受中國文學影響的日本文學之特質

Needless to say, Japanese literature was greatly influenced by the Chinese literature from the ancient to modern times. It is believed that the Manyōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves), the oldest anthology of Japanese poetry, was compiled in the middle of the eighth century. Already in the time when the Manyōshū was compiled, in China, the Book of Songs (Shih Ching) had been compiled for more than a thousand years and the era of the High Tang literature represented by Li Bo and Du Fu had long gone. At the time when the Japanese literature came into existence, in the neighboring country there was a grown-up “adult” like literature which had been developed maturely. Thus, it was natural for the Japanese literature to learn from its neighbor when it was still a “baby” and later when it became a “boy” and “young man”. Therefore, the history of Japanese literature has been always misunderstood as a history of imitation of Chinese literature. Yet, although there are a mount of the similarities of rhetoric and expressions which can be seen as of the imitation from Chinese literature, from those poems or essays, it is also very easy to realize unique ideas or values derived from Japanese indigenous faith. For instance, mirror was imported from China to Japan in Fifth Century, at the same time, the habits of treating mirror as a gift to be given to a person who will leave home for a journey also accepted by Japanese. Yet, striking different from the Chinese seeing mirror as a symbol of the eternal relationship, the mirror in Japanese context became to an object of warship which believed contains mysterious power, as well as the souls of a god or person. Moreover, in ancient Japanese faith, mirror was also used as a metaphor of young women to express their beautifulness. This kinds of the examples also could not be found in Chinese literature. Furthermore, for Japanese people and in Japanese language, there is a strong sense of incongruity of using money, either “thousands gold,” “ten thousands gold,” or “a million dollars”, to decide the value of beauty. Such a Japanese sensitivity could be considered as the background for the change of the expressions “costs thousands gold” and “worth ten thousands gold” to “cannot change it for thousands gold” and “more valuable than ten thousands gold”. At least, it could be considered as one of the reasons for the change. These tendencies and characteristics indicate a fact plainly that while Japanese imitating Chinese literature, they also maintaining and developing their own values and aesthetic consciousness actively. Therefore, by compare the expressions of "mirror" "time" and several other examples in Chinese and Japanese contexts, we can not only approach to the different ideas and values, these cases will be also lead to the understanding of the nature of the culture of the two countries.