as none of the prose in the least corresponds to our prose, and as it is not given in the ordinary speaking voice of the Japanese, but is always specially intoned, it seems to me much more suitable and harmonious to render the whole _utai_ in verse of various kinds.
Even this little book has been the task of years, despite its many imperfections. It was undertaken primarily because I delighted in the _No_, and the labour of bringing it through the Press was rendered lighter by the hope that it might give pleasure to the English reading public to see, even "through a glass darkly," something of the beauty of this unexplored literature. I have already described the effect these plays have on the Japanese and on me. That I have caught perhaps an echo of their spirit I am encouraged to think, because on the two occasions when one or other of these translations have been read to audiences it has been reported to me that several of those who heard them were in tears. That strikes the right note. For with all their literary richness and their descriptions of beautiful scenes and of heroic deeds, the ground note of the _No_ is human tragedy. Their tragedy is of the fundamental, elemental kind that depends upon the very nature of our being, that turns upon the terrible fact which the trivialities of the material world so readily delude us into forgetting--that we are fleeting as a drop of dew.
[1] _The Sumida River_ formed the subject of a paper read before the Royal Society of Literature. The translators acknowledge with gratitude the kindness of the Council in allowing them to republish the major part of the verse in the form in which it appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature in 1909.
[2] _Trans. Roy. Soc. Literature_, _London_, vol. 29, pp. 156-7.
[3] _Trans. Asiatic Soc. Japan_, vol. 35, pt. 4. 1908.
[4] _Primitive and Mediæval Japanese Texts_, p. 399.
[5] _History of Japanese Literature_, p. 207.
[6] The land and sea breezes, which blow regularly only in fine weather.
[7] _Trans. Asiatic Soc. Japan_, vol. 38, pt. 3, p. 174.
This piece is now commonly attributed to _Kiyotsugu_, and is supposed to have been produced at the end of the fourteenth century. Its exact date is not known, but Kiyotsugu was born in 1354 and died in 1406; yet it is most likely that he was an adapter and not the original author of the _utai_, parts of which were probably written long before his time. The play is still one of the most important of the _No_, and is indeed a test piece, as parts of the _Shite's_ chanting are exceptionally difficult. A foreigner cannot judge of this, but from my own point of view it is perhaps the finest of all the _No_.