the Tanabata festival used to be a merry holiday for the young people of all classes—a holiday beginning with lantern displays before sunrise, and lasting well into the following night. Boys and girls on that day were dressed in their best, and paid visits of ceremony to friends and neighbors.
—The moon of the seventh month used to be called Tanabata-tsuki, or "The Moon of Tanabata." And it was also called Fumi-tsuki, or "The Literary Moon," because during the seventh month poems were everywhere composed in praise of the Celestial Lovers.
I think that my readers ought to be interested in the following selection of ancient Japanese poems, treating of the Tanabata legend. All are from the Manyōshū. The Manyōshū, or "Gathering of a Myriad Leaves," is a vast collection of poems composed before the middle of the eighth century. It was compiled by Imperial order, and completed early in the ninth century. The number of the poems which it contains is upwards of four thousand; some being "long poems" (naga-uta), but the great majority tanka, or compositions limited to thirty-one syllables; and the authors were courtiers or high officials. The first eleven tanka hereafter translated were composed by Yamagami 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:—
Wakakeréba
Nichi-yuki shiraji:
Mahi wa sému,
Shitabé no tsukahi
Ohité-tohorasé.
—[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 Manyōshū 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-tsumé still represents for us the Japanese wife, worshipfully loving;—Hikoboshi appears to us with none of the luminosity of the god, but as the young Japanese husband of the sixth or seventh century, before Chinese ethical convention had begun to exercise its restraint upon life and literature. Also these poems interest us by their expression of the early feeling for natural beauty. In them we find the scenery and the seasons of Japan transported to the Blue Plain of High Heaven;—the Celestial Stream with its rapids and shallows, its sudden risings and clamourings within its stony bed, and its water-grasses bending in the autumn wind, might well be the Kamogawa;—and the mists that haunt its shores are the very mists of Arashiyama. The boat of Hikoboshi, impelled by a single oar working upon a wooden peg, is not yet obsolete; and at many a country ferry you may still see the hiki-funé in which Tanabata-tsumé prayed her husband to cross in a night of storm—a flat broad barge pulled over the river by cables. And maids and wives still sit at their doors in country villages, on pleasant autumn days, to weave as Tanabata-tsumé wove for the sake of her lord and lover.
—It will be observed that, in most of these verses, it is not the wife who dutifully crosses the Celestial River to meet her husband, but the husband who rows over the stream to meet the wife; and there is no reference to the Bridge of Birds. … As for my renderings, those readers who know by experience the difficulty of translating Japanese verse will be the most indulgent, I fancy. The Romaji system of spelling has been followed (except in one or two cases where I thought it better to indicate the ancient syllabication after the method adopted by Aston); and words or phrases necessarily supplied have been inclosed in parentheses.
Amanogawa
Ai-muki tachité,
Waga koïshi
Kimi kimasu nari
Himo-toki makéna!
[He is coming, my long-desired lord, whom I have been waiting to meet here, on the banks of the River of Heaven. … The moment of loosening my girdle is nigh!7]
Hisakata no8
Ama no kawasé ni,
Funé ukété,
Koyoï ka kimi ga
Agari kimasan?
[Over the Rapids of the Everlasting Heaven, floating in his boat, my lord will doubtless deign to come to me this very night.]
Kazé kumo wa
Futatsu no kishi ni
Kayoëdomo,
Waga toho-tsuma no
Koto zo kayowanu!
[Though winds and clouds to either bank may freely come or go, between myself and my faraway spouse no message whatever may pass.]
Tsubuté9 ni mo
Nagé koshitsu-béki,
Amanogawa
Hédatéréba ka mo,
Amata subé-naki!
[To the opposite bank one might easily fling a pebble; yet, being separated from him by the River of Heaven, alas! to hope for a meeting (except in autumn) is utterly useless.]
Aki-kazé no
Fukinishi hi yori
"Itsushika" to—;
Waga machi koîshi
Kimi zo kimaséru.
[From the day that the autumn wind began to blow (I kept saying to myself), "Ah! when shall we meet?"—but now my beloved, for whom
