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literary schools with established outlooks or more or less set programmes.
When, however, we are faced with a literature as remote from most Western readers as that of Japan, the historical approach can hardly be avoided. As Mr Angus Wilson has said, “To read the literature of a civilization or age entirely or almost unfamiliar emphasizes one’s unconscious dependence on historical background. To begin with, the unfamiliar is likely immediately to present a number of specious qualities—the ‘quaint’, the ‘charming’, the ‘horrific’—which are merely attempts to come to terms with a strange world on a surface level. Greater familiarity always destroys the immediate impressions.”
In few countries is the dividing line that marks the beginning of the ‘modern’ period as clear as in Japan. What historians term the Meiji Restoration was the result of inter-acting processes that had been continuing for a very long time. When these processes finally reached their culmination, the collapse of the old régime, which had given the country some two and a half centuries of peace and stability, occurred with remarkable speed. In 1867 the gradual stagnation and disintegration of the economic system, increasing pressure from foreign powers and the revolt of four of the great clans combined with numerous other factors to bring about the downfall of the centralized feudal government that had been in the hands of a succession of military rulers belonging to the Tokugawa family. Political power was handed over in 1867 to the Emperor Meiji and his advisers. In the years that followed, every effort was made to abolish feudalism, especially in its political and economic aspects, and to turn Japan into a centralized nation-state on the European model. The political structure was completely reorganized and a capitalist economy rapidly developed with the impetus of a belated industrial revolution. In the effort to become ‘modern’, countless old customs, habits and heritages were scrapped in a wave of cultural iconoclasm