aken straight from Chinese books, as at a later
stage when Japanese authors loaded their periods with alien
vocables."

This Heian literature "reflects the pleasure-loving and effeminate,
but cultured and refined, character of the class of Japanese who
produced it. It has no serious masculine qualities and may be
described in one word as belles-lettres--poetry, fiction, diaries,
and essays of a desultory kind. The lower classes of the people had
no share in the literary activity of the time. Culture had not as yet
penetrated beyond a very narrow circle. Both writers and readers
belonged exclusively to the official caste. It is remarkable that a
very large and important part of the best literature which Japan has
produced was written by women. A good share of the Nara poetry is of
feminine authorship, and, in the Heian period, women took a still
more conspicuous part in maintaining the honour of the native
literature. The two greatest works which have come down from Heian
time are both by women.* This was no doubt partly due to the
absorption of the masculine intellect in Chinese studies. But there
was a still more effective cause. The position of women in ancient
Japan was very different from what it afterwards became when Chinese
ideals were in the ascendant. The Japanese of this early period did
not share the feeling common to most Eastern countries that women
should be kept in subjection and as far as possible in seclusion.
Though the morality which the Heian literature reveals is anything
but strait-laced, the language is uniformly refined and decent, in
this respect resembling the best literature of China."**

*The Genji Monogatari by Murasaki Shikibu, and the Makura Soshi by
Sei Shonagon.

**Japanese Literature, by W. G. Aston.

With the Heian epoch is connected the wide use of the phonetic script
known as kana, which may be described as a syllabary of forty-seven
symbols formed from abbreviated Chinese ideographs. There are two
varieties of the kana--the kata-kana and the hiragana* The former is
said to have been devised by Makibi, the latter by Kobo Daishi
(Kukai), but doubts have been cast on the accuracy of that record,
and nothing can be certainly affirmed except that both were known
before the close of the ninth century, though they do not seem to
have been largely used until the Heian epoch, and even then almost
entirely by women.

*Katakana means "side kana" because its symbols are fragments (sides)