ng than the glint of withered leaf wind-blown, the thing
called life."*

*See Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, article "Japan."

The sketchy nature of Japanese poetry, especially in this five-line
stanza, may be illustrated further by two poems quoted by Prof. B. H.
Chamberlain in his "Things Japanese" (pp. 375-376),

The first:

Hototogisu
Nakitsuru kata wo
Nagamureba--
Tada ari-ake no
Tsuki zo nokoreru

is literally translated by Professor Chamberlain as follows:

"When I gaze towards the place where the cuckoo has been singing,
nought remains but the moon in the early dawn."

And the conventional and pictorial character of the literary form is
illustrated again in the lines:

Shira-kumo ni
Hane uchi-kawashi
Tobu kari no
Kazu sae miyuru
Aki no yo no tsuki!

which the same eminent scholar translates: "The moon on an autumn
night making visible the very number of the wild-geese that fly past
with wings intercrossed in the white clouds." It is to be noted that
this last is, to Occidental notions, a mere poetic phrase and not a
unit.

Of course, the very exigencies of the case make the three-line stanza
(or hokku), containing only 17 syllables, even more sketchy--hardly
more indeed than a tour de force composed of a limited number of
brush strokes! The Western critic, with his totally different
literary conventions, has difficulty in bringing himself to regard
Japanese verse as a literary form or in thinking of it otherwise than
as an exercise in ingenuity, an Oriental puzzle; and this notion is
heightened by the prevalence of the couplet-composing contests, which
did much to heighten the artificiality of the genre.

RELATIONS BETWEEN THE SEXES

There was probably no more shocking sexual vice or irregularity in
the Nara epoch than there had been before nor than there was
afterwards. The only evidence adduced to prove that there was
anything of the sort is the fact that laws were promulgated looking
to the restraint of illicit intercourse. These laws seem to have
accomplished little or nothing and the existence of the laws argues
rather a growing sense of the seriousness of the evil than any sudden
increase in the prevalence of the evil itself. There can be no
question, however, of the wide diffusion of concubinage in this
period. Not morals nor repute nor public opinion, but the wealth and
wishes of each man limited him in his amours of this sort. The
essential o