A JAPANESE ROMANCE.* TEE customs and opinions of a nation
will always be best illus- trated by its own writers, and can hardly be otherwise accurately known, even by observant travellers with every opportunity of
anukingura; a Japanese Romance. Traneleted by Frederick S. Maine, Sc.B. London : Allen and Co.
seeing and hearing for themselves how natives speak and com- port themselves in their own country. From this point of view Mr. Dickins, in the translation he has given us of Chushingura, or, the Loyal League, one of the most popular and best-known romances in Japan, has opened a page of national life which, without a knowledge of the written language, acquired only by a few Orientalist students, must have remained a closed book to Europeans. To many who have been in the habit of seeing Japanese figures in tragic and festive scenes, vividly coloured, on fans, screens, and porcelain, and evidently drawn from some popular story, this book will gratify a very natural curiosity, by reproducing many of these in the illustrations, and thus affording the explanation of the scenes which they represent, not otherwise to be obtained without difficulty.
The romance of Chushingura is one of many versions of the popular history or legend of the " Forty-seven Ronins," whose tombstones are still to be seen in the cemetery where they were erected in a past century. It is so spun out, however, and interwoven with episodes, that it more resembles in the original the History of Don Quixote, by Cervantes, or The Adventures of Gil Blas, or, perhaps, to compare like with like, the other and older classic Japanese romance styled Genii Monogotari, which consists of some sixty volumes, and has never been translated. The most enthusiastic of Oriental scholars might well hesitate indeed before undertaking such an in- terminable and thankless task,—deterred not more by the labour and time it would require, than by the consideration of how few in the Western world would ever turn its pages, either for amusement or instruction. From all that we know both of Chinese and Japanese novels or romances by translations, dullness and prolixity are characteristic features. Either the native mind finds wit and amusement in dialogues and speeches of heroes and heroines where the translator finds none, or all such qualities evaporate in the process of translation. Perhaps, apart from the more child- like stage of mental development in the Eastern races, their appetite for adventure renders them easily satisfied, even as children are, with long drawn-out narratives of impossible events, regardless of consistency or plot. Even in the most advanced of Western nations, we should not forget that but a few centuries ago the most tedious of love-stories and tales of adventure or chivalry were popular works. Down to the age of Elizabeth, and the appearance of Spenser's Faerie Queen, a Portuguese romance, Amadis of Gaul, written by Vasco Lobimo in 1342, was only one, and per- haps the best, of a whole class of literature translated into various languages,—and what is more marvellous still, enlarged by such editors as De Montalvo, more than a century later. We cannot ourselves pretend to have ever attempted the perusal from beginning to end of any of the folio versions of this once celebrated and popular romance, but we have dipped sufficiently into the long sequence of books and chapters, to feel justified in placing the Chinese and Japanese romances in the same category. Neither are adapted to the taste of the present day, but they are interesting and instructive, nevertheless, as giving, in a more or less authentic and graphic form a portraiture of the manners, customs, and habits of thought of bygone generations,— of men and women under various conditions of race and clime, such as no true student of history will despise. In this faith, Southey was led, at the beginning of the present century, to undertake a new translation in an abbreviated. form of the Spanish version of Antadis of Gaul. The edition appeared in four duodecimo volumes in 1803, and many will agree with Southey that, although Cervantes, with his pungent satire embodied in the extravagances and absurdi- ties of the Knight of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, consigned the whole class of chivalric literature to oblivion, there may still be found in their pages what no history supplies. Amidst all the imaginary phantasmagoria of witches and fairies, enchanted castles, and charmed weapons, there is underlying the whole a true presentment, with in- numerable authentic details, of the life and speech of the time, and of the age in which they appeared, not to be found elsewhere.
It is needful to recall these facts, in taking up a volume such as Mr. Dickins has given us in his translation of a romance, the scene of which is laid in " Japan," in the fourteenth century. And it is the better entitled to attention, from the circumstance that between the period in which the
events of the story took place and that of the present generation, Japan, in its utter exclusiveness and isolation, appears to have retained the same customs, institutions, and manners with little change. We are, therefore, reading in the narrative of the " Loyal League " what, by a mere transmuta- tion of dates from A.D. 1338 to 1858, might equally well have taken place in the latter epoch, with the same surroundings, dramatis personae, and motives of action. In March,1760, for in- stance, a deed of daring and revenge as feudal and barbarous in all its features as those recounted of the Forty-seven Ronins was perpetrated in open day at the very gates of the Tycoon's palace, when the Regent's head was struck from his body in the midst of his armed retinue, and carried off in triumph by a band of clansmen, to avenge a feud with another Daimio, whose feudatories they were. All the details given in the British Minister's despatch of that date, and published in a Blue-book, are so similar, as to show conclusively how little change had taken place in the lapse of centuries.
The tragic story of the Forty-seven Ronins refers to a quarrel between two nobles at the Court of the Shogun, A.D. 1338, one of whom, having been provoked to draw his sword and wound his opponent within the precincts of the palace, was constrained to commit the hari-kari ; and his feudal retainers, to the number of forty-seven, vowed to avenge the insult which caused the death of their lord, and this, after long con- spiring together, they effected by storming the castle of his enemy, and carrying off his head to the tomb of their lord as an offering to his manes, after which they all immolated themselves by performing the hari-kari. The revolution brought about by foreign intercourse in 1868 has done much to change the current of popular opinion on this, as on many other subjects, and by the abolition of the feudal rela- tions which had existed for so many hundred years between the Daimios and their retainers, the very ground-work of such a tragic romance of loyalty and chivalry has passed away. But its chief claim to interest lies, no doubt, in the quaint pic- ture it furnishes of the national life of a mediaeval time, which ended so abruptly with the revolution of 1868, after surviving all the shocks of feudal wars, and the introduction of Christ- ianity two centuries ago by the Portuguese and Spanish Missions, and other agencies of change and progress through a long cycle of time. Japan stands alone in the history of the world in this respect. No other country has ever been the scene of a transformation so violent and so rapid, and yet so com- plete. From the most exclusive and isolated of Eastern races, the Japanese, in less than a decade, became the most eager and progressive, seeking Western knowledge in the capitals of every Western kingdom. Telegraphs and railroads in that short period spanned the islands. Costumes and customs alike disappeared before this all-devouring desire for Western culture and the power associated with it. They are the only people in the history of the world that ever bridged over in a single decade the vast chasm which separates the East from the West, and that has ever taken five centuries in its stride.
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