Pilgrimages : Aspects of Japanese Literature and Culture

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. ## Shelley, Ozymandias AMERICANS, perhaps better than any others, ought to have a sympathy, and so perhaps an understanding, of the profound attraction that one culture can feel for another. American culture has been molded by the dialectic of our continuing relationship with the development of European civilization, and much of our developing and changing self-image has come from our own sense of a response to the Other, a model to be emulated or discarded but never altogether ignored. We are less aware, perhaps, of the profound relationship that Japanese artists and intellectuals have felt with France. The fascination that the French felt for Japan, particularly for her arts, in the latter part of the nineteenth century has been well documented, but relatively little has been written about the continuing excitement that the French intellectual, social, and artistic model has supplied for Japan since roughly the same period. A list of the important writers and intellectuals from the interwar period will show at once how powerful these affinities were to become: Yokomitsu Riichi the novelist, Nishiwaki Junzaburo the poet, Saeki Yuzo and half a dozen other important artists, Kuki Shuzo the philosopher, and many others spent much of