Description
The difficulties of reading Japanese literature can hardly be exaggerated; even a specialist in one period is likely to have trouble deciphering a work from another period or genre. Japanese style has always favoured ambiguity, and the particles of speech necessary for easy comprehension of a statement are often omitted as unnecessary or as fussily precise. Sometimes the only clue to the subject or object of a sentence is the level of politeness in which the words are couched; for example, the verb mesu (meaning “to eat,” “to wear,” “to ride in a carriage,” etc.) designates merely an action performed by a person of quality. In many cases, ready comprehension of a simple sentence depends on a familiarity with the background of a particular period of history. The verb miru, “to see,” had overtones of “to have an affair with” or even “to marry” during the Heian period in the 10th and 11th centuries, when men were generally able to see women only after they had become intimate. The long period of Japanese isolation in the 17th and 18th centuries also tended to make the literature provincial, or intelligible only to persons sharing a common background; the phrase “some smoke rose noisily” (kemuri tachisawagite), for example, was all readers of the late 17th century needed to realize that an author was referring to the Great Fire of 1682 that ravaged the shogunal capital of Edo (the modern city of Tokyo).
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