Monogatari Literature
A genre of Japanese classical literature that originated in the Heian Period (early 10th century AD). It was formed on the basis of Japanese folk commentaries, derived from myths and folklore, and was formally influenced by the legendary literature of China's Six Dynasties and Sui and Tang Dynasties.
The "Tales of Bamboo", written in the early 10th century, is Japan's earliest monogatari literature. The story tells that a bamboo cutter found a beautiful little girl in the heart of a bamboo. She grew up in three months and named her "Xizhu Heyingji". Five noble sons proposed to her, and she promised to marry the man who could find her favorite treasure, but all the suitors failed. At this time, the emperor wanted to use his power to marry her by force, but he was rejected. He Yingji suddenly ascended to heaven while these ordinary people were at a loss.
The Monogatari literature "The Tale of Ise" was written around the same period as "The Tale of Bamboo". It is composed of 125 short stories. Each story is its own independent story, but the whole story was written by Hara Ippei. The characters are connected together to describe the various love stories that Yuan Yeping experienced in the court and in other places.
Monogatari literature has been divided into two categories since its inception. One is fictional monogatari, which consciously fictionalizes folk stories and polishes them, refining them into complete stories, which are legendary. Color is represented by "The Story of Bamboo" and "The Story of Falling". The other type is Uta Monogatari, represented by "Ise Monogatari" and "Yamato Monogatari", which mainly focus on Waka, making Waka and prose completely integrated and becoming an organic part of the entire novel. Both types of stories are derived from myths and folklore, and are a literary form that develops into independent stories. Their shortcomings are the lack of internal unity and artistic perfection.
As the peak of monogatari literature, "The Tale of Genji" (produced in the early 11th century) and "The Tale of Utsubo" (produced in the late 10th century) are two different models. "The Tale of Genji" was the first to combine fictional stories with song stories, and inherited the realism tradition of the Monogatari in terms of creative methods. It abandoned the Monogatari's emphasis on historical facts and lacked psychological description, and promoted the development of Monogatari literature. The development of Japanese prose literature had a huge impact. The story structure of "The Tale of Utsubo" is modeled on that of "The Tale of Bamboo", except that the suitors are all crown princes and dignitaries in the court, and the marriage conflicts in aristocratic society are described in the context of their struggle for power, criticizing the behavior of the court aristocrats. A life of arrogance and luxury. It is characterized by bold contact with reality, starting from the country's literary heritage and tradition, and at the same time innovating and developing. But it
is not a complete ideological and artistic work like "The Tale of Genji".
After "The Tale of Genji", Monogatari literature gradually declined and declined. Some historical stories, such as "The Story of Prosperity", "The Great Mirror", and "The Mirror of the Present", expose and criticize the corruption of the nobility. The contents of the commentary stories such as "The Story of the Past" are mostly Buddhist stories, and secular stories are also well written.
With the rise of the samurai class in feudal Japan in the Middle Ages, war stories represented by "The Tale of the Heike" appeared in literature. It is essentially different from ancient stories in both content and form. It mainly describes the decline of medieval society and the changes brought to society by the feudal revolution. They use a new style that is a mixture of Chinese, Buddhist, and common sayings. This style of writing has been tried in "The Story of the Ages", but it was not until "The Tale of the Heike" that it reached maturity and became a narrative poem. War literature is a major change in the history of literature. Later narrative literature and other various literatures all developed from war literature. Senki Monogatari, especially "The Tale of the Heike", brought Japanese classical literature to a new level.
The origin of kana in Japanese
In ancient times, the Japanese nation only had its own national language, but not its own writing. Later, Chinese culture was introduced to Japan, and Japanese people with cultural accomplishment began to be able to record events in Chinese.
After the middle of the fifth century AD, the Japanese people created a method of writing Japanese using Chinese characters as inter-table symbols. By the eighth century, this method of using Chinese characters as symbols between tables had been widely adopted. The famous ancient Japanese poetry collection "Man'yoshu" adopted this writing method. For example, "mountain" in Japanese is pronounced "やま", and it is written with the two Chinese characters "Yama" in "Man'yoshu". "桜" is pronounced as "さくら", so it is written with the three Chinese characters "Sankyura". The particles "て, に, を, は" in Japanese are represented by Chinese characters such as "天, 尔, hu, wave". This writing method later became known as "Man'yokana". However, writing notes in Chinese characters written in Manyo Kana style was very complicated, and it was later simplified and only the radicals of Chinese characters in regular script were written, such as "Ah" -> "ア", "伊" -> "イ", "宇" - >"ウ" etc. In addition, the soft Chinese cursive script is suitable for writing Japanese waka. Especially after writing letters, diaries, and novels in cursive script became popular, a concise, smooth, free and easy font has gradually formed, such as "安" -> "あ", "宇" ”->“う” etc.
At this point, the Japanese nation finally created its own writing using Chinese characters. Since these characters are all borrowed from Chinese glyphs, they are called "kana". Depending on how the kana is written, those derived from the radicals of the regular Chinese characters are called "katakana" (カタカナ), while those derived from the cursive Chinese characters are called "hiragana" (ひらがな).
Katakana and Hiragana are phonetic characters created based on kanji. Hiragana is generally used for writing and printing, and katakana is usually used to represent foreign words and special vocabulary.
For example: これは日本语のテキストです. (Translation: This is a Japanese textbook) (This is Japanese text)
Hiragana "これは", "の", and "です" in this sentence are Hiragana. Hiragana is an important part of Japanese. It can directly form words. For example, "これ" (pronounced "ko re" Note: Roman phonetic notation) in the example means "this" (equivalent to "this" in English) ;の (pronounced "no") means "of", and the last "です" means judgment, which means "yes". Hiragana can also serve as other components in sentences that have no specific meaning. For example, "は" in this example is a particle used to separate "これ" (this) and "日本语". In addition, it is also the basic unit for pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese, and its function is somewhat similar to Chinese pinyin.
Katakana "テキスト" is katakana. Katakana and Hiragana have a one-to-one correspondence. They have the same pronunciation but different writing methods. You can understand it as the difference between uppercase letters and lowercase letters in English (but they are not the same thing, just to facilitate 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, Japanese also uses Latin letters derived from Rome to express Japanese, called "Romaji". Similar to my country's "Pinyin".
Romaji are mainly found in proper nouns such as people’s names, place names, and organization names. And often used in Japanese computer input method.
The origin and history of Hiragana
“Hiragana” was born for writing Japanese songs and stories. The main writers are women, so it is also called "female writing".
Hiragana evolved from the cursive script of Chinese characters. In the early days, Hiragana was mostly used by Japanese women, and they often wrote lyrical texts, so they were called female characters and female hands. Men mainly use Chinese characters to write history and essays, and are called male characters and male hands. Even if men use kana, they often use katakana for Chinese annotation. It can be seen that the status of hiragana in the early days was not high. It was not until Kikanyuki wrote the "Anthology of Ancient and Modern Japanese Songs" that he placed the preface of kana at the beginning of the chapter, which was the forerunner of the "song theory", proving the value of kana literature and establishing the status of hiragana. Later, the popularity of Murasaki Shikibu's "The Tale of Genji" also contributed to the spread of hiragana.
Since the palace women copied the "Man'yoshu" for many years, and the Chinese characters of "Man'yo Kana" have fixed pronunciations, they were written and written, which invisibly simplified the Chinese characters and turned them into cursive scripts. The font, over time, becomes "hiragana".
On the other hand, in order to pronounce Chinese into the unique pronunciation of the Japanese country, the court children who had to learn Chinese or the elites who were admitted to university had to add various particles and symbols that were made by disassembling Chinese characters. , these particles and symbols are exactly "katakana". For example, "One hundred hearings is worth one sight", and the Japanese pronunciation is "One hundred hearings, one sight, such as かず" (ひゃくもんはいっけんにしかず, hyakumon wa ikken ni sikazu). Interestingly, the "cheating" methods of the elite at that time were very similar to the "cheating" methods of modern students when learning foreign languages. Modern students have pencils and can secretly write "ancient moning" next to "Good morning" and then destroy the evidence with an eraser afterwards. Although the ancient Japanese students did not have pencils, they knew how to use bamboo sticks to add subsidy marks next to the Chinese characters. It was a kind of "invisible writing". If you don't look carefully, you can't really see the traces of "cheating".
Therefore, in the Japanese country after the mid-ninth century, there were two writing languages, one was Chinese and the other was "hiragana" script. "The Tale of Bamboo", "Anthology of Ancient and Modern Japanese Songs", "The Tale of Ise", "Tosa Diary", "Dragonfly Diary", "Pillow", "The Tale of Genji", etc. are all "hiragana" without punctuation or kanji. arts. This period was also a period when male and female writing was incompatible.
There are many Japanese songs in "The Tale of Ise". It can be said that it is a story compiled with Japanese songs. It is natural that the whole story is written in "hiragana". However, "Tosa Diary" is a travel diary written by the famous Japanese singer Ki Nuki pretending to be a woman.
Why did Ji Guanzhi have to pretend to be a woman? Because during this period, except for Japanese songs, men were accustomed to using Chinese when recording or writing articles. From a man's perspective at the time, "hiragana" was a thing only for women. Just like some knotty-minded people who insist that classical music is nobler than pop songs, and world classics are nobler than shojo comics.
However, travel notes, diaries, essays, etc. are prose genres that freely express daily life and personal inner feelings. Writing them in Chinese would be too cumbersome. It can never be written in the style of Confucius' "I eat sparingly and drink water, I bend my arms and rest on it, and enjoy it. Unjust wealth and honor are like floating clouds to me", let alone Li Bai's "White hair is three thousand feet" "The fate is like a long one. I don't know where to find the autumn frost in the mirror." Therefore, Ji Guanzhi had to pretend to be a woman and record what he saw and heard during the journey in the colloquial language of the time (hiragana).
Unexpectedly, it was precisely because Kikanyuki was the first to write "Tosa Diary" that the women of the palace created the literature of dynasty women.
Taiwan’s early textbooks claimed that katakana was created by the scholarly monk Kukai, which is actually incorrect. The origin of kana is the simplification of Chinese characters agreed upon by many people, not the work of one person.