“Words are the tools of thoughts; they are also their decoration. They cannot be neglected in composing a novel. In China and in the West, the written and the spoken languages are, for the most part, the same, and there is no particular necessity to choose either as a literary form.” 1
Due in part to these writing styles being so dissimilar from the Western norm of writing similarly to everyday speech, translations were very difficult to write successfully and as a result, early Meiji translations failed to capture the essence of the original books which they were translated