There is a subtle charm about Japanese poetry peculiarly its own. I recall with pleasure the unforgettable hours I spent in reading Mr. Yone Noguchi's The Pilgrimage. I was compelled, through sheer delight, to read the two volumes at a sitting. It is true that Mr. Noguchi is very much under the influence of Walt Whitman, and it has left its impress upon his work; but that only tends to heighten the effect of the purely Japanese element. A brief, haunting phrase of Mr. Noguchi has far more charm than an imitation of his American master's torrential manner. Japan has no need to imitate as far as her poetry is concerned. In the old days one of the characteristics of that country's poetry was its almost entire freedom from outside influences, not even excepting that of China, from whom, in other directions, she borrowed so much. I have mentioned Mr. Yone Noguchi because his work forms an excellent starting-point for the study of Japanese poetry. This charming poet, writing in English, has given us for the first time an intimate knowledge of the very spirit of Japanese poetry. When a book is written on comparative poetry, that of Japan will take a very high place.

It is far easier to describe what Japanese poetry is not than what it actually is. To begin with, there are no Japanese epics, such as the Iliad and Odyssey, the Kalevala, and the Mahabharata, and their phrase naga-uta ("long poetry") is to us a misnomer, for they have no really long poems. Philosophy, religion, satire are not themes for the Japanese poet; he even goes so far as to consider war no fit subject for a song.

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The Tanka and Hokku

Where, then, are the charm and wonder of Japan's Pegasus? The real genius is to be found in the tanka, a poem of five lines or phrases and thirty-one syllables. In many ways the tanka shows far more limitation than an English sonnet, and our verbose poets would do well to practise a form that engenders suppression and delicately gives suggestion the supreme place. It is surprising what music and sentiment are expressed within these limits. The tanka is certainly brief in form, but it frequently suggests, with haunting insistency, that the fragment really has no end, when imagination seizes it and turns it into a thousand thousand lines. The tanka belongs as much to Japan as Mount Fuji itself. One cannot regard it without thinking that a Japanese poet must essentially have all the finer instincts of an artist. In him the two arts seem inseparable. He must convey in five lines, in the most felicitous language at his disposal, the idea he wishes to express. That he does so with extraordinary success is beyond dispute. These brief poems are wonderfully characteristic of the Japanese people, for they have such a love for little things. The same love that delights in carving a netsuke, the small button on a Japanese tobacco-pouch, or the fashioning of a miniature garden in a space no bigger than a soup-plate is part of the same subtle genius.

There is an even more Lilliputian form of verse. It is called the hokku, and contains only seventeen syllables, such as: "What I saw as a fallen blossom returning to the branch, lo! it was a butterfly," Butterflies were no mere flying insects in Old Japan. The sight of such a brightly coloured creature heralded the approach of some dear friend. On one occasion[Pg 382] great clouds of butterflies were thought to be the souls of an army.
The Hyaku-nin-isshiu

Those who are familiar with the Hyaku-nin-isshiu[1] ("Single Verses by a Hundred People"), written before the time of the Norman Conquest, will recognise that much of the old Japanese poetry depended on the dexterous punning and the use of "pivot" and "pillow" words. The art was practised, not with the idea of provoking laughter, which was the aim of Thomas Hood, but rather with the idea of winning quiet admiration for a clever and subtle verbal ornament. No translation can do full justice to this phase of Japanese poetry; but the following tanka, by Yasuhide Bunya, may perhaps give some idea of their word-play:

"The mountain wind in autumn time
Is well called 'hurricane';
It hurries canes and twigs along,
And whirls them o'er the plain
To scatter them again."

The cleverness of this verse lies in the fact that yama kaze ("mountain wind") is written with two characters. When these characters are combined they form the word arashi ("hurricane"). Clever as these "pillow" and "pivot" words were, they were used but sparingly by the poets of the classical period, to be revived again in a later age when their extravagant use is to be condemned as a verbal display that quite overshadowed the spirit of the poetry itself.
Love Poems

There are Japanese love poems, but they are very different from those with which we are familiar. The[Pg 383] tiresome habit of enumerating a woman's charms, either briefly or at length, is happily an impossibility in the tanka. There is nothing approaching the sensuousness of a Swinburne or a D. G. Rossetti in Japanese poetry, but the sentiments are gentle and pleasing nevertheless. No doubt there were love-lorn poets in Japan, as in every other country, poets who possibly felt quite passionately on the subject; but in their poetry the fire is ghostly rather than human, always polite and delicate. What could be more naïve and dainty than the following song from the "Flower Dance" of Bingo province?

"If you want to meet me, love,
Only we twain,
Come to the gate, love,
Sunshine or rain;
And if people pry
Say that you came, love,
To watch who ............