiren, that undaunted spirit of
a Buddhist priest born to a fisher's family in the
Awa province in 1222, whose belief in the mysteri-
ous law of the White Lotus made him proclaim
himself a prophet. And I would call to my
imagination the continuous scene of persecutions
the priest encountered — gibes, railings, and even
stones ; he exclaimed at the beginning of the
establishment of his own Buddhism, the sect
of the White Lotus : " Know that all the sects
in existence are a way to Hell, or the teaching of
infernal hosts, or a heresy to destroy the nation,
or an enemy of the land. These are not my words,
but I found them in the sutra. And I am the
messenger sent by the Worshipful for the teaching
of the Real Law." When he attempted with the
fervent tongue of a propagandist, to destroy at
one stroke the old formulae and conceptions (or,
more true to say, superstitions), by emphasising
the individualistic fire of Buddhistic inspiration

71

72 THE EARLIEST JAPANESE POETRY

through whose activity he himself, as he de-
clared, was the symbol of the infinite, his mind
dwelt on the religious freedom born out of the
idealism whose real manifestation can only
appear through the highest development of the
individual life. Nichiren saw clearly that Japan
or Japanese life had been greatly harmed by the
pessimistic interpretation of Buddhism, with its
thought of Nirvana or peaceful haven far beyond
where your absorption of the infinite can only
be realised through the virtue of death, a death
that does not recognise individuality. It was
Nichiren's Activism (with apology to the German
professor) to make life more meaningful, or
again to make death more meaningful by that
meaningful life, through the true Buddhism
perfectly delivered from the despotism of ignorance
or misconception ; it is not far wrong to say that
he alone found the meeting ground of Buddhism
and the thoughts of our Japanese ancestors who,
like sunflowers, most passionately sought after
life and sunlight ; on the sunflower I wrote once
in The Pilgrimage, a book of verses, the following
lines ;

" Thou burstest from mood :
Marvel of thy every atom burning in life.
How fully thou livest !
Passionate lover of sunlight,
Symbol of youth and pride ;
What absorption of thy life's memory,
Wonder of thy consciousness, —
Mighty sense of thy existence ! "

RECORDS OF ANCIENT MATTERS 73

I am thankful to Nichiren, although his in-
fluence was not universal, for his hopeful, brighter
mind (it was almost a Western mind), whose
theological adventure would certainly please the
followers of Eucken ; it was the effect of the
common pessimism of Buddhism or thought of
Nirvana, combined with the morality and ethics
of the Confucian literature, that our original
Japanese mind, indeed quite a Celtic mind, like
that of the young woman in Yeats' Land of
Heart's Desire, who ever wearied of four tongues
and wished to dance upon the mountains like a
flame, had slowly but steadily lost its imagination
and passion, and our lives had become hardened
and disfigured. I leave aside the question of
religion, because my chief concern for the present
moment is in poetry whose rejuvenation may
depend in some measure on a leader (such a
leader as Nichiren in religion) — a leader who, like
Whitman, will cry for " the splendid silent sun
with all his beams full-dazzling " from the
worshipping mind gladdened in Nature's sanctuary
where our ancestors of three thousand years ago
loved and lived. They had only the thought of
life and birth, again the thought of birth and
eternal life, never the thought of death and
shadow ; how our Japanese ancestors hated
shadow and death is recorded in the first page of
Kojiki or Records of Ancient Matters, the earliest
book of Japanese literature in existence, as it

74 THE EARLIEST JAPANESE POETRY

was actually written or completed in A.D. 712.
On this book I am going to dwell presently at
greater length.

Go back to the age, that is many thousand
years ago, when our Japanese mind was the
Japanese mind pure and true, not the Japanese
mind of later age, sometimes, doubtless, refined
and polished, but always wounded and tormented
by the despotic counsel of Chinese literature and
Buddhism, therefore the Japanese mind like the
sunflower, as I said before, a seeker of sunlight
and life, the Japanese mind which is the personi-
fication of life's activity itself ; you might call
it the individualism, conscious or unconscious,
following after the modern fashion. Let me ex-
claim as I exclaimed on the sunflower : " Marvel
of thy every atom burning in life, how fully thou
livest ! " Our later Japanese spiritual history
in literature or what not is more or less the history
of quietism or negation in which the great charm
and attraction is the thought of Cathay called
death ; I myself am pleased to sing on and of
death because it makes life more strong, more
beautiful, and more meaningful through its virtue
of difference ; and when I put stress upon the
fusion of death with life, or upon valuing them
equally, my mind thinks on the real spiritual
freedom which will soon become a perfect idealism
like a broader day born from the mixed souls of
East and West. But when the Japanese mind

YAMATO-TAKE 75

of later days began to deal with death as a state
lifeless, or something hard and final, then the
thought of death ceased to have a better, greater
influence on life ; I despise such a death or such
a thought of death. Go back to the age when
our ancient Japanese did not know death and
shadow, or even when they knew them, did not
think much of them, or scorned them, like
children laughing with winds and sun. To
return to the age of Kojiki is indeed a rare treat
in a time like to-day, when our aspiration or
ambition, I mean that of the Japanese, only
wastes its energy under incongruities, contra-
dictions, and confusions of wild cross-currents of
East and West.

ii

Here in the second volume of Records of Ancient
Matters we have a story in Yamato-Take (not
only that one story, but many other stories scat-
tered in the first and last volumes) which will
surely please a mind of Meredithian cast, epic-
loving ; one who fully endorses the so-called
evolutional philosophy in the Woods of Wester-
main, or the cultivation of the power of the will,
can find enough material for building his songs
of tragic life ; that rude philosophy of Meredith's
our forefathers practised unconsciously. They
such a self-strengthening mind and will

76 THE EARLIEST JAPANESE POETRY

(indeed the ancient Japanese thought was that
life's greatest sin was the sin of weakness) as the
old Norsemen thought ; but our ancestors hailed,
I believe, from a warmer climate with poetry
and love ; they were from the beginning poets
and warriors. To return to Yamato-Take ; he
was a fierce type like Meredith's King Harold ;
while the English ballad ends with the following
lines,

" Sudden, as it were a monster oak
Split to yield a limb by stress of heat,
Strained he, staggered, broke
Doubled at their feet,"

the story of Yamato-Take does not close with his
death, because, from the hatred of death and
shadow, his great dead spirit turned into a white
bird eight fathoms long, soared up to the skies,
and flew away over the seas, while the princesses
and children who had shared equal pains under
his conquering banner in the Eastern countries,
pursued after that bird with their sad songs in
heart, saying :

" Impeded are our loins in the plain,
(The plain thick with bamboo-grasaea) :
Oh ! we are only on foot,
Not flying through the skies."

Again saying :

" Impeded are our loins as we go
Through the seas, oh ! tottering
In the seas like herbs
Grown in a great river-bed."

PRINCESS OTO-TACHIBANA 77

This great valiant spirit, son of Emperor Keiko
who was already afraid of his wonderful valour
and ferocity, had been again sent away -to conquer
the unsubmissive bravoes of the East ; on
receiving the Imperial command, he said : " The
Heavenly Sovereign must be thinking that I
should die quickly, for after sending me to smite
the wild people of the West, I am no sooner come
up again to the capital than, without bestowing
on me an army, he now sends me off afresh to
subdue the wicked people of the East. So I
think that he certainly thinks I shall die quickly."
It was in the almost mythological ancient age
when even the father, if he be weak, often hap-
pened to suffer the fate of a dove torn by a hawk ;
although Yamato-Take clearly knew his father's
intention, he could not disobey his command,
and beside, his love of fighting for fighting's
sake made him start with renewed joy toward
the East, where he began a series of successes
with the slaying of the rulers of Sagama. He
lost his beloved wife, Princess Oto-Tachibana,
while crossing the sea of Hashiri Midzu, who
drowned herself in the waves for the purpose
of calming the storm by the sacrifice of her
own self ; it is said that the violent waves
at once went down, and Yamato-Take's ship
was able to proceed. His wife, this Japanese
woman of many thousand years ago, already
understood something of Meredith's following

78 THE EARLIEST JAPANESE POETRY

lines, of course with a variation of Japanese
morality :

" The lesson writ in red since time first ran :
A hunter hunting down the beast in man ;
That till the chasing but of its last vice,
The flesh was fashioned but for sacrifice."

Yamato-Take subdued and pacified all the East ;
now reaching the moor of Yagi on the way home,
he suddenly felt weak and exclaimed : " Whereas
my heart always felt like flying through the sky,
my legs are now unable to walk ; they have
become rudder-shaped." Again at the village
of Mike he exclaimed : " My legs are like three-
fold crooks, and very very weary."

Then he pulled his tired body to the Moor of
Nobo, and from his deep love of his native land,
he exclaimed, singing •

" O Yamato, the most hidden of lands,
Yamato, snug within green hills,
The hills encompassing thee with their fences,
How delightful, O Yamato ! "

And then he passed away, singing :

" Thou whose life may be strong,
Adorn thy hah", thou in health,
With the bear-oak leaves from Heguri Mount,
Be happy, my child ! "

Such was the last song of this great spirit ;
when you compare it with the Japanese songs
of a later age, you will see that our ancestors,

THE EMPEROR CHUAI 79

even at the moment of death, were never taken,
to use the modern words, by the thought of
pessimism or sentimentality ; they were the
singers of life and joy, not of death and tears.

They knew the world was never made for weak
body and mind ; they never exercised pity and
compassion upon any form of weakness ; they
believed that the instant that one begins to
doubt his own strength, whether it be of mind
or body, all the hopes pf winning life's prizes
shall be at once overthrown. The fact that the
sad destruction of life comes most surely through
indulgence, not through struggle and pain, is
well illustrated in the story of the Emperor
Chuai somewhere in the second volume.

The book reads as follows : "So when the
Heavenly Sovereign, dwelling at the Palace of
Kashii in Tsukushi, was about to smite the land
of Kumaso, the Heavenly Sovereign played on
his lute ; the Prime Minister, the noble Takeuchi,
being in the pine court, requested the divine orders.
Hereupon the Empress, divinely possessed,
charged him with this instruction and counsel ;
' There is a land to the Westward ; in that land
is abundance of treasures dazzling to the eye,
from gold and silver downward. I will now
bestow this land upon thee.' Then the Heavenly
Sovereign replied saying : ' If one ascend to a
high place and look Westward, no country is to
be seen. There is only the great sea. What

80 THE EARLIEST JAPANESE POETRY

lying deities.' He pushed away his lute, playing
no more, and sat silent. Then the deities became
very angry, and said through the mouth of the
Empress : ' Altogether as for this Empire, it is
not a land over which thou oughtest to rule.
Do thou go only the road to Hades ! ' The Prime
Minister, the noble Takeuchi, said : ' I am filled
with awe, my Heavenly Sovereign ! Pray,
continue playing thy great august lute.' The
Heavenly Sovereign slowly drew his lute to him
and languidly played on it. But when the
sound almost immediately became inaudible, the
Heavenly Sovereign was found, alas, dead."
What a splendid subject this for a ballad or
poem for a poet of Meredith's class.

The first note we encounter in opening the
pages of this Records of Ancient Matters is our
ancestors' conception of death as defilement ;
here we have a story of Izanami or His Augustness
the Male-Who-Invites, who followed after his
dead wife, Her Augustness the Female-Who-
Invites, to the Land of Hades. When the male
deity entreated her to come back again to the
world, saying j " The lands that I and thou
made are not yet finished making ; pray come
back ! " Her Augustness the Female- Who-In-
vites was pleased to consent, but begged her
husband to wait for a little while, as she had to
discuss the matter with the deities of Hades.
And she made him promise not to attempt to

EIGHT THUNDER DEITIES 81

come to her while retiring within the palace of
shadow. She tarried there so long, His August-
ness the Male-Who-Invites would not wait any
longer ; so having taken and broken off, this
mythology goes on to say, one of the end-teeth
of this close-toothed comb stuck in the left bunch
of his hair, he lit a light and went in and looked.
Alas, his wife-deity was rotting with swarming
maggots ; in her head, it is written in the book,
dwelt the Great Thunder^ in her breast the Fire-
Thunder, in her belly the Black Thunder, in
her private parts the Cleaving Thunder, in her
left hand the Young Thunder, in her right hand
the Earth Thunder, in her left foot the Rumbling
Thunder, in her right foot the Couchant Thunder,
thus altogether eight Thunder Deities dwelt
there. His Augustness the Male-Who-Invites,
indeed, overawed at the sight, fell back, while
his wife, who grew mad, exclaimed : " Thou hast
put me to shame," and sent the eight Thunder
Deities with a thousand and five hundred warriors
of Hades to pursue him ; but when they failed
to meet him, Her Augustness the Female- Who-
Invites came out herself in pursuit. She was
blocked by a huge rock at the Even Pass of
Hades which the male deity had placed there
for his own protection ; here these two deities
stood opposite to one another, and Her August-
ness the Female-Who-Invites was first to speak,
and she said : "If thou doest like this, I will

6

82 THE EARLIEST JAPANESE POETRY

in one day strangle to death a thousand of the
folk of thy land." Then His Augustness the
Male-Who-Invites replied : "If thou doest this,
I will in one day set up a thousand and five
hundred parturition houses, and make the women
bear children. Suppose a thousand people may
each day die ; but each day a thousand and five
hundred people will be born." Thus birth
conquered over death, the land of light over the
land of shadow.

The great deity who defeated death and per-
suaded the deities of shadow not to pursue any
more, said ; " How hideous ! I have come to a
hideous polluted land ; I will perform the purifica-
tion of my person." Then he went into a plain
and by a river near Tachibana in the island of
Tsukushi, and began to purify and cleanse him-
self ; it is written in the book, that, when he
threw down his girdle, the Deity Road-Long Space
was born thence, the Deity Master of Trouble
from his upper garment he put aside, the Deity
Master of the Open Mouth from his hat, and so
on ; thus the twelve deities altogether were born
from his taking off the things that were on his
person. And then from the bathing of his
august person itself the other fourteen deities
came into existence, among them the three
illustrious children at whose birth His Augustness
the Male-Who-Invites was rejoiced, the Heaven
Shining Great August Deity from his left eye,

LIFE'S ACTIVE SPIRIT 83

His Augustness Moon-Night Possessor from his
right eye, and His Brave Swift Impetuous Male
Augustness from his nose. When these three
deities, the first and second representing the sun
and moon, the last ruling the seas, were born,
we know that the creation of the world was in
good shape. Not only from garment or eyes, but
from anything or anywhere, indeed, even from a
cough, our ancient deities, it was supposed, had
such a power or magic to produce anything and
everything by their free will, and they inspired
their own personalities into the things they created.
All the phenomena thus exhibited were, in our
ancient Japanese mind, nothing but the symbol
of life's active spirit ; the great reverence of our
forefathers toward the deities or gods was only
fierce adoration or praising expression toward
the power or strength which overflows from the
bosoms of mighty personalities. I dare say that
it would do justice to class it with the common
pantheism or Nature-worship you find in ordinary
barbarous tribes ; when Japanese scholars like
Motoori declare that the gods or deities of old
Japanese mind were human beings, it is from their
belief that the conception of gods should be based
on the true realisation of life's fire.

Therefore, where was the real expression of life
was a deity ; there are no men who created so
many gods or deities as the old Japanese ; to
them most impossible Japanese names were

84 THE EARLIEST JAPANESE POETRY

given, names like Ameno-Minaka-Nushi or Takami
Musubi or Umashi-Ashikabi-Higoji.

m

The date of A.D. 712 was given to Kojiki
(Records of Ancient Matters), in fact, the first
written book in Japan, in its completion ; it is
said that Yasumaro, the author, took it all down
from the lips of a certain Hiyedano Are, a Kata-
ribe or reciter whose official function, at the
very early Mikado's government of the Nara
period, was to retell ancient records from his
memory ; it will be believed that they must
have been changed, some parts perhaps omitted,
or others added, during the process of retelling
from one reciter to another. It is not my work
to discuss here their value as legends of history ;
my important concern with them is their poetry,
that is to say, the poetry of our Japanese an-
cestors, which runs through almost every page
of the book. When I read love-songs diffused
here and there in these three volumes it makes
me think of a popular ditty like the following :

" What does never change,
Since the days of the gods,
Is the way how a river runs :
What does never change
Since the days of the gods,
la the way how love flows."

THE PRINCESS OF NUNA-KAHA 85

One of the early love-songs is found when the
Deity-of-Eight-Thousand-Spears went forth to
woo the Princess of Nuna-Kaha and sang on his
arrival at her house as follows :

" His Augustnesa the Deity-of-Eight-Thousand-Speara,
With no Spouse in the Land of the Eight Isles,
Now has heard in the far-off Koshi Land there is a maiden

wise,

Now has heard there is a maiden beauteous :
Here he stands to truly woo her.
Here he goes backward and forward to woo her,
Having untied even the cdrd of his sword,
Having untied even hia veil,

He pushes baok the plank door shut by the maiden ;
He stands here, forward he pulls it :
Here he stands, he soon hears the Nuge singing on the green

hill;

And the bird of the moor, the pheasant, resounds,
The bird of the yard, the oock, crows :
Oh, the pity that the birds should sing, oh, these birds !
Oh, how soon the night dawns !
Would that I could beat them to siokness and death ! "

Then the Princess of Nuna-Kaha, without
opening the door, sang from within :

" Thine Augustness the Deity-of-Eight-Thousand-Spears,
Being a maiden like a drooping plant,
My heart is just a bird on a bank by the shore ;
My heart is now indeed a dotterel.
But it will soon become a gentle bird ;
So as for thy life, do not deign to die."

Again she sang in the following fashion :

" The sun may hide behind the green hills.
The night, the jewel-black night will come forth ;
I will then welcome thee.
Smile like the glad morning sun and come ;

86 THE EARLIEST JAPANESE POETRY

Thine arms white as rope of paper-mulberry bark,
Shall softly pat my breast soft as melting snow ;
Patting each other interlaced,
Stretching out, pillowing us on each other's arms, on true

jewel- arms,

With outstretched legs, oh, will we sleep.
So speak not too lovingly,
Thine Augustness the Deity-of-Eight-Thousand-Spears ! "

The Chief Empress, Her Augustness the For-
ward-Princess, got very jealous ; His Augustness
the Deity-of-Eight-Thousand Spears was greatly
distressed when he was about to go from Izumo
to the Land of Yamato ; as he stood attired, with
one hand on the saddle of his horse and one foot
in his stirrup, he sang, saying :

" I take and carefully attire myself
In my garments black as the jewels of the moor ;
Like the birds of the offing I look at my breast,
I find these are not good,
And cast them off on the waves of the beach.
1 take and carefully attire myself
In my garments green as a kingfisher ;
Like the birds of the offing, I look at my breast,
I find these too are not good,
And cast them off on the waves of the beach.
I take and carefully attire myself
In my raiment dyed in the sap of the dye-tree,
The pounded madder sought in the mountain fields ;
Like the birds of the offing, I look at my breast,
I find they are good.

My dear Younger sister, Thine Augustness !
Though thou say thou wilt not weep,
If, like the flocking birds, I flock and depart,
If, like the led birds, I am led away and depart,
Thou wilt hang down thy head.

THE FORWARD-PRINCESS 87

Like a single eulalia upon the mountain

Thy weeping shall indeed rise

As the mist of the morning shower,

Thine Augustnesa, my spouse young like young herbs ! "

Then the Empress taking a great liquor cup,
and drawing anear and offering it to her husband
deity, sang as follows :

" Thine Augustnesa the Deity-of-Eight-Thousand-Spears !
Thou, my Master-of-the Great-Land, being a man,
Mayest have a wife young like young herbs,
On all island headlands that thou seest,
On every beach headland that thou lookest on ;
But as for me, alas, being a woman,
I have no man except thee, I have no spouse except thee,
Beneath the fluttering of the ornamented fence,
Beneath the rustling cloth coverlet,
Thine arms white as rope of paper-mulberry bark
Softly patting my breast soft as melting snow,
Patting each other interlaced,
Stretching out, pillowing us on each other's arms, on true

jewel-arms,

With outstretched legs, oh, will we sleep.
Luxuriant liquor, oh, pray, lift up ! "

The fact that the ancient Japanese patiently
bore any amount of pain for conquering love is
illustrated in how His Augustness the Deity-of-
Eight-Thousand Spears found his Empress, that
is Her Augustness the Forward-Princess, and
married her ; he was put in a snake-house by her
angry father when he discovered their love, and
again in a house filled with centipedes when he

88 THE EARLIEST JAPANESE POETRY

was rescued. And after many happenings His
Augustness the Deity-of-Eight-Thousand Spears
grasped the hair of the father of the Princess,
while he was sleeping, and tied it fast to the
various rafters of the house, and after blocking up
the floor of the house with a huge rock, he carried
off his new wife on his back, and ran away. It
is written in the book that when he ran away,
the heavenly-speaking lute which he also carried
on his back brushed against a tree and the
beautiful voice of the lute resounded, shaking
the earth. I think that our old ancestors had
quite a developed sense of music ; here is a
story, the most beautiful of all the stories which
illustrates their delicacy of feeling.

There was in the reign of the Emperor Nintoku
a tall tree on the west bank of the river Tsuki ;
the shadow of this tree, on its being struck by
the morning sun, it is said, reached to the Island
of Ahaji, and on being struck by the evening sun,
it crossed Mount Takayasu. When the tree was
cut down, it was made into a vessel which proved
to be a very swift-going one, and it was called
by the name of Karanu. With this vessel the
water of the Island of Ahaji was drawn morning
and evening and presented as the great august
water. The vessel became ruined and useless in
time ; some broken pieces of this old vessel were
used as fuel to dry salt, and other pieces of wood
that remained over from the burning were turned

KARANU 89

into a lute, whose sound beautifully re-echoed
seven miles away. Some one sang, saying :

" Karanu was burned for salt ;
The part that was left was made into a lute ;
Oh, when, struck, listen, it sounds
Like the wet trees standing
Hocked on the reefs in the middle of the wave,
In the middle of the Yura Sea."

V
THE POETS OF PRESENT JAPAN

THE conservatism of Japanese " poetry " often
proved to be a cowardice with little claim to
wisdom ; the poets (here I mean chiefly the
thirty-one-syllable Uta writers) had been taught
it was a dignity to rigidly observe the ancient
form and spirit. Though I admit that changes
are not always a triumph, and that modernity
is not an emancipation altogether, their loyalty
was more or less a literary superstition. They
had to appear at least under a self-denying guise.
Uniformity was their special virtue, individuality
was regarded by them to be little short of vul-
garity. Their poems turned to be the expression
of an etiquette whose formality took the place
of life and beauty ; no sudden change was
permitted in their old kingdom. And any con-
scious introduction of foreign elements, any
advance in diction, imagery, or motive, was
not readily recognised. The limitation which
originated as a test of strength now degenerated
to a confession of weakness. There was a time

90

THE NEW FORM OF POETRY 91

when we thought that nothing could be more
perfect than our little poems, and they are
remarkable, in fact, but " for what they are not,
rather than for what they are," as W. C. Aston
cleverly put it ; indeed, wonderful in their
felicity of phrase, melody of versification, and
true sentiment, within their narrow limits. But
that was ages ago. The Uta poets had been
already for a long time a sort of dilettantes who
did no small harm to the development of our
Japanese poetry, which, under any circumstances,
could not be left alone to be ruined. Modern
Japan is the age of evolution and expansion ;
our poetry also began to undergo their influence.
It would be more proper, however, to say that
the Uta poets were left undisturbed with full
freedom to stick to the original key if they
wanted to, while the younger poets for themselves
started a new form of poem called Shintaishi,
meaning the new-styled poem, with larger scope
and greatly increased resources ; it is well-nigh
reaching already to some achievement.

It is true that the simplicity of our old Uta
poets was a source of charm and often surprise,
and at the same time it was rather tragic for the
poets to be forced to keep it up. They were
obliged to make a completely unconditional
surrender to the ancient form and thought, and
to spin from the same old subjects. The chang-
ing seasons, the voice of a running stream, the

92 THE POETS OF PRESENT JAPAN

snow-capped Fuji Yama, waves on the beach,
the singing of insects or birds, a cherry-blossom,
maple-leaves, Spring rains, longing for home,
and the like, were the subjects. The Uta poets
lamented over the dead, and complained enough
about the uncertainty of life ; but their voices
were not from their actual study of real life ;
they never speculated of Heaven and where they
should go after death. Repetition is not without
delight entirely when it is musical ; but we shall
grow very tired of being suggested the same thing
all the time ; monotony is often suicidal. But
our shintai-shijin (the new-styled poem-writers)
broke off at once from such a prejudice which
is, at its best, the refuge of an impoverished mind ;
and they left the old home of restriction and flew
out into the freedom of nature and life. We may
say that our Japanese poetry received a baptism ;
and it seems it has somehow revived.

Not only the subjects, the form of the poetry
as well underwent a change. The modern poets
could not rest satisfied with the hereditary shape,
which consisted of five phrases of lines of 5, 7, 5, 7,
and 7 syllables, 31 syllables in all. (And there
is another shorter form, consisting of 5, 7, and 5,
which you already know in Hokku.) To-day
they make their own forms to fit their own songs ;
some use lines of 5 and 7, repeating them to a
considerable length as they wish, while some use
lines of 7 and 6 ; many forms like 5 and 5 ; 7 and

LIKE THE ENGLISH POETS 93

7 ; 8 and 6 ; 7 and 8 ; 7 and 4 ; 7 and 6 ; 3, 3,
and 4 ; 4, 7, and 6 ; 5, 7, and 7 ; 5, 7, and 5 ; and
others have been invented to advantage. But
since every syllable of the Japanese language ends
in a vowel, and there are only five vowels, no
poet could be successful in the use of rhyme j the
result would be only intolerably monotonous if
we used i* . However, there are many who at-
tempt to overcome the weakness ; and even
alliteration has been introduced. We have a
trick of words in Ufa, poetry called makura kotoba
or " pillow-words," standing at the beginning of
a verse, and serving, as it were, as the pillow upon
which it rests ; it might be said to be an adjective
in many cases ; but always it is unintelligible
and often absurd. Another bit of word- jugglery
is the " pivot-words " ; a word or a part of a
word is used in two senses ; one, with what
precedes, the other with what follows. The use
of such artifices is utterly despised by our modern
poets. The old poets tabooed in their poetry
the introduction of a monosyllable Chinese word,
which the shintai-shijin freely use ; and again the
latter are not shy about using even English. Like
the English poets, they have begun to use the
personification of abstract qualities. In one
word, they are not so very different from them
in writing lyrics, ballads, allegories, epics, and so
forth. However, it may be some time yet
before we see real development of the drama.

94 THE POETS OF PRESENT JAPAN

Some ten or fifteen years ago the poems of
"storm and stress" overflowed in Japan; in
this phase our poets were not far behind their
Western brothers.

It was in the early fifteenth of Meiji (1882)
when the Shintaishi were first introduced by the
professors of the Imperial University, the late
Masakazu Toyama, Tetsutaro Inouye, and others,
who published their collections of new poems
and translations from the Western poets. But
in fact there was not much to consider till Toson
Shimazaki appeared some ten years later.

II

Shimazaki's Wakanashu enthroned him at
once as the master of Shintaishi ; in that respect
he reminds us of Bryant, who suddenly illumined
the dearth of early American poetry. (How
undeveloped was this new-style poem before his
appearance like a comet !) Even Shimazaki's
actual work of his early days, A Ramble in the
Forest for instance, with quite an interesting
interruption in a sort of duet :

Mountain Spirit.

" The deer, when they fall to death,
Return to love of their wives.

" The fields and hills, when they wither away,
Return to Spring a thousand years old."

A JAPANESE THANATOPSIS 95

Tree Spirit.

" Let TIB bury the old fallen leaves
Under the shadow of leaves, tender, green.

" Awake from winter's dream-road,
Come to this forest of Spring."

might be called a Japanese interpretation of
Thanatopsis. We have more than one reason
to compare him with Bryant. He began his
work at the right time when it was easier for
a poet to sing, and at the same time easier for
us to listen ; it was in the idyllic years, if we may
say so (though they passed quickly as anything
else in Japan) — those four or five years we en-
joyed before the China-Japan war which changed
abruptly the aspect, atmosphere, and aspiration
of the country, vivified the sense of life, and
raised the question of the relation of man with
man as well as of country with country. It
was perfectly natural for Shimazaki to start as
a poet of Nature ; as I understand, the landscape
school of poetry is always first to appear in any
country. On reading his poems to-day we
cannot help showing our dissatisfaction with his
want of persistence and minute observation ;
and we need more enthusiasm, and some higher
poetic dash. But his tone, sentiment, and re-
sponsive imaginativeness which were brewed in
the time when criticism was not so keen, and
the impression of foreign knowledge not so strong

96 THE POETS OF PRESENT JAPAN

as to-day, must be regarded fairly ; they give a
delightful relief to our minds. In them he has a
strong claim. He was a poet of sentiment, almost
inclined to be sentimental ; he was always
delicate, and often sad. (I should like to know
where is a Japanese poet who is not sad.) He
hated, as any other Japanese poet, the song of
wisdom, faith, and liberty ; he was flexible in his
mind, extremely facile in ear and voice. His
voice was that of a youth which has never re-
ceived any deep scratch from life ; and his love,
which was passionate enough, but not from real
experience, was only a speculation of his dream ;
and then, the shade and colour of his love were
very young, always fresh. He was a poet of
Spring, when the flowers commingle with the
birds to complete a beautiful concert.

He was not a Tennyson who had a Keats and
a Shelley for his predecessors ; in one sense, he
was an originator. We cannot so severely
criticise his diction, which, in fact, cannot be
compared with that of a later poet who has
boundless vocabularies at his command. He is
a poet of a few words ; with a few words, he wrote
a far better poem than you could expect. And
he was not a poet of a few great poems ; we must
see him as a whole ; it is true that he has no
wonderful expressions nor separate lines for
quotation. However, it is delightful to notice
that he could not pretend to a feeling which he

TOUCH OF SAIGYO HOSHI 97

did not enjoy, nor did he hunt emotion and rap-
ture for writing's sake as do the later poets. His
cadences and pauses were so pleasing. He was
meditative, but not slow and also not profound ;
in one word, he was elementary. And that is
one reason why even to-day all the beginners of
Shintaishi should go to him first ; he is the father
of the " new-style " poem in that sense. (That
is also like Bryant in America.)

In those days Rossetti and Swinburne were
not known in Japan, and Wordsworth, Tennyson ,
and Longfellow were the only names. However,
I am not sure at which shrine he burned his
incense, although it is clear enough that he was
greatly influenced by the Western magic. He
who sang the nature and beauty of love in his
first book of verses, began to weave the grief and
tears of love in his Ichiyoshu ; here I notice a
certain touch of Saigyo Hoshi, that great sad
poet of the Kamakura period, whose Oriental
longing was deepened by Occidental suggestive-
ness. He associated nature with the ineffable
yearning of art ; and he entered into the bosom
of silence to seek his own home of poetry and
ideal.

" The light of the moon,
Shining quiet,

Why does it make me think
Incessantly 7
The shadow of the moon
Has no voice,

98 THE POETS OF PRESENT JAPAN

But it does steal

Into one's bosom

Oh ! I who am going to die

From the world and love !

My thought which I do not tell,

And this shadow of the moon,

Which is more silent ?

Which more sad ? "

However, from the oppression of life's meaning,
he could not stay young and dreamy, and suddenly
stopped singing when he left Tokyo for Shinano,
where he became a school-teacher. When he
appeared again in literature, it was as a successful
novelist. His life as a poet was short, but
monumental.

We must come to Bansui Tsuchii to find a
representative of the culture and knowledge that
advanced in no small degree with the Imperial
University as their centre. (By the way, Tsuchii
is a University man.) His real qualification as
a poet is rather doubtful, but at the same time
he is a living proof that a made poet, when he is
properly made, is not altogether unacceptable.
It is true that he made his Western learning help
him to make a better display. It goes without
saying that he was never moved by sudden in-
stinct and quickening pulses ; but he was glad
to scrutinise the phases of Nature, and the
universal soul and ideal. He observed wisdom
through Hugo and perhaps Schiller (he did not
confine his reading to the English poets), and he

WRESTLING WITH ETERNITY 99

was pleased to add his own endorsement to them.
The admirable part is that his poetical attitude
was always sincere, his conception of life grave
and just, but without tenderness. He was the
first to wrestle with Eternity, and he did not
return without something to his profit. His
intellectual faculties were very well balanced,
almost to the discreetest degree ; and under their
right guidance he expressed his poetical thought,
but that is not to say fire. So his poem was a
result, not a first intention, whatever. His
deliberation and thought were praiseworthy ;
ethics was always hi his view.

" An6 (elder sister) and Imo (younger sister), who were fed
By the same Nature's, the same mother's honourable hands,
The flower of the sky is called Star,
The star qf our world ia called Flower.

" This and that are parted afar,
But their odour is the same, Star and Flower,
Laughter and Light they interchange sweet,
Every Eve, Flower and Star.

" But when the clouds of the dawn grow white,
And the flower of the sky fades away,
Do you not see a drop of dew ?
The star of our world is crying."

We notice that many young poets grew nursed
by wrong poets, and were carried away by the
wild and fantastic passion and fire of a thoughtless
youth. But there is no sounder poet than this
Tsuchii, whose noble attitude of reverence toward

100 THE POETS OF PRESENT JAPAN

the Western knowledge kept him at the proper
place, and even helped him find the right clue
of poetical mystery as he wished. Although his
individual note was not impressive, his poems
prove his clear truimph over that knowledge
and culture which did not appear to him as a
distraction ; and I will say that he was their
best harvester. He was wise to desert his fellow
university poets of pseudo-classicism like Take-
jima or Shioi, and he gained a voice sonorous
and rhapsodic, though not particularly rich,
yet always attractive, from his excursion into
the Chinese diction. Shimazaki was frequently
effeminate, but Tsuchii was manly. He was
always correct, and comprehensive, so then he
lacked a touch of illusion. I am ready to say
that he was quite commonplace, but he succeeded
in making his commonplaceness often suggestive.
I believe that it is no small art.

Those who wished for a deeper colour and
variety of diction than Shimazaki's, and showed
a fatigue at his monotony, open their arms to
welcome Kyukin Susukida. Susukida enshrined
Keats in his heart ; like him he is a poet of
Youth and Beauty, to whom Nature appeared as
a background. At least so he was in his earlier
books, Yukuharu and Botekishu. I do not say
that he did not understand Nature, but he did
not attempt to see her with his naked eyes, and
he tried to robe her with his own idealistic robes.

BEAUTY AND MELODY 101

He did not incline to solve Nature and Life as
Tsuchii, but he made them a symbol of love and
poetry, through which he looked for salvation.
He was a dreamer, but he never speculated in
thought. He was simple. He hated the world
vulgar and material. He is a poet of unerring
culture who built the house beautiful, which he
peopled with his choicest images and longing,
who put beauty and melody of language before
everything else. He has been verily often criti-
cised as a classicist. It is true that his taste was
refined by virtue of his training, and he could be
quite graceful even when he had nothing to say.
On the other hand, his mind never rose high,
he brought no particular message to our life. His
chief merit must be valued through the channel
of his language which gives us a delightful change
from Shimazaki ; indeed, he is the master of art,
he had no competitor in its beauty. However,
in his later work, there is plenty of reason to
believe that he was trying to escape from his
culture and classicism which benefited him at
the beginning ; it is almost tragic to see his
struggle. His hands are too delicate after a long
habit of wearing gloves ; he is not accustomed
so well to the open air. His views of life and
beauty are far more advanced in his Nijugogen and
Hakuyokyu than in his earlier books ; but it seems
that he could not leave his classicism entirely.
If he were smaller or larger than himself, I should

102 THE POETS OF PRESENT JAPAN

say that he would be better off ; his strength is,
after all, his weakness.

We have two other interesting poets of modern
Japan in Ariake Kanbara and Homei Iwano.

in

It seems to me that Ariake Kanbara had been
wandering in the labyrinth of experiment (how
he loved that wandering), not knowing exactly
where he would come out ; he has much en-
thusiasm ; his sensitive mind made his poetical
ambition quick to flame up over a new thing.
His travelling guide or companion was Rossetti
at first, when he strove to hold the vision and
romance of his own kingdom of music and love,
his eternal land of imagination and youth :

" I stand alone, and I hear
The whisper sad, —

'Tia Heaven's whisper over the far-away sea,
Which the white sunbeams spoke.

" The voice is lone but clear,
Quiet but bright,

I can never know the whisper of the far-away sea,
The whisper of the shining sky."

I have been thinking sometimes that he had a
false start in his poetical work ; it is true that
he needed somebody to support him when he
could not walk by himself ; but even at the time
when he was perfectly able to manage himself,
his face still turned instinctively toward his
original help. We read many reflections and

AS IN THE CASE OF BROWNING 103

echoes of Rossetti even in his latest work. (By
the way, he is the author of some four books of
poems, the latest being Ariake Shu.) To have a
support at the start is nothing particularly bad ;
but at the same time it is enough of a disad-
vantage. It is a question of genuineness for
poetry ; realisation is the main thing.

He has been often charged with vagueness ; I
should say that he has only to smile over such a
charge. We are rather glad that he has no aim
of amusing his readers • in fact, there he shows
a poet's dignity. Vagueness is often a virtue ; a
god lives in a cloud ; truth cannot be put on one's
finger-tip. The darkness of night is beauty ; that
is only another view of the light of day. Still we
know that when a poet is great, he always goes back
to the simplicity of nature ; there may come a time
for him when he will cry for that simplicity as a
child for his mother's milk. In fact, when he re-
turned to simplicity he was most delightful, as in
the case of Browning ; read one of his poems called
"Shu no Madara" or "The Dark Red Shadow-
Spots " with the following lines somewhere ;

" Between the spaces,
Of acacia branches commingled,
Spread on
The shining crown of clouds.

Two alone in the shadowy lane,

You and I ;

Oh how lovely,

The fragrance of the green !

104 THE POETS OF PRESENT JAPAN

" The breezes fan,
The leaves of the acacia trees
Turn on
Dreamily.

" The dark-red shadow-spots of the sun
Swing ;

Alas, of a sudden,
My thought disordered."

He is a builder of a brick house who sets his
materials with care ; he is a curio-shop keeper
who arranges his bric-a-brac with no small taste.
He is not a free bird who sings to a star ; but he
is a caged nightingale who sings beautifully.
His understanding of what it is to be a poet is
thorough ; and he can be that quite easily.
However, his poetical atmosphere is rather close
and shut up ; his mind is too systematic ; he has
too good a head to be a great poet. What is
symbolism if not "the affirmation of your own
temperament in other things, the spinning of a
strange thread which will bind you and the other
phenomena together " ? Kanbara is that symbo-
list ; he looks upon everything with his own
special personality. We have no symbols in the
strict literary meaning ; it seems to me that he
has a great chance before him ; and if he can
work out his own symbolism, he may create a
special cult for the future generation to follow.
But we are rather doubtful of the nature of his
faith ; I have some reason to think that his

LOVE, BUT NOT A PURPOSE 105

symbolism may be only a fancy, that it has no
root in the ground. It may be his love, but not
a purpose ; and that is a weak point for him.
He has elaborate adjectives, phrases, and descrip-
tion, but we are sure he must find some other
way to make his poem alive. Truth and beauty
want no explanation, nor pomp of line. His
poetical mind is clear like a looking-glass which
reflects every line and colour. But his enemy is
himself ; he has too much restraint, a certain
heaviness, unmistakable difficulty with his lines,
appeals too much to the reader's eye ; he has
an excess of exactitude which only makes him
difficult to follow. He uses too often a sharpened
pencil to make a landscape of large size ; it makes
the picture a failure as a whole ; he spoils the
general effect by paying too diligent attention to
details. He is a wonder of development ; he
is a poet of taste. He takes a little seed of a
strange flower, puts it in the ground, waters it,
makes it bloom, places it on a tokonoma, and
gazes at and admires it from every side ; he does
not require a great subject to sing on. But his
poetical mood is often sophisticated ; he is too
careful, too timid, like a shy bird. And if he
grasps life's meaning, unfortunately he kills it.
It would be his triumph if he could leave out his
classicism which he himself created. He has to
conquer his own soul ; he has to learn the emotion
of faith which is primal After all, his cleverness

106 THE POETS OF PRESENT JAPAN

would be only his own fault. Some critic said
that Mallarme (Kanbara's art, which originated
in Rossetti, was improved later by Mallarme and
other French poets) was obscure, not so much
because he wrote differently, but because he
thought differently, from other people ; now
I should like to say the same thing of Kanbara.
He thinks with a strange thought ; how many
people of Japan could understand Rossetti or
Mallarme ? There are so many echoes of them in
Kanbara's poems ; but I do not mean to under-
estimate his worth ; in that shade he is worthy
and even wonderful.

IV

I have much to say on Homei Iwano. We hear
of a poet of promise with youthfulness and a
certain amateurish fire, but never reaching to a
state of maturity ; such a poet is rarely guilty
of falsehood or artificiality, but his want of the
power of self-analysis is often wonderful. Iwano
is one of that class.

" 'Tis too sweet — ah, the joy of the world,
Spring joins with the road of dream ; what a vision
(Light mist afar, sleeping flowers anear)
Goes round my spirit's eyes.

" Let me bid my careless love adieu,
Under the window the slender rains fall on ;
My yearning of the springing passion
Would live in the breeze under the cloudy sky."

A TOO OPEN SINGER 107

His poem is that of mood, whether of love or
other emotion ; and we are often sad when we
are disenchanted, the veil of his muse's shrine
having fallen. He is a too open singer ; his voice
sometimes drops even into bathos. Suggestion,
the spirit of atmosphere should be properly valued ;
and we do not attempt to hold back the poet when
he flies into the clouds. Iwano's imagination
shows great variety in wealth and colour without
depth, like a summer cloud which haunts the
mountain peak. Questions in philosophy and
reflection are not his own field ; but his specula-
tion in thought and passion makes one of ten wonder
and gaze. His poems themselves are his person-
ality. His is the poetry of his transition age ;
will he ever reach the time of realisation ? Doubt-
less his spiritual life will evolve and he will gain
intimacy with Nature in time. I think, however,
that poetical sureness is more often born than
made. It is a pity that he is much troubled with
the richness of his own fire and thought, and, in
spite of himself, loses his self -consciousness. We
cannot find the silence and the odour of time
and association in his free and often undisciplined
songs. His head never turns back to the twilight,
but looks forward to the sunrise and the sky.
He has been accused of being an unthinking
singer, who scatters his thoughts and wastes his
passion on any subject ; in fact, he is at home
on any subject, his sudden fire and thought rising

108 THE POETS OF PRESENT JAPAN

up on the spot. He is the most versatile poet
of the present day ; and, naturally, he has un-
consciously degenerated into every excess. And
it seems to me that he always lacks just one touch
of distinction. The heart of Nature is sad. Be-
yond the sounds of the wind and the waves you
will be impressed by the loneliness and beauty of
silence, which is the dignity of Nature. The real
poem should be like it. But it is regrettable in
Iwano that his voice often stops at being only a
voice, and lacks something which should lie
beyond. On the other hand, his buoyancy and
exaltation of imagination and swing are the out-
burst of his own nature, frequently reminding us
of the Celtic. (He is the Irish singer of Japan.)
The question with him is not how to sing, but
how not to sing. He was a poet ardently follow-
ing after a romantic colour in life and passion
when he published his Homei Shishu. I noticed
then that his romanticism, too, tottered toward
a sad confusion. But I begin to observe a great
change in his later work. He is a born poet, and
in any circumstances can be trusted as to his
genuineness. He is not a bric-a-brac poet what-
ever, but has yet to learn how to control his
poetic impulse, which is his only guide. His
mood is so compelling that he is carried on by
the force of momentum, and troubled with his
own gift. While I know that the gospel of the
negative cannot be admiredj some sense of limjta-

SAD LOVE AND SAD SONG 109

tion would do him a world of good. He wrote
" Tankyoku " in the Sad Love and Sad Song,
the fourteen-line songs which proved successful.
They are impressive in their own special way,
one dwelling on a speculation in thought, and
another carrying a terribly realistic picture of
passion. What he sings in them is less Japanese
than universal. " Tankyoku " is not a sonnet
which should be rigid in form and idea ; it is
simply written in fourteen lines t

" Holding a stone which has no voice,
I cry my world away with tears ;
"Pis not for love as the other people say,
'Tis not for the pain which I suffer most,
'Tis more than my pain and love ;
My flesh of burning thoughts will burn,
And my hot tears alone run down,
When the loneliness in my bosom comes to flow.
Nor God nor Death is in me ;
If there is a thing, 'tis this loneliness :
Now I am a prey of my own life,
And cry away this endless world with the stone ;
It bears silence eternally growing,
And I pour on it my own tears."

It is acknowledged that in his later work he
has deserted the golden realm of romanticism
and entered delightfully into the silver-grey cloud-
land of symbolism ; and he has made a better
friendship with Verlaine, and taken him as a
bosom friend without any proper etiquette, and
even thinks that he is himself a Japanese Verlaine.
I am sure that there is no slightest harm in it.

110 THE POETS OF PRESENT JAPAN

I do not call his transformation to some sort
of symbolism from romanticism an advance to
a higher poetical plane — it is simply his line of
evolution. And I see a delightful change in
Iwano of to-day. But somehow I suspect that
in his idea and poetry he is lusting after strange
gods and kneeling to them in too free adoration.
I even declare that he offends sometimes, but
without any bad intention against good taste and
discretion ; and I espy that he appears quite
glad hi his own action. It is not a rebellion in
his case by any means, but a revolution. But
what is the saddest thing with this Iwano is that
he has lately stopped singing ; he is squandering
his own talent and passion on novel-writing and
criticism. It is not alone myself that wishes his
return to poetry.

There are other names who have helped to
make this new-styled poems or Shintaishi a strong
literary force and brought it to the presentdevelop-
ment — for instance, Hakusei Hiraki, who grasps a
large subject and executes with a rigid construc-
tion and handsome but passionless rhetoric ;
Tetsukan Yosano, whose life-long training in
t/to-writing made his poems terse, and whose
experience of life flashes sharp ; Suimei Kawai,
whose calm rhythm and tender beauty of feeling
might suggest a Longfellow ; Kagai Kodama,
whose Byronic fire and surprise cannot be over-
looked ; and Gekko Takayasu, who is the singer

TOKOKU KITAMURA 111

of Kyoto, the old capital, where he lives, that is
to say, an appreciator of quieter life and somewhat
old but pleasing ideality. And lastly, we cannot
forget the name of Tokoku Kitamura, a singer of
Byronism, who, some years before Shimazaki,
already breathed a new poetical spirit into the
poetry of modern Japan ; in truth, he might be
termed the father of Shintaishi. The develop-
ment of the last few years brought to the front
two names, Hakushu Kitahara and Rofu Miki, to
whose work special attention should be called.

SOME VTA SPECIMENS FROM THE HYAKUNIN
ISHIU ANTHOLOGY COMPILED IN 1235
BY SADAIYE, A NOBLE OF THE KYOTO
COURT

" The flowers and my love
Passed away under the rain,
While I idly looked upon them I
Where is my y ester-love ? "

ONO NO KOMACHI.

" Ono no Komachi," Ki no Tsurayuki remarks,
" belongs to the school of Sotoori Hime of ancient
times. There is feeling in her poems, but little
vigour. She is like a lovely woman who is suffering
from ill health. Want of vigour, however, is only
natural in a woman's poetry." Although she left
little work, her poetical capacity as well as her
beauty, it is said, caused her to be called to the
Imperial House. She was not from a family of high
position by any means, as she was a daughter of a
certain chief officer of a county. There is no other
woman of old Japan whose life figures so largely in
fiction ; and her name as a model of beauty more
than as a poetess is universally known. Komachi is
regarded as a synonym of " beautiful woman " ; there
were or are many beautiful women nicknamed
Komachi. Whether a fiction or not, Fukakusa no

112

ABE NO NAKAMARO 113

Chujo's love-story with her is famous : it is said that
his love was utterly scorned, and he called her to
admit him to her house with no success whatever,
and that he died under the winter snow on his hun-
dredth journey.

" Behold the heavenly vastness,
The sky of the moon !
Is it not the same moon I once saw
Out of Kasuga's Mikasa hill ? "

ABE NO NAKAMARO.

Abe no Nakamaro left Japan for China in his
sixteenth year, and stayed in China for thirty-eight
long years. The Emperor Benso admired his ability
and appointed him as his secretary ; and Nakamaro
changed his name and took the Chinese name of
Choko, and considered himself as a Chinese. But
it was the 4th of Tenbio Shoho (729), when the
Japanese ambassador to China, FujiwaranoKiyokawa,
was going back, and Nakamaro's thought of home
stirred. And he decided to return to Japan ; and
many of his friends, Oi and Rihaku, the two famous
Chinese poets, among them, held a farewell party
in Nakamaro's honour. It was a moonlit night when
the dinner took place, and he wrote this Uta thinking
about the moon that used to come out of Kasuga's
Mikasa hill, which he knew well in his boyhood
days. The Mikasa hill is in the outskirts of Nara.
It is said that every member of the party wept over

8

114 SOME SPECIMENS

his Uta. However, Nakamaro could not return home
after all ; the ship in which he sailed met with a
tempest, and he was shipwrecked. He died in China
at the age of eighty-one.

" 0 thou, fisher's boat,
Tell men that I sailed
Away into the eighty isles,
Into the bluest field, — the sea ! "

SANGI TAKAMUBA.

This Sangi Takamura's Uta was written when he
was put in a boat to be an exile in the far-away Iki
island. It happened that he had been appointed
vice-ambassador to China, the chief being Fujiwara
no Tsunetsuyu, and the four ships which were to
take the entire company were announced officially.
And the first ship which Tsunetsuyu rode in was
damaged when it had hardly left the shore, and he
insisted on having Takamura exchange ships for
his safety. The latter grew angry, and at once
turned the head of his boat and landed ; and he
resigned, saying that his old father needed him so
that he could not go so far off. The Emperor Saga
(810-842) was obliged to impose on him an official
punishment since he had disobeyed his august com-
mand for such a reason.

He wrote some seventy Uta poems on his exile
journey, which are said to be beautiful in diction
and full of meaning. This Uta is one of them.

MIBU NO TADAMI 115

" To gaze upon the moon
Is to be sad in a thousand ways,
Though all the Autumn
Is not meant to be my own self's."

OYE NO CHIZATO.

" 'Tis the Spring day
With lovely far-away light.
Why must the flowers fall
With hearts unquiet ? "

Ki NO TOMONORI.

Some commentator says that this Uta poem is the
best among all the Uta poems ever written in Japan.

" Alas, my face betrayed
The secret of my love.
All men ask me why
I am so sad."

TAIEA NO KANEMOEI.

" That I love thee
Is known already. Ah, me !
I had been thinking that
No one would know it."

MIBU NO TADAMI.

This Uta was written, it is said, on the 2nd of
Tentoku (957), when the Emperor Reizei gathered

116 SOME SPECIMENS

the court poets and poetesses to hold an Uta contest.
Among the love poems on this occasion, this is
one of the best, the other best one being Taira no
Kanemori's Uta, which precedes this poem. The
poetical umpire Ononomiya pronounced Kanemori's
the better. Tadami took the failure too hard to his
heart ; and it is said that he died after ceasing to
eat for some days.

" The moon has nothing to make
Me think and cry,
But, alas, my own tears alone
Do lament and fall."

SAIGYO HOSHI.

" Oh, thread of my life,
Be torn off now if it must !
I fear in longer life
My secret would be hard to keep."

SHIKISHI NAISHINNO.

I might show thee

How the Oshima island fishers' sleeves
Never change their tints, though wet through.
But, alas, tearful sleeves of mine ! "

IMPUKU MONIN NO OSUKE.

DAJODAIJIN 117

" List, the crickets sing !
Upon the mat of the frost-night,
I, my raiment not yet unbound,
Have to sleep alone."

GOKYOKOKU SESSHO SAKINO

" 'Tis not the stormy snow
Luring the garden flower,
But what is falling fast
Is nothing but my own self."

NYUDO SAKINO DAJODAIJIN.

My sleeves are like

The wide sea rocks unseen

Even at the lowest tide. Nobody would know

That their tears never dry."

NuoNora SANUKI.

118

SOME HOKKU SPECIMENS BY THE
MASTERS

" To-day, at last to-day,
I grew to wish to raise
The chrysanthemum flowers."

RANSETSU.

" Autumn's full moon 5
Lo, the shadows of a pine tree
Upon the mats ! "

KIKAKU.

"Yellow chrysanthemum, white chrysanthemum :
Why, the other names for me
Are of no use."

RANSETSU.

" ' Let day pass,
Let night break.'

The frogs sing — they sing morning and eve."

BUSON.

" Ah, how sublime —
The green leaves, the young leaves,
In the light of the sun ! "

BASHO.

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