Murasaki Shikibu

• 1. Introduction

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  Murasaki Shikibu is the woman who wrote what many call one of the world's first novels, and almost nothing about her name is certain. "Murasaki Shikibu" is a descriptive name, not a personal one. Her real name is unknown. She may have been the imperial lady-in-waiting named in a court diary in 1007. She wrote The Tale of Genji in Japanese between about 1000 and 1012, during the Heian period at the Imperial court. Her father, a learned scholar, once lamented her gifts aloud. "Just my luck," he said, "What a pity she was not born a man!" She had absorbed the Chinese classics that women of her era were forbidden to learn. How did a woman from a fading branch of a great clan come to write a book studied for a thousand years? Who pulled her into the heart of court power, and at what cost? And why did she hide what she knew?

• 2. A Fading Branch

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  Fujiwara no Yoshifusa became the first Fujiwara regent in the 9th century, and Murasaki descended from that northern Fujiwara line. The clan ruled court politics until the end of the 11th century by marrying their daughters into the imperial family and governing through regencies. Yet her own branch had slipped. By the time she was born around 973 in Heian-kyō, her family sat at the middle to lower ranks of the aristocracy, the level of provincial governors. The lower nobility were posted away from the capital to undesirable provincial positions, exiled from the centralized power in Kyoto. The family kept its name through poetry rather than rank. Her great-grandfather, Fujiwara no Kanesuke, had 56 poems included in 13 of the Twenty-one Imperial Anthologies, as well as the Collections of Thirty-six Poets and the Yamato Monogatari. He and her grandfather were both friends of Ki no Tsurayuki, who popularized Japanese-language verse. Her father, Fujiwara no Tametoki, studied at the State Academy and became a respected scholar of Chinese classics, his verse anthologized. He entered public service around 968 and received a governorship in 996. The contrast set the stage for a daughter raised among books but conscious of standing on the wrong side of court power.

• 3. The Forbidden Lessons

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  Chinese was the written language of government, and Heian women were traditionally excluded from learning it. Murasaki broke that pattern by accident. Living in her father's household, most likely on Teramachi Street in Kyoto, she listened as her younger brother Nobunori was taught Chinese for a career in government. In her diary she recalled becoming "unusually proficient at understanding those passages that he found too difficult to understand and memorize." Her education was unorthodox in a society that doubted women's minds. The historian Louis Perez explains in The History of Japan that women "were thought to be incapable of real intelligence and therefore were not educated in Chinese." The capability came at a social price. Murasaki knew others saw her as "pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous and scornful." The Asian literature scholar Thomas Inge believes she had "a forceful personality that seldom won her friends." Around her, the written language itself was changing, as kana, a syllabary built from abbreviated Chinese characters, became the intimate written language of noblewomen and the seedbed of a new Japanese literature.

• 4. Marriage And Grief

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  Aristocratic Heian women lived secluded lives, allowed to speak with men only if they were close relatives or household members. Murasaki exchanged poetry with women but never with men, and unlike most noblewomen she did not marry at puberty. She stayed in her father's household into her mid-twenties or perhaps her early thirties. In 996 she did something rare for a noblewoman, traveling with her father to his four-year governorship in Echizen Province, a journey that could take as long as five days. She returned to Kyoto, probably in 998, to marry her father's friend, a much older second cousin from the same Fujiwara branch. He was a court functionary at the Ministry of Ceremonials, known for dressing extravagantly and for his talent as a dancer. In his late forties, he had multiple households and an unknown number of wives and offspring. Their daughter Kenshi was born in 999. Two years later her husband Nobutaka died during a cholera epidemic. In her diary she described the aftermath. "I felt depressed and confused. For some years I had existed from day to day in listless fashion... The thought of my continuing loneliness was quite unbearable." Scholars believe she may have started The Tale of Genji before his death and was certainly writing after she was widowed, perhaps in grief. By distributing newly written chapters to friends who recopied and passed them on, she gained a reputation as an author that would soon reach the most powerful man at court.

• 5. Brought To Court

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  Fujiwara no Michinaga, the so-called Mido Kampaku, arranged his four daughters into marriages with emperors, giving him unprecedented power. In 995 his two brothers died and left the regency vacant. Michinaga won the power struggle against his nephew Fujiwara no Korechika, aided by his sister Senshi. Korechika was discredited and banished in 996 after a scandal involving his shooting at the retired Emperor Kazan. Michinaga then sent his eldest daughter Shōshi to Emperor Ichijō's harem when she was about 12. A year later, to undermine the existing empress Teishi, he had Shōshi named empress as well. The historian Donald Shively describes the move as shocking even his admirers, arranging "the unprecedented appointment" of Teishi and Shōshi "as concurrent empresses of the same emperor." Influence at court often flowed through competitive salons, dependent on the quality of the women attending. Michinaga wanted Shōshi surrounded by skilled women to build a rival salon. Around 1005 or 1006, when Shōshi was 16 to 19, he brought Murasaki to her court, probably because of her reputation as a writer. Richard Bowring describes the role as a companion-tutor, and Chieko Mulhern thinks Michinaga wanted Murasaki to educate his daughter. Shōshi gathered talented women such as Izumi Shikibu and Akazome Emon, the author of the early vernacular history The Tale of Flowering Fortunes.

• 6. Rivals And Secrecy

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  Sei Shōnagon, author of The Pillow Book, had served as lady-in-waiting to the rival empress Teishi, and her shadow fell across Murasaki's court life. Teishi died in 1001, before Murasaki entered service, so the two writers were never there together, but Murasaki knew of her and wrote about her. Their temperaments clashed even at a distance. Murasaki recorded that Shōnagon "was dreadfully conceited. She thought herself so clever, littered her writing with Chinese characters, which left a great deal to be desired." Donald Keene believes Murasaki was brought to court to write Genji in response to Shōnagon's popular Pillow Book. Murasaki also turned a sharp eye on her own colleague. Of Izumi Shikibu she wrote that she had a gift for dashing off informal compositions, "but in poetry she needs either an interesting subject or some classic model to imitate. Indeed it does not seem to me that in herself she is really a poet at all." Her own great secret was the Chinese she had been forbidden to learn. Shōshi, interested in the ballads of Bai Juyi, asked Murasaki to teach her the language. Written Chinese was considered the language of men, and the lessons stayed hidden. "Since last summer... very secretly, in odd moments when there happened to be no one about, I have been reading with Her Majesty," she wrote, adding that she had "thought it best to say nothing about the matter to anybody." Bowring calls it "almost subversive" that she knew Chinese and taught it to an empress.

• 7. The Lady Of The Chronicles

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  "The Lady of the Chronicles" was the ambiguous nickname a hostile lady-in-waiting pinned on Murasaki, an allusion to the classic Chronicles of Japan. It followed an incident in which chapters of Genji were read aloud to the Emperor and his courtiers, one of whom remarked on the author's high level of education. Murasaki bristled at the attention. "How utterly ridiculous!" she wrote. "Would I, who hesitate to reveal my learning to my women at home, ever think of doing so at court?" Though meant as a barb, Mulhern believes she was secretly flattered. Court life itself left her withdrawn and somber, disliking the drunken revelry and the men she thought were drunken and stupid. She found one close friend in a lady-in-waiting called Lady Saishō, and wrote of the season she enjoyed, "I love to see the snow here." Arthur Waley suspects she was not unhappy with court life in general but bored in Shōshi's court, which had "gained a reputation for extreme dullness." Some scholars believe Michinaga pursued her romantically. Her diary records his pressure as late as 1010, and one night he sneaked into her room and stole a newly written chapter of Genji. She wrote to him in a poem, "You have neither read my book, nor won my love." The name Murasaki itself was most likely given to her at a court dinner in 1008, when the court poet Fujiwara no Kintō inquired after the "Young Murasaki," a character from her novel, a compliment from a male poet to a female author.

• 8. A Thousand Years Of Genji

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  The Tale of Genji is a three-part novel spanning 1100 pages and 54 chapters, thought to have taken a decade to complete. Michinaga's patronage made the scale possible, supplying costly paper, ink, and calligraphers, with the first handwritten volumes probably bound by ladies-in-waiting. Its central theme is the fragility of life, the sorrow of human existence known as mono no aware, a phrase used over a thousand times in the book. The story of the shining prince Genji is set in the late 9th to early 10th centuries, and Murasaki stripped away the fairy-tale and fantasy elements common in earlier monogatari. The work spread quickly. By 1021 all the chapters were known to be complete and were sought after in the provinces where copies were scarce. Within a century of her death she was regarded as a classical writer. The Genji Monogatari Emaki, a 12th-century handscroll, consists of four scrolls, 19 paintings, and 20 sheets of calligraphy, with illustrations dated to between 1110 and 1120 and now housed at the Gotoh Museum and the Tokugawa Art Museum. In the 17th century her work became emblematic of Confucian philosophy, and in 1673 Kumazawa Banzan praised its sensitivity and depiction of emotions. Genji-inspired artifacts, known as genji-e, decorated dowry sets and wedding gifts. When Waley's translation appeared in 1933, reviewers compared Genji to Austen, Proust, and Shakespeare. Helen McCullough wrote that Murasaki "is both the quintessential representative of a unique society and a writer who speaks to universal human concerns with a timeless voice. Japan has not seen another such genius." In 2008 Kyoto held a year-long celebration of the 1000th anniversary of Genji, and a plant bearing purple berries now carries her name.