ami no Okura, Governor of the province of Chikuzen more than
eleven hundred years ago. His fame as a poet is well deserved; for
not a little of his work will bear comparison with some of the finer
epigrams of the Greek Anthology. The following verses, upon the death
of his little son Furubi, will serve as an example:--

Wakaker['e]ba
Nichi-yuki shiraji:
Mahi wa s['e]mu,
Shitab['e] no tsukahi
Ohit['e]-tohoras['e].

--[_As he is so young, he cannot know the way.... To the
messenger of the Underworld I will give a bribe, and entreat
him, saying: "Do thou kindly take the little one upon thy back
along the road."_]

Eight hundred years earlier, the Greek poet Diodorus Zonas of Sardis
had written:--

"_Do thou, who rowest the boat of the dead in the water
of this reedy lake, for Hades, stretch out thy hand, dark
Charon, to the son of Kinyras, as he mounts the ladder by the
gang-way, and receive him. For his sandals will cause the lad
to slip, and he fears to set his feet naked on the sand of the
shore._"

But the charming epigram of Diodorus was inspired only by a myth,--for
the "son of Kinyras" was no other than Adonis,--whereas the verses of
Okura express for us the yearning of a father's heart.

* * * * *

--Though the legend of Tanabata was indeed borrowed from China, the
reader will find nothing Chinese in the following compositions.
They represent the old classic poetry at its purest, free from alien
influence; and they offer us many suggestions as to the condition of
Japanese life and thought twelve hundred years ago. Remembering that
they were written before any modern European literature had yet taken
form, one is startled to find how little the Japanese written language
has changed in the course of so many centuries. Allowing for a few
obsolete words, and sundry slight changes of pronunciation, the
ordinary Japanese reader to-day can enjoy these early productions of
his native muse with about as little difficulty as the English reader
finds in studying the poets of the Elizabethan era. Moreover, the
refinement and the simple charm of the _Many[=o]sh[=u]_ compositions
have never been surpassed, and seldom equaled, by later Japanese
poets.

As for the forty-odd _tanka_ which I have translated, their chief
attraction lies, I think, in what they reveal to us of the human
nature of their authors. Tanabata-tsum['e] still rep