Sunrise Stories: A Glance at the Literature of Japan (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Sunrise Stories: A Glance at the Literature of Japan

What is best in the literature of Japan does not bear translation. It is a literature of form without much substance, and, when pressed into the mould of a foreign language, its peculiar beauties are apt to disappear like the opal tints from a squeezed jelly fish. Handled as carefully as may be, the results are much more likely to excite curiosity than to gratify it, and to send the reader back to those ballads in blue porcelain, those sonnets in chased silver, those poems in old gold lacquer that first drew the attention of westerners to the Land of the Sunrise. Art, whose words are things, whose symbols types, whose gram mar beauty, is the universal language that needs no interpreter.

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