None but the moon came
Under my net.
The kaya (mosquito-net) is not a mere curtain, but a green gauze room within a room, suspended from the corners of the ceiling.
Humour has indeed discharged thousands of these pretty pellets, which lend themselves admirably to satire, drollery, and play on words. Yet these are precisely the most difficult to render. A jest, of which the point depends on punning ambiguity, should never cross the frontier. When a foreigner has been made to see the quaint conjunction of incongruous ideas, he will yet miss the surprise attending identity of sound, which strikes with comic duplicity a native ear. Moreover, the Japanese looks for verbal legerdemain in his most serious literature with an appreciation that seems puerile to us, who relegate puns and riddles to half-educated minds. There is an equally large field of fun which can only be indicated, since British prudery plants it round with fig-trees. The Japanese, like the French, see no harm in tipping Apollo’s arrows with malicious mirth to assail humanity in the arms of Venus, where it cuts a vulnerable and often ridiculous figure. The Anglo-Saxon professes to exclude comedy from the bedroom. He gains in dignity; he loses in gaiety. If this same comedy, banished to the smoking-room, descend to too gross levels, he has only to cross the Channel and will find at the Palais Royal or elsewhere such traps for laughter as Shakespeare and Aristophanes did not disdain to set. He supposes that the interests of morality require many drags on the wheels of humour. He is generally sincere: the restraint is not imposed by “hypocrisy,” as foreigners believe and assert. But neither is the opposite assumption justified, that races which permit themselves more joyous licence are less virtuous than our own. On the contrary, they find in laughter a safety-valve sanctioned by custom. And it seems to me that Madame and Okamisan, who are free to giggle behind their fans at audacious pleasantry, are placed by destiny in a more fortunate attitude than the British matron, who is reduced to indignation or discomfort. Critics of Japanese poems, novels, and plays usually dismiss this element of mirth with the adjective “pornographic,” but the epithet (if it presuppose an ignobly prostituted pen) entirely misses the mark. The passages so labelled do not allure readers with the promise of forbidden fruit: they merely denote a wider range of innoxious merriment, indulged in by a nation whose sense of humour is as yet unfettered by our local and artificial sense of propriety. The naïveté of such songs is proved by the fact that they hardly ever sound a cynical note. The tone of the only one which I shall quote is exceptional:
Lothario.
Steered with deft rudder,
Fooled with soft speeches,
To my verandah
I hale her up.
But this song may have the opposite meaning of a woman alluring a man with soft speeches. As there are no pronouns and no genders in the vernacular, the sense is entirely ambiguous, and the Japanese whom I have consulted do not agree. So I append the original: