[In this essay, Berry compares Chikamatsu's The Battles of Coxinga to John Dryden's The Conquest of Granada, one of the most important heroic dramas of the Restoration period in England. Despite some remarkable similarities in their performance contexts, Berry finds that the dramas differ in their treatment of man's place in the universe and in the nature of honor.]

A good takeoff point for studying drama West and East is Antonin Artaud's 1944 essay collection Le Théâtre et son double, translated into English in 1958 by Mary Caroline Richards.¹ A, if not the, major theoretician of twentieth-century drama, Artaud proposes a) that Western drama has, since the Greeks and Shakespeare, greatly deteriorated by reason of excessive literalism (in the broad sense) and naturalism, and its concomitant diminishing of extra-literary aspects of drama intended for the theater; b) that to recover our losses and restore drama to its integrity as total theater, with literary excellence as but one of several important components, we may profitably study the drama of the East, not only in its classical phase, but also in its living development; and c) that the purpose of resorting to study of Eastern drama is, not to imitate its matter or its technique (though these may at times prove exportable and advantageous), but to understand anew the nature and power of total theater, of the possibilities of space, symbolism, costume, cosmetic, sound, body language, stylization, spectacle, and mask.

The work of Artaud, which flowered in the plays of Jean Genêt, soon found support in the United States.² The University of California's Leonard Pronko, Artaud's disciple, in his 1967 Theater East and West, besides tracing the history of Balinese, Chinese, and Japanese performances in the West, analyzes related theories, techniques, specific works, and zeitgeists out of which they have emerged.³ This text encourages three major approaches to drama East and West. The plays are read

1) as theater pieces, involving diverse use of all the aspects of actual production;

2) as reflections of specific cultural milieux, imaging the unique insights, experiences, perspectives, characteristics, values, institutions, psychology, and history of a people-group;

3) as world classics, conveying experiences common to humans everywhere and at all times as they relate to one another and to the natural world of which they are so late and so minor a part.

This stimulating 3-part exercise invites many East-West drama and genre pairings. Japanese-related units, for example, might include among its plays:

Samuel Beckett's Endgame (or Krapp's Last Tape) and the Noh drama Hagoromo (or Sotoba Komachi);

John Dryden's The Conquest of Granada and Chikamatsu Monzaemon's The Battles of Coxinga;

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Chikamatsu's The Love Suicides of Sonezaki (or of Amijima);

Paul Claudel's The Satin Slipper and Chushingura;

Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta and a kabuki play.

By genre:

Noh Drama and Greek Tragedy (also Medieval Sacred Drama)
Bunraku and Commedia dell'Arte
Kabuki and Western Melodrama
The Theater of the Absurd and Japanese Drama (generally)
The Satyr Play and Kyōgen (also Medieval Interlude)

This study collates two plays in the epic tradition: Dryden's heroic The Conquest of Granada and Chikamatsu's jidaimono, The Battles of Coxinga.

One of the most fascinating parallels in national history is that between England and Japan, both island-realms adjacent to large continental masses, Europe and China. These points of likeness emerge:

1) the realized cultural identity beginning about 600 A.D., with Graeco-Roman civilization back of England and Chinese civilization back of Japan;

2) the augmented importance and importation at this time of a foreign religion: Christianity in England, Buddhism in Japan; the one an overlay on ancient Anglo-Saxon belief; the other on Shintoism, the Way of the Gods;

3) high literary distinction achieved in the eighth century with, on the one hand, the epic Beowulf, and, on the other, the Manyōshu (the nature of the two works perhaps hints at the respective psychological centers of the two cultures, the one action-oriented, the other aesthetic and affective);

4) the movement in the early second millennium, our so-called Middle Ages, toward a more humanized religion, a warmer, more earthy Christ, and, in Japan, a similar movement toward popular Buddhism and a tender O-Shaku-Sama accessible to the multitudes;

5) extraordinary political changes effected at this time by, on the one hand, the Norman Conquest in England, and, on the other, the Heike Wars in Japan;

6) the beginnings of serious drama in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in both countries, with the development of the sacred plays in England and of Noh in Japan;

7) the profound influence in sixteenth-century England of the recovery of Greek and Roman classics, and, in Japan, of the introduction of Neo-Confucianism—both with incalculable implications for the futures of the two countries;

8) the changes in basic postures toward reality in seventeenth-century England and Japan, each surrendering much of sacred traditional values in favor of more secular, materialist, and bourgeois views—the fading, thus, in England of faith in the Great Chain of Being, and, in Japan, the introduction of ukiyo views;

9) the salient roles in this seventeenth century in both countries of a strong Puritan element, occasioning, for example, the closing of London theaters in 1642 and of Kyoto theaters in 1656 (the one chiefly for moral purposes, the other for maintenance of public order);

10) the emergence of new dramatic forms in this same century, in Japan of jidaimono (history play) and of sewamono (domestic play), both presented in bunraku and in kabuki theaters; and in England of the heroic play and of Restoration Comedy;

11) the parallel flowering at this time of two notable cultural eras: the Restoration Period in England and, in Japan, the Genroku.

Historical and cultural parallels between these two countries suggest more specific collatings, in this case, the lives and careers of central dramatic personages: John Dryden in Restoration England, Chikamatsu Monzaemon in Genroku Japan.

Chikamatsu being the younger by twenty-odd years, the two writers enjoyed similarly long life spans, Dryden dying in 1700 at age sixty-nine, Chikamatsu in 1725 at seventy. Both were from upper class, disciplined families, Chikamatsu belonging to the samurai and Dryden to a genteel, partly Puritan clan. Both spent their youths in cultivated surroundings, Chikamatsu's family anthologizing its poetry, and Dryden's sending him through Cambridge. Both were intimately associated with elite circles, Chikamatsu serving as retainer in one or more noble houses, Dryden the familiar of the Stuart kings.⁴

About age thirty both men were recognized as accomplished dramatists and thereafter produced abundantly, Chikamatsu creating about 110 joruri and thirty kabuki plays; Dryden, in a wide variety of genres, producing even more. Both wrote for and procured the services of the leading actors of the day: Sakata Tojuro in the case of Chikamatsu; Thomas Betterton, Edward Kynaston, and Nell Gwynn in the case of Dryden. Both writers fell from the favor of the great and were forced to earn their livings by the pen.

Both writers, again, strikingly reflect their times in politics, religion, philosophy, and art. Thus Dryden's conservative, at times reactionary, posture in each of these fields accords with Restoration history and with the onset of England's Neo-Classical Age. Chikamatsu as notably reflects the Tokugawa era: its political isolation, except for strictly controlled contact with Dutch and Chinese at Nagasaki; its intensifying clash between old values buttressed by Neo-Confucianism and ukiyo madness for money and sensual delight; its social irony of debt-ridden, prestigious samurai and wealthy, socially despised merchants.

In reflecting their worlds each dramatist crystallized and perfected two dramatic forms: jidaimono and sewamono in the case of Chikamatsu and the heroic play and Restoration comedy in the case of Dryden.

It was not, however, the plays alone that brought enduring fame to the writers. Each propounded theories of drama destined to become loci classici for generations of theorists and critics. In numerous prefaces and especially in the 1668 Essay on Dramatic Poesy, Dryden reaffirms neo-classical principles—the unities, purity of genre, general rather than particular form, the whole rather than the part, imitation of the ancients, and poetic justice. Yet more: With English independence and greater liberality than most of his contemporaries, Dryden also argues for greater vigor, spontaneity, and diversity. Future critics he charmed by championing Chaucer and Shakespeare despite their mixing of genres, multiplication and individualization of characters and plots, ignoring of time-place unities, and choice of colloquial language. For Dryden the heroic play is an epic in miniature, featuring exalted actions and conflicts of love and honor resolved in a richly designed plot, with a hero—unlike the French paragons of virtue à la Corneille and La Calprenède—a hero flawed and realistic as life itself.⁵

Chikamatsu left no writings on dramatic or literary theory. Yet his discussions on the subject, recalled by Hozumi Ikan in Naniwa Miyage, constitute what Donald Keene calls “one of the most important examples of dramatic criticism in the literature.”⁶ The heart of Chikamatsu's discourse is his statement that “art is something that lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal. … Entertainment lies between the two. While bearing resemblance to the original, it should have stylization. This makes it art and delights men's minds.”⁷ Hozumi recalls, further, Chikamatsu's stress on a) the emotions (“feeling is the basis of writing”); b) decorum, propriety of character type; c) pathos, “entirely a matter of restraint … moving when the whole of a play is controlled by a dramatic situation and then the stronger and firmer the melody and words the sadder the impression”; and d) the avoidance of the explicit in favor of implied and therefore connotative, evocative detail.

Parallels in national development, personal careers, and dramatic theories of Dryden and Chikamatsu culminate in specific play pairings: here The Conquest of Granada and The Battles of Coxinga. Why epic forms should at this time have arisen in both countries invites speculation. Did the new, mundane, at times cynical societies yearn for heroes no longer found on field or throne, and seek them in literature?

Whatever the reason, both the Japanese jidaimono and the English heroic play proved enormously popular for a short time, then sank into quasi-oblivion. First produced in 1715, The Battles of Coxinga in one city alone drew almost a quarter of a million spectators during a record-breaking seventeen-month run.⁸ In its own way Dryden's play succeeded similarly.⁹

The most striking differences between Dryden's Conquest of Granada and Chikamatsu's Battles of Coxinga refer, of course, to their media: the elaborate theater of Restoration England and the puppet or bunraku theater of Genroku Japan—though Chikamatsu's play was, within two years, performed also as kabuki in a theater rivaling the English for grandeur and complexity.

Both English theater and bunraku, puppet theater, derived from a long development and offered assets and limitations not here discussed. Not only, however, did physical aspects of the productions differ; acting styles, too, diverged, and, finally,—and here the two productions resemble each other—their audiences were not today's sedate groups. Both places gained notoriety for intrusive, rowdy, raucous, at times inattentive and insulting crowds.

These aspects, however, are not here my focus. I deal, rather, with the stories, characters, themes as these are indicated in the texts—in the case of Chikamatsu known as the jōruri.

Jidaimono and heroic play alike choose their backgrounds for exotica as well as, occasionally, for veiling criticism of contemporary personages and institutions. Distant times and places can transport audiences from drab, enervating routine into milieux magic with clashing color, novel form and sound, grandeur and romance pervaded with chivalry to feed the hungriest fantasy. Incredibly valorous heroes single-handedly overthrow armies of usurping monarchs and, aided by impossibly lovely heroines, retrieve the kingdoms of weak but appealing kings.

Dryden here chooses late fifteenth-century Granada, in southern Andalusian Spain, redolent of the intellectual and artistic achievements of the gifted Moors in their rich and panoramic history. Here historic King Boabdil prepares for the final confrontation with Christian Spanish forces led by Ferdinand and Isabella. Here, faithful to history, the Zegri and Abencerrages families by internecine feuding occasion the downfall of their people. They go at times to the Alhambra, to the Albazyn, or to the summer palace of the Generalife with its “matchless gardens and hills honeycombed with gypsies.” Into the opening scene, filled with historic personages, strides the mysterious fictional hero Almanzor, his origins unknown or disputed until events reveal his noble birth from the Castillian army general.

Chikamatsu's swatch of history, belonging to about the same time, is set partly in Japan but chiefly in China, where Ming loyalists struggle to hold their own against Tartar, i.e. Mongolian, invaders and against internal dissension and betrayal. Like the historic Khan Essen, the Tartar king here has requested the hand of a Ming princess, and, rejected, has savaged the countryside. Amid the slaughter appears Coxinga, formerly known as Watonai, a figure drawn from an actual person, a pirate, son of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, who figured importantly in the Ming Wars.¹⁰

Of more dramaturgic importance than the historic backgrounds is the character of the heroes—Almanzor in Dryden's play, Coxinga in Chikamatsu's.

Both are epic heroes—men of extraordinary valor engaged in great deeds crucial to a nation's survival. Each embodies his country's values, ideals, and aspirations. Each is a flawed hero, though the rashness and impetuosity of Coxinga seem more perfunctory, more a conformity to type than a true moral deficiency, while Almanzor's failings arise more credibly from the insubordination of unschooled passions to reason.

In the end Almanzor overcomes his feelings and bows before reason and faith. In this he accedes to the primacy in the West of these two faculties and the pre-occupation with an objective morality inherited from the Greeks and fortified by Judaeo-Christianity. Almanzor's development, in fact, mirrors the movement away from Thomas Hobbes' natural man, motivated solely by self-interest, and back to the orthodox Christian view of the regenerated person, submitting not just to reason, but also to Revelation and to Sacramental grace as mediated by the Church.

To this intellectual and moral emphasis, however, Almanzor adds a fierce individualism and insistence on personal freedom which, again, traces both to Greek humanism and to Christian emphasis on the dignity and rights of the individual human. Three value systems are involved in the intricate reflections, product of an English mind treating a Spanish hero, whose training has been Moorish, a situation paralleled in Chikamatsu's play by considerations Chinese, Japanese, and Tartar. Dryden's models for Almanzor, the author tells us, are Homer's Achilles, Tasso's Rinaldo, and La Calprenède's Artaban—all prefigurative of the rebellious individualism of Dryden's protagonist.¹¹

Chikamatsu's hero embodies samurai ideals of seventeenth-century Japan: its devotion to a leader, absolute loyalty, valor, purity of life, ruthlessness to the enemy, gentleness to the friend. Beyond these ideals appear other, perhaps older ideals: Shintoist intimacy with nature, a lingering on its colors, forms, textures, sounds, sense of immanent divinity, features almost entirely missing from the English play. Here, too, are sentiments redolent of Buddhist melancholy and unquestioning Confucian commitment to filial piety in its widest sense, as covering all the basic human relations. A striking difference appears, too, in the fact that, by reason of his lower-class Japanese mother, Coxinga is ranked as a commoner, exemplifying seventeenth-century interest in the common man. Such a portrayal would have been impossible in the English heroic play; even in tragedy proper no bourgeois protagonist would appear in English drama until George Lillo's 1730 London Merchant: The Tragical History of George Barnwell.

Since history identifies Coxinga's father as tutor and counselor to the former Ming emperor, it is not entirely clear whence the son derives his extraordinary interest in military life and in the cultivation of martial strategies. These latter he observes in nature, achieving therefrom sudden enlightenment—as in the famous passage about the shrike and the clam; learning, too, from the examples of history, and, finally, glorying in the native ingenuity he calls Japanese.¹²

Life for Chikamatsu's hero is perceived less in terms of absolutes than in terms of yin and yang, principles of instability and order, constantly invading and transforming each other. The Tartars thus appear as fierce and unremitting savages piercing into the highly ordered, theoretically humane, and civilized Chinese world where harmony and humanity are the highest good, a situation reminiscent of Dionysian and Apollonian contests in the Western view, the agon between energy and form.

Again, in Japanese style, Coxinga and his friends exhibit unfailing piety towards the gods, notably the sea-gods of Sumiyoshi Shrine and the sun-goddess Amaterasu of the Shrine of Ise.

The propensity of the Japanese to explore, at times exploit, the emotions shows up in Coxinga's readiness to shed tears at the sight of unearned distress, to appreciate ecstatically the beauty of his surroundings, to react feelingly to place names, to invoke historic example, and to pride himself on Japanese gentleness as well as valor and ingenuity. In these ways Coxinga projects qualities often attributed to the Japanese, either directly or by way of Chinese borrowing.

The major difference in the two characterizations—Almanzor and Coxinga—appears in their conflicts, on the one hand of love and honor; on the other of giri and ninjō.

Of giri Donald Keene writes that it has “both Buddhist and Confucian antecedents, developing equally from awareness of the law of causality and the concern for moral justice. The word may be translated as duty or moral obligation, but its implications extend far beyond the usual sphere of the English words. To control the passions, ninjō, one had to exercise giri; when the passions were too strong to be controlled, there was likely to be tragedy, as Chikamatsu demonstrated.”¹³

Elsewhere Keene writes: “The meanings of giri varied considerably according to the circumstances. It might mean obligation to members of one's own family, to fellow townsmen, to one's class, or to society at large, or refer to something closer to the abstract concept of honor. Ninjō represented the human sentiments balancing the austere ideals of giri.”¹⁴

Richard Beardsley, drawing somewhat on Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, finds the implications of giri “similar to those of on (beneficence) and ongaeshi (obligation thereby incurred) … lucid enough if considered in the matrix of collectivity-oriented behavior [as in Tokugawa dramas and stories wherein it] pertains to what one must do or avoid doing because of status and group membership. [Ninjō] cannot be condoned if they [the feelings] go against the collective solidarity or welfare.”¹⁵

A third scholar, Edward Putzar, writes: “Giri is the whole set of ethics which externally patterns the lives of men in the feudal society. However, in the works of Chikamatsu, giri, although still a pattern of ethics, is not external to the individual but a natural categorical imperative, something that might be called the public or social aspect of ninjō. Tragic situations in the plays show people who are bewildered by the collision of public and private affections, by the social ethic termed giri.”¹⁶

Despite Putzar's intriguing characterization of giri as the public or social phase of ninjō, the play, nevertheless, at least in Keene's translation, presents duty primarily as an external, unwritten law to which the individual must conform. Moreover, conformity creates quite as intense tragedy as non-conformity; it becomes just a question of who undergoes the suffering. Hence the melancholy, not to say lacrimae rerum, pervading the human condition as depicted in Japanese literature.

The climactic dilemma of The Battles of Coxinga occurs in the final act in which the hero finds himself confronted by the Tartar king, assisted by the traitor Ri Toten, who displays Coxinga's father, Ikkan, bound to the face of a shield. “Coxinga,” Ri calls, “shall we cut his belly open in the Japanese manner? Or will you and your father agree to return to Japan immediately? Make your answer one way or the other.”

In high spirits until that moment, Coxinga feels his strength draining away, his head sinks, his heart quails even as his father shouts to him to continue the fight for the Ming emperor's throne. Impelled by his father's words, Coxinga renews the battle, only to shrink again as Ri Toten's sword presses against Ikkan's throat.

From this extremity father and son are both saved by their allies Kanki and Go Senkei, the minister of war. Ironically Go Senkei had, earlier in the play, been called upon to save the unborn royal heir by slitting open the belly of the dead queen, taking the live infant, and substituting in the womb his own infant—which, to deceive the enemy, he has killed. This is an extreme giri, matched by equally heroic and preposterous acts of several women in the play, who take their own lives to ease the difficulty of husbands who must fear public disapproval of the influence of wives and mothers.

The Conquest of Granada shows love and honor conflicts with a different cast. Here the term “love” roughly equates to ninjō, though with a narrower sense. “Honor,” however, evinces an ambiguity and contradictoriness even yet unresolved. For the term carries a double meaning: a) public recognition of integrity, valor, or, in a woman, of chastity; and b) valor, integrity, chastity itself, regardless of recognition.

No piece of literature with which I am familiar so clearly emphasizes the difference as The Conquest of Granada. Almanzor's norm for honor is clearly not his reputation or fame or the opinion of king, court, or anybody else, but solely his own conscience which, unfortunately for him, vacillates between judgments motivated by reason and those passion prompted.

In the opening scene of the play, proffered recognition under certain strainful conditions, Almanzor replies:

No man has more contempt than I of breath,
But whence hast thou the right to give me death?
Obeyed as sovereign by thy subjects be,
But know that I alone am king of me.
I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
You were inconstant, you who did the wrong;
To do me justice does to me belong …
Honor is what myself, and friends, I owe
And none can love it who forsake a foe.
My laws are made but only for my sake;
No king against himself a law can make.
If thou pretend'st to be a prince like me,
Blame not an act which should thy pattern be.
I saw the oppress't and thought it did belong
To a king's office to redress the wrong;
I brought that succor which thou oughtst to bring,
And so, in nature, am thy subjects' king.
Thou canst no title to my duty bring,
I'm not thy subject and my soul's thy king.(17)

Thus throughout the play Almanzor brings home the point that honor to him is the approval, indeed the propunding of his own soul and intelligence; codes of others he scorns. The attitude belongs also to other Western heroes—Achilles, Roland, El Cid.

Queen Almahide's honor, too, is less her fame for chastity than the virtue itself. Pointedly throughout the play the distinction is made, notably when the evil Lyndaraxa smears the heroine's name and fame. In a final, exemplary irony Almanzor, wrongly convinced of Almahide's guilt, yet is impelled by his conscience to defend her innocence before her enemies.

In short, a striking difference in the heroes of the plays is the greater sense of individual and independent selfhood exhibited by Almanzor as against Coxinga's identification and realization of himself chiefly in terms of his relation with others: kin, kings, benefactors of various kinds. Even more striking is this observation relative to women personae. The wives of Ikkan, Kanki, and Coxinga all define themselves exclusively in terms of their husbands; all perform a giri (much like the Hindu Act of Truth), in this case a suicide, to forestall criticism of their husbands as susceptible to female machinations.

Not even the virtuous Almahide, rejecting adultery despite her love for Almanzor, thinks of herself as merely a wife, a role-playing person. Her cowardly king-husband she rejects in favor of convent life, where she may keep intact her individual soul. Much more does Lyndaraxa function as an individual, as an independent person taking charge of her own life without regard to reputation, in the tradition of Clytemnestra, Antigone, and Medea.

This greater sense in the West of the individual self apart from social roles has been noted in another context by Masao Miyoshi of the University of California, Berkeley. In Accomplices of Silence, a study of contemporary Japanese novelists, he writes:

The Japanese attitude toward personality … is basically profoundly negative. The self, that cornerstone of European humanism … is nowhere felt as an everyday experience. The Japanese Bildungsroman is not so much about the self's discovery of the self as the self's discipline of itself into a production-model hierarchically classified and blue-printed in detail by society at large.

(xi)

Characters in Japanese novels are almost always types and not living individuals.

(xi)

The underdevelopment of character in Japanese fiction … [is] rooted in the Japanese hostility toward personality.

(178)¹⁸

In summary the Japanese play shows a remarkably greater resonance with nature, with aesthetic form in many manifestations, and with affective life. In view of the hubristic insistence of the West (with some bright exceptions) on humans as the center and even the raison d'être of the universe of which they are so late, so minor, and so dispensable a part, the Japanese play shines forth as a truer perception of how things are, as against the almost total ignoring of nature in the English play.¹⁹

On the other hand, the English drama shows a greater grasp on the mystery of the human person, on the intellectual component of human activity, and on a morality deriving, not from an implicit social contract, but from a universal objective law discoverable in either the universe (as the Greeks derived it) or, for some, from Divine Revelation (as Judaeo-Christian teaching declares).

At times Japanese and English cultures have come nearer to each other in spirit than at others. Eighteenth-century drama, for example, under the aegis of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and others, turned, in a way reminiscent of the Japanese, to the emotions as the source of the moral sense and to sentiment as the proper guide for reason—reversing the tradition of two thousand years. The result as seen in the melodramas and weeping comedies was a failure so dismal that for almost two hundred years after Dryden, English drama produced little of enduring value. For our genius lies in a different vein from that of Japan. We cannot duplicate each other; we need to complement.

Finally, the student of these two plays ought to observe the common humanity that flows through each and in fresh language and imagery traces the story of people everywhere as they pursue glory in the face of danger, build and break the bonds of friendship and of love, endure poverty, disease, pain, and treachery, and somehow perceive that through it all—as Buddha and Confucius and David and Christ believed and taught—that humanity is the affection that binds humans one to another, and that, severed, it rises again somehow, heals itself, and starts anew in the cycle of human interdependency.

Notes

1. New York: Grove Press, 1958. See also Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre et son double (Paris: Gallimard Publications, 1964 repr.).

2. Kelly Morris, ed., Genêt/Ionesco: The Theatre of the Double, A Critical Anthology (New York: Bantam Books, 1969).

3. Leonard Cabell Pronko, Theater East and West: Perspectives Toward a Total Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).

4. Donald Keene, “Chikamatsu's Career and the Place in It of The Battles of Coxinga,” The Battles of Coxinga (Cambridge: The University Press, 1951, repr. 1971), pp. 31-43. Mori Shū, Chikamatsu Monzaemon (Tokyo: San'ichi Shobo, 1971). William Myers, Dryden (London: Hutchinson Company, 1973).

5. Thomas H. Fujimura, “The Appeal of Dryden's Heroic Plays,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 75 (1960), pp. 37-45. George Saintsbury, ed., John Dryden: Three Plays (New York: Hill and Wang Publishers, 1957), pp. 11-13.

6. Anthology of Japanese Literature (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 65.

7. Sources of Japanese Tradition, ed. William Theodore de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 434-40.

8. Keene, Japanese Literature (New York: Grove Press, 1955), p. 65.

9. Kenneth Young; Dryden: A Critical Biography (London: Sylvan Press, 1954), p. 76.

10. Keene, “A Literary History of Coxinga's Life,” The Battles of Coxinga, p. 45.

11. Preface to The Conquest of Granada in Saintsbury, p. 11.

12. “The clam, secure in the hardness of its shells, did not realize that a shrike would attack. The shrike, proud of its sharp beak, did not foresee that the clam would shut its mouth. The shells will not let go, and the shrike, straining all its energies to free itself, has no time to look behind. Nothing could be simpler than for me to seize both of them in one swoop. … This is the secret of military tactics: to provoke a quarrel between two adversaries, and then catch both of them when they least expect it.” Four Major Plays of Chikamatsu, ed. and tr., Donald Keene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 77.

13. “The Vocabulary of Japanese Aesthetics III,” Sources of Japanese Tradition, p. 436.

14. Keene, Four Major Plays, p. 33. Also see Shūzui Kenji, Giri, 1941. (repr. Tokyo Kasama Shoin, 1976-79).

15. Twelve Doors to Japan (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1965), pp. 94-96.

16. Edward Putzar, Japanese Literature: A Historical Outline (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1973), p. 131.

17. Saintsbury, passim.

18. Masao Myoshi, Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).

19. Admiring and perhaps envying these feelings and ideals, we remain aware that in actual life the Japanese, too, despite their portrayals of exquisite natural beauty, sin against the environment, as we in the West, with all our devotion to the mystery of the person and the we-are-our-brother's-keeper standards, looked on and permitted the Holocaust in Christian Europe.