History of Japanese Literature,v.1 Book

Akira Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress" tells the story of a medieval Japanese princess on the run after losing battles, protected by a single general (the incomparable Toshiro Mifune who in this film meets his match in the actress playing the princess, Misa Uehara). George Lucas' Star Wars borrowed heavily from the film, including the robot characters who in the original were two clownish Japanese peasants who agree to help the fugitives (for recompense) without knowing that the fleeing woman is royalty. At the end of the Kurosawa film, order has been restored, as it should be in a comedy, to what Kurosawa acerbically depicts as the Japanese norm: elaborate class-based ritual, in which the general is subservient to the princess he has grown close to and from which the two peasants are banished despite risking their lives. The inescapable conclusion is that the princess was freer before being restored to her pedestal, when she could run in loose clothing instead being bound by royal costumes and rites, when she was actually allowed to speak with and learn about her subjects. In this book, Shuichi Kato undertook the probably impossible task of reviewing a thousand years of Japanese literature in three hundred pages; what strikes one most (aside from the necessity of dispatching masterpieces like Genji or the Tale of the Heike in a few pages), is the utter absence of peasant clowns, of Falstaffs and Wives of Bath. It is literature of the aristocracy by the aristocracy, as befits a poetry that has its origins in lamentations on the death of Emperors. To the credit of the book, shifts in the ruling structure--whether the Emperors are being bossed around the Fujiwaras or some other clan, or by that peculiar rival court presided over by Retired Emperors--are seen as one of the dominant forces shaping the literature. The other, intertwined with it, is the wandering path of the various sects of Buddhism that held sway. It is to Shuichi Kato's credit that I almost understood the dueling schools of esoteric Buddhism, Shingon and Tendai, before they gave way to the more familiar Pure Land (which has much in common with Christianity although no Christ) and Zen. Shuichi Kato lucidly explains why each sect was in turn prevalent among the rigid and quarrelsome nobility (hard to think of any kind of Buddhism in that context, but there it is) and how that affected a literature dominated, as apparently everything was, by the aristocracy. What suffers in this account is the literature: if anything, one would like more on the extraordinary group of ladies-in-waiting who gave us diaries and Genji or the development of No from Shinto ritual. In that sense, Shuichi Kato is most compelling on the development of the early poetry, from royal laments to romantic poetry, so often depicted through observations of flora and the turning of the seasons.