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(which includes the charming and original fragment ‘The Lady Who Loved Insects’) is a collection of ten stories with well-defined plots and considerable realism. In the eleventh century Tales of Past and Present, consisting of over 1,000 stories taken from Indian, Chinese and Japanese history and folklore, represents a considerable advance in construction over the lyrical tales of the early Heian Period. Otogi-Zōshi is the generic term for collections of popular stories, most simply fairy-tales, that were in circulation during the Muromachi Period (c. 1300–1600).

In a more recent period the numerous collections of stories by Ihara Saikaku (1642–93) deal in a more or less realistic way with the lives of contemporary men and women, mostly members of the seventeenth century townsman class. Tales of the Moonlight and the Pain (1776), a famous collection of nine ghost stories by Ueda Akinari, belongs to a tradition of supernatural tales that goes back to the eighth century. We should also take note of a common form that is to be found in much of Saikaku’s work and elsewhere. This consists of a collection of stories having a common thread or theme; a typical example is Saikaku’s ‘Reckonings that Carry Men through The World’ (Seken Munesanyō, 1693), which is a volume of twenty independent stories all dealing with the torments that different groups of characters experience on the last day of the year when all debts become due for payment.

Despite this ancient and diverse tradition, the modern Japanese story form in this century owed remarkably little to the various pre-Meiji collections of which examples have been given above. It is true that a number of the Meiji Period writers (including Higuchi Ichiyō, Ozaki Kōyō, Kōda Rohan and Tayama Katai) recognized in Saikaku’s stories the same vigorous realism that they had found in modern French literature. Saikaku’s realism, however, served to confirm such writers in their already established literary approach, rather than to inspire them. When it actually came to writing stories, the main influences derived, not from Saikaku or the other