ANCIENT LITERATURE

Origins
The first writing of literature in Japanese was occasioned by influence from China. The Japanese
were still comparatively primitive and without writing when, in the first four centuries ce,
knowledge of Chinese civilization gradually reached them. They rapidly assimilated much of this
civilization, and the Japanese scribes adopted Chinese characters as a system of writing, although
an alphabet (if one had been available to them) would have been infinitely better suited to the
Japanese language. The characters, first devised to represent Chinese monosyllables, could be
used only with great ingenuity to represent the agglutinative forms of the Japanese language. The
ultimate results were chaotic, giving rise to one of the most complicated systems of writing ever
invented. The use of Chinese characters enormously influenced modes of expression and led to
an association between literary composition and calligraphy lasting many centuries.

Early writings
The earliest Japanese texts were written in Chinese because no system of transcribing the sounds
and grammatical forms of Japanese had been invented. The oldest known inscription, on a sword
that dates from about 440 ce, already showed some modification of normal Chinese usage in
order to transcribe Japanese names and expressions. The most accurate way of writing Japanese
words was by using Chinese characters not for their meanings but for their phonetic values,
giving each character a pronunciation approximating that used by the Chinese themselves. In the
oldest extant works, the Kojiki (712; The Kojiki: Records of Ancient Matters) and Nihon shoki, or
Nihon-gi (720; Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697),

Kojiki, (Japanese: “Records of Ancient Matters”), together with the Nihon shoki (q.v.), the first
written record in Japan, part of which is considered a sacred text of the Shintō religion. The
Kojiki text was compiled from oral tradition in 712.The Kojiki is an important source book for
ceremonies, customs, divination, and magical practices of ancient Japan. It includes myths,
legends, and historical accounts of the imperial court from the earliest days of its creation up to
the reign of Empress Suiko (628).

Nihon shoki, also called Nihon-gi, (Japanese: “Chronicles of Japan”), text that, together with the
Kojiki (q.v.), comprises the oldest official history of Japan, covering the period from its mythical
origins to ad 697.

The Nihon shoki, written in Chinese, reflects the influence of Chinese civilization on Japan. It
was compiled in 720 by order of the imperial court to give the newly Sinicized court a history
that could be compared with the annals of the Chinese. It was the first of six officially compiled
chronicles that were continued to 887 by imperial command.

The Nihon shoki consists of 30 chapters. The first part deals with many myths and legends of
ancient Japan and is an important source for Shintō thought. The later chapters, for the period
from about the 5th century on, are historically more accurate and contain records of several of
the politically powerful clans as well as of the imperial family. Among the events described are
the introduction of Buddhism and the Taika reforms of the 7th century.

- more than 120 songs, some dating back to perhaps the 5th century ce, are given in phonetic
transcription, doubtless because the Japanese attached great importance to the sounds
themselves. In these two works, both officially commissioned “histories” of Japan, many
sections were written entirely in Chinese; but parts of the Kojiki were composed in a complicated
mixture of languages that made use of the Chinese characters sometimes for their meaning and
sometimes for their sound.

Origin of the tanka in the Kojiki

The Kojiki, though revered as the most ancient document concerning the myths and history of the
Japanese people, was not included in collections of literature until well into the 20th century. The
myths in the Kojiki are occasionally beguiling (see Japanese mythology), but the only truly
literary parts of the work are the songs. The early songs lack a fixed metrical form; the lines,
consisting of an indeterminate number of syllables, were strung out to irregular lengths, showing
no conception of poetic form. Some songs, however, seem to have been reworked—perhaps
when the manuscript was transcribed in the 8th century—into what became the classic Japanese
verse form, the tanka (short poem), consisting of five lines of five, seven, five, seven, and seven
syllables. Various poetic devices employed in these songs, such as the makura kotoba (“pillow
word”), a kind of fixed epithet, remained a feature of later poetry.

Makurakotoba (枕詞) — literally "pillow words" in English — are figures of speech used in
Japanese waka poetry in which epithets are used in association with certain words.

A magnificent anthology of poetry, the Man’yōshū (compiled after 759; Ten Thousand Leaves), is the
single great literary monument of the Nara period (710–784), although it includes poetry written in the
preceding century, if not earlier. Most of the 4,500 or so poems are tanka, but the masterpieces of the
Man’yōshū are the 260 chōka (“long poems”), ranging up to 150 lines in length and cast in the form of
alternating lines in five and seven syllables followed by a concluding line in seven syllables. The
amplitude of the chōka permitted the poets to treat themes impossible within the compass of the tanka
—whether the death of a wife or child, the glory of the imperial family, the discovery of a gold mine in a
remote province, or the hardships of military service.

CLASSICAL LITERATURE: (Heian Period) (794–1185)

- The foundation of the city of Heian-kyō (later known as Kyōto) as the capital of Japan marked the
beginning of a period of great literary brilliance. The earliest writings of the period, however, were
almost all in Chinese because of the continued desire to emulate the culture of the continent.

- Heian Period Japan is known as the Golden Age of Japanese history because of the major import and
further development of Chinese ideas in art, architecture, literature, and ritual that occurred at this
time and led to a new and ultimately unique Japanese culture.
- In the resplendent aristocratic culture that thrived early in the eleventh century, a time when the use
of the hiragana alphabet derived from Chinese characters had become widespread, court ladies played
the central role in developing literature.

One of them, Murasaki Shikibu wrote the 54-chapter novel Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji) [in
ealy 11 century, ca 1008 ?], while another, Sei Shonagon, wrote Makura no soshi (The Pillow
Book), a diverse collection of jottings and essays [around 996 ].

MURASAKI SHIKIBI

- TALE of GENJI - The Tale of Genji is a classic work of Japanese literature written in the early 11th
century by the noblewoman and lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu. The original manuscript, created
around the peak of the Heian period, no longer exists

SHEI SHoNaGoN

- The Pillow Book (枕草子, Makura no Sōshi) is a book of observations and musings recorded
by Sei Shōnagon during her time as court lady to Empress Consort Teishi during the 990s and
early 1000s in Heian Japan. The book was completed in the year 1002.

The work is a collection of essays, anecdotes, poems, and descriptive passages that have little
connection to one another except for the fact that they are ideas and whims of Shōnagon's
spurred by moments in her daily life

Ki no Tsurayuki

- was a Japanese author, poet and courtier of the Heian period. He is best known as the principal
compiler of the Kokin Wakashū, also writing its Japanese Preface, and as a possible author of the
Tosa Diary, although this was published anonymously. Tsurayuki was a son of Ki no Mochiyuki

- Ki Tsurayuki is celebrated also for his Tosa nikki (936; The Tosa Diary), the account of his homeward
journey to Kyōto from the province of Tosa, where he had served as governor. Tsurayuki wrote this diary
in Japanese, though men at the time normally kept their diaries in Chinese; that may explain why he
pretended that a woman in the governor’s entourage was its author.

- Others also wrote diaries and stories, and their psychological portrayals remain fresh and vivid to
present-day readers.

- The Heian court society passed its prime by the middle of the 11th century, but it did not collapse for
another 100 years. Long after its political power had been usurped by military men, the court retained
its prestige as the fountainhead of culture. But in the 12th century, literary works belonging to a quite
different tradition began to appear.

The appearance of the Konjaku monogatari (Tales of a Time That Is Now Past) around 1120 added a
new dimension to literature. This collection of more than 1,000 Buddhist and secular tales from India,
China, and Japan is particularly notable for its rich descriptions of the lives of the nobility and common
people in Japan at that time.

Medieval literature: Kamakura, Muromachi,

and Azuchi-Momoyama periods (1192–1600)
KAMAKURA PERIOD

- The warfare of the 12th century brought to undisputed power military men (samurai) whose new
regime was based on martial discipline. Though the samurai expressed respect for the old culture, some
of them even studying tanka composition with the Kyōto masters, the capital of the country moved to
Kamakura. The lowered position of women under this feudalistic government perhaps explains the
noticeable diminution in the importance of writings by court ladies; indeed, there was hardly a woman
writer of distinction between the 13th and 19th centuries. The court poets, however, remained prolific:
15 imperially sponsored anthologies were completed between 1188 and 1439, and most of the tanka
followed the stereotypes established in earlier literary periods.