A school of Japanese classical literature, which originated in heian period (65438+early 20th century). It was formed on the basis of Japanese folk comments, born out of fairy tales and folklore, and was formally influenced by the legendary literature of China Six Dynasties and Sui and Tang Dynasties.
The Story of Takeshi, written in 65438+ at the beginning of the 20th century, is the earliest story-telling literature in Japan. The story is that a bamboo cutter got a beautiful little girl in the heart of bamboo. Three months later, she grew up and was named "Zhu Xi and Ying Ji". Five aristocratic children proposed to her, and she promised to marry someone who could find her favorite treasure, but all these suitors failed. At this time, the emperor tried to marry her by virtue of his power, but it was also rejected. In the confusion of these ordinary people, he suddenly ascended to heaven in Ying Ji.
The Story of Yi Shi is a story-telling literary work about the same time as The Story of Bamboo. It consists of 125 short stories, each of which is an independent story, but the whole story is run through by a character, Yuan Yeping, who wrote various love stories that Yuan Yeping experienced at court and abroad.
Story literature can be divided into two categories at the beginning. One is a fictional story, which is a complete story consciously fabricated and polished by folk stories, with legendary colors, represented by bamboo stories and falling stories. The other is the story of songs, represented by Yi Shi's Story and Yamato's Story, with harmony as the main theme, which makes harmony and prose completely integrated and become an organic part of the whole novel. These two kinds of stories are born out of fairy tales and folklore, and they are a literary form that develops into independent stories. Their shortcoming is the lack of internal unity and artistic perfection.
As the pinnacle of story literature, Tale of Genji (produced at the beginning of 1 1 century) and Tale of Treasure (produced at the end of 1 century) are two different modes. Tale of Genji combines fictional stories with Song stories for the first time, inherits the realistic tradition of stories in creative methods, and abandons the way that stories only emphasize historical facts and lack psychological description, which promotes the development of story literature and has a great influence on the development of Japanese prose literature. The story structure of Yujinbao Tale follows the story of Wude Tale, except that the suitors are both crown princes and court dignitaries, describing the marriage contradiction in aristocratic society with their scenes of fighting for power and profit, and criticizing the extravagant and dissolute life of court nobles. It is characterized by bold contact with reality, starting from its own literary heritage and tradition, and at the same time innovating and developing. But it
Different from Tale of Genji, it is a work with both ideological and artistic qualities.
After the Tale of Genji, story literature gradually declined and declined. Some historical stories, such as glorious stories, big mirrors and today's mirrors, exposed and criticized the corruption of nobles. Ancient and modern stories are mostly Buddhist stories, and secular stories are also well written.
In the Middle Ages, the samurai class rose in Japanese feudal society, and war stories, represented by the story of the Ping family, appeared in literature. It is essentially different from ancient stories in content and form, mainly describing the decline of medieval society and the changes brought about by feudal revolution. They use a new style, which blends Chinese, Buddhism and common sayings. This style has been tried in Story of the Past and Present, but it didn't mature until Story of the Pingjia Family became a narrative poem. War literature is a major change in the history of literature. Narrative literature and other kinds of literature all developed from war literature. The story of war stories, especially the peaceful family, made Japanese classical literature develop into a new class.
The origin of pseudonyms in Japanese
In ancient times, the Japanese nation only had its own national language, but not its own writing. Later, China culture was introduced to Japan, and literate Japanese began to record in Chinese.
After the middle of the fifth century, the Japanese created a Japanese writing method with Chinese characters as symbols between tables. After the eighth century, this method of using Chinese characters as symbols between tables was widely adopted, and the famous ancient Japanese poetry collection "Ye Wan Collection" adopted this writing method. For example, the Japanese word "mountain" is pronounced "やま", and the Chinese character "Ma Ye" is used to write in "Ye Wan Ji". "Bangbang" is pronounced "さくら", so it is written in three Chinese characters: Sanjiuliang. Japanese auxiliary words "て, に, を, は" are expressed by Chinese characters "Tian, Er, Hu, Bo" and so on. This writing was later called "Wanye pen name". However, it is very complicated to write notes in Chinese characters with 10,000 pseudonyms, which will be simplified in the future. Only the radicals of Chinese characters are written in regular script, such as "a"->; "","Yi"->; ィ and Yu->; ""wait. In addition, the soft China cursive script is suitable for writing Japanese songs, especially after cursive script is popular in writing letters, diaries and novels. It is a simple, fluent and free and easy font, such as "An"->; ぁ and Yu->; ぅ and so on.
At this point, the Japanese nation finally created its own characters by using Chinese characters. Because these words are borrowed from Chinese characters, they are called "pseudonyms" According to the different writing methods of pseudonyms, pseudonyms taken from regular script of Chinese characters are called katakana (カタカナ), and pseudonyms evolved from cursive script of Chinese characters are called hiragana (ひらがな). Both katakana and hiragana are phonography based on Chinese characters. Hiragana is commonly used for writing and printing, and katakana is usually used to represent loanwords and special words.
For example: これはのテキストです. This is a Japanese textbook. This is a Japanese text.
"これは", "の" and "です" in this sentence are hiragana. Hiragana is an important part of Japanese, which can directly form words, such as "これ" (pronounced "ko re"), meaning "this" (equivalent to "this" in English); の (pronounced "no") means yes, and the last です means yes. Hiragana can also be used as other components in a sentence that have no specific meaning. For example, "は" is an auxiliary word that separates "これ" (this) from "Japanese". In addition, it is also the basic unit of Chinese character pronunciation in Japanese, which is somewhat similar to the function of Chinese Pinyin.
Katakana "テキスト" is a katakana. Katakana and Hiragana are in one-to-one correspondence, with the same pronunciation, but different writing styles. You can understand the difference between uppercase letters and lowercase letters in English (but they are not the same thing, just for your understanding). Katakana is mainly used to form western loanwords and other special words. For example, "テキスト" (pronounced "te ki su to") means "textbook", which is transliterated from the English word "text".
In addition, there is another way to express Japanese with Latin letters from Rome, which is called "Roman characters". Similar to China's "Pinyin".
Roman characters mainly appear in proper nouns such as names of people, places and institutions. And it is commonly used in Japanese computer input methods.
The Origin and History of Hiragana
Hiragana was born to write songs and stories. The main writer is a woman, so it is also called "female writing".
Hiragana evolved from the cursive script of Chinese characters in China. Early hiragana was mostly used by Japanese women, mostly lyrical, so it was called female writing female hands. Men mainly use Chinese characters to describe history and papers, which are called male characters and male hands. Even if men use pseudonyms, they often use katakana for Chinese tagging. It can be seen that Hiragana's position in the early stage was not high. It was not until Ji Guan wrote the Collection of Ancient and Modern Harmony Songs and put it at the beginning of the article under a pseudonym. The forerunner of "Song Theory" proved the value of pseudonym literature and established the status of Hiragana. The popularity of Murasaki shikibu's Tale of Genji also contributed to the spread of Hiragana.
Because the court girl copied the Collection of Ye Wan for many years, and the Chinese characters of "Ye Wan pseudonym" have a fixed pronunciation and are handwritten, which virtually simplifies the Chinese characters and becomes a cursive font. Over the years, it has become a "hiragana".
On the other hand, in order to pronounce Chinese as the inherent voice of Japan, court children or elites who have to learn Chinese have to add various auxiliary words and marks made by disassembling Chinese characters. These auxiliary words and marks are "katakana". For example, the Japanese pronunciation is "seeing a hundred things at a time" (ひゃくもんはぃっけけけけけ). What is interesting is that the "cheating" means of elites at that time and modern students learn foreign languages. Modern students have pencils, so they can secretly write "Ancient Morning" next to "Good Morning" and then destroy the evidence with an eraser afterwards. Ancient Japanese students, although they didn't have pencils, knew how to use bamboo sticks to add subsidy marks next to Chinese, which was regarded as a kind of "invisible writing". If you don't look carefully, you really can't see the trace of "derailment".
So after the middle of the ninth century, there are two kinds of Japanese characters, one is Chinese and the other is Hiragana. Tale of Bamboo, Collection of Songs of Ancient and Modern Harmony, Tale of Ise, Diary of Tosa, Diary of Dragonfly, Pillow Grass, Tale of Genji, etc. They are all "hiragana" characters without punctuation and Chinese characters. And this period is also a period of disharmony between male and female roles.
There are many chorus songs in Ise Tale, which can be said to be a story made up of chorus songs. Naturally, the whole article is written in Hiragana. But the Diary of Tosa is a travel note written by the famous singer Ji Guanzhi posing as a woman.
Why did Ji Guanzhi pretend to be a woman? Because in this period, except for the choir, men used Chinese when recording or writing articles. From the standpoint of men at that time, "Hiragana" was a special thing for women. Just like some people with knotted brains, they insist that classical music is more noble than pop songs, and world masterpieces are more noble than girl cartoons.
However, travel notes, diaries, essays, etc. , is a prose genre that freely expresses daily life and personal inner feelings. It is too inconvenient to write in Chinese. It can't be written as Confucius's "Eat food and drink water, bend your arms and pillow it, and enjoy it". letting wealth and fame drift by like clouds is unjust, and it is even more impossible to learn from Li Bai's "White hair and three thousands of feet, sorrow is like a long beard." I don't know where to get autumn frost in the mirror. Therefore, Ji Guanzhi had to pretend to be a woman, and recorded what he saw and heard on the trip in the spoken language (Hiragana) at that time. Unexpectedly, it was because Ji Guanzhi wrote the first record, The Diary of Tosa, that the court women created the female literature of the dynasty.
Taiwan Province's early textbooks claimed that Katakana was created by the monk Konghai, but this is not true. The cause of pseudonym is the simplification of Chinese characters, not the work of one person.