A person of quality is holding forth about something in the past or about a recent event that is being widely discussed. Several people are gathered round him, but it is oneself that he keeps looking at as he talks.
A person who is very dear to one has fallen ill. One is miserably worried about him even if he lives in the capital and far more so if he is in some remote part of the country. What a pleasure to be told that he has recovered!
I am most pleased when I hear someone I love being praised or being mentioned approvingly by an important person.
A poem that someone has composed for a special occasion or written to another person in reply is widely praised and copied by people in their notebooks. Although this is something that has never yet happened to me, I can imagine how pleasing it must be.
A person with whom one is not especially intimate refers to an old poem or story that is unfamiliar. Then one hears it being mentioned by someone else and one has the pleasure of recognizing it. Still later, when one comes across it in a book, one thinks, “Ah, this is it!” and feels delighted with the person who first brought it up.
I feel very pleased when I have acquired some Michinoku paper or some white, decorated paper or even plain paper if it is nice and white.
A person in whose company one feels awkward asks one to supply the opening or closing line of a poem. If one happens to recall it, one is very pleased. Yet often on such occasions one completely forgets something that one would normally know.
I look for an object that I need at once, and I find it. Or again, there is a book that I must see immediately; I turn everything upside down, and there it is. What a joy!
When one is competing in an object match153 (it does not matter what kind), how can one help being pleased at winning?
I greatly enjoy taking in someone who is pleased with himself and who has a self-confident look, especially if he is a man. It is amusing to observe him as he alertly waits for my next repartee; but it is also interesting if he tries to put me off my guard by adopting an air of calm indifference as if there were not a thought in his head.
I realize that it is very sinful of me, but I cannot help being pleased when someone I dislike has a bad experience.
It is a great pleasure when the ornamental comb that one has ordered turns out to be pretty.
I am more pleased when something nice happens to a person I love than when it happens to myself.
Entering the empress’s room and finding that ladies-in-waiting are crowded round her in a tight group, I go next to a pillar that is some distance from where she is sitting. What a delight it is when Her Majesty summons me to her side so that all the others have to make way!
One Day, When the Snow Lay Thick on the Ground (157)
One day, when the snow lay thick on the ground and it was so cold that all the lattices had been closed, I and the other ladies were sitting with Her Majesty, chatting and poking the embers in the brazier.
“Tell me, Shōnagon,” said the empress, “how is the snow on Mount Xianglu?”154
I told the maid to raise one of the lattices and then rolled up the blind all the way. Her Majesty smiled. I was not alone in recognizing the Chinese poem she had quoted; in fact all the ladies knew the lines and had even rewritten them in Japanese. Yet no one but me had managed to think of it instantly.
“Yes indeed,” people said when they heard the story. “She was born to serve an empress like ours.”
This Book (185)
It is getting so dark that I can scarcely go on writing, and my brush is all worn out. Yet I should like to add a few things before I end.
I wrote these notes at home when I had a good deal of time to myself and thought no one would notice what I was doing. Everything that I have seen and felt is included. Since much of it might appear malicious and even harmful to other people, I was careful to keep my book hidden. But now it has become public, which is the last thing I expected.
One day Lord Korechika, the minister of the center, brought the empress a bundle of notebooks. “What shall we do with them?” Her Majesty asked me. “The emperor has already made arrangements for copying the ‘Records of the Historian.’”155
“Let me make them into a pillow,”156 I said.
“Very well,” said Her Majesty. “You may have them.”
I now had a vast quantity of paper at my disposal, and I set about filling the notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material. On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes also are full of poems and observations about trees and plants, birds and insects. I was sure that when people saw my book they would say, “It’s even worse than I expected. Now one can really tell what she is like.” After all, it is written entirely for my own amusement and I put things down exactly as they came to me. How could my casual jottings possibly bear comparison with the many impressive books that exist in our time? Readers have declared, however, that I can be proud of my work. This has surprised me greatly; yet I suppose it is not so strange that people should like it, for, as will be gathered from these notes of mine, I am the sort of person who approves of what others abhor and detests the things they like.
Whatever people may think of my book, I still regret that it ever came to light.
[Adapted from a translation by Ivan Morris]
MURASAKI SHIKIBU
Murasaki Shikibu (d. ca. 1014) belonged to the northern branch of the Fujiwara lineage, the same branch that produced the regents. In fact, both sides of her family can be traced back to Fujiwara no Fuyutsugu (775–826), whose son Yoshifusa became the first regent (sesshō). Murasaki Shikibu’s family line, however, subsequently declined and by her grandfather’s generation had settled at the provincial governor, or zuryō, level. Murasaki Shikibu’s father, Fujiwara no Tametoki (d. 1029), although eventually appointed governor of Echizen and then Echigo, had an undistinguished career as a bureaucrat. He was able, however, to make a name for himself as a scholar of Chinese literature and a poet.
Murasaki Shikibu was probably born sometime between 970 and 978, and in 996 she accompanied her father to his new post as provincial governor in Echizen, on the coast of the Japan Sea. A year or two later, she returned to the capital to marry Fujiwara no Nobutaka, a mid-level aristocrat who was old enough to be her father. She had a daughter named Kenshi, probably in 999, and Nobutaka died a couple of years later, in 1001. It is generally believed that Murasaki Shikibu started writing The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) after her husband’s death, perhaps in response to the sorrow it caused her, and it was probably the reputation of the early chapters that resulted in her being summoned to the imperial court around 1005 or 1006. She became a lady-in-waiting (nyōbō) to Empress Shōshi, the chief consort of Emperor Ichijō and the eldest daughter of Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027), who had become regent. At least half of Murasaki Shikibu’s Diary (Murasaki Shikibu nikki) is devoted to a long-awaited event in Michinaga’s career—the birth of a son to Empress Shōshi in 1008—which would make Michinaga the grandfather of a future emperor.
Murasaki Shikibu was the sobriquet given to the author of The Tale of Genji when she was a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court and is not her actual name, which is not known. The name Shikibu probably comes from her father’s position in the Shikibu-shō (Ministry of Ceremonial), and Murasaki may refer to the lavender color of the flower of her clan (Fujiwara, or Wisteria Fields), or it may have been borrowed from the name of the heroine of The Tale of Genji.
THE TALE OF GENJI (GENJI MONOGATARI)
The title of The Tale of Genji comes from the surname of the hero (the son of the emperor reigning at the beginning of the narrative), whose life and relationships with various women are described in the first forty-one chapters. The Tale of Genji is generally divided into three parts. The first part, consisting of thirty-three chapters, follows Genji’s career from his birth through his exile and triumphant return to his rise
to the pinnacle of society, focusing equally, if not more, on the fate of the various women with whom he becomes involved. The second part, chapters 34 to 41, from “New Herbs” (Wakana) to “The Wizard” (Maboroshi), explores the darkness that gathers over Genji’s private life and that of his great love Murasaki, who eventually succumbs and dies, and ends with Genji’s own death. The third part, the thirteen chapters following Genji’s death, is concerned primarily with the affairs of Kaoru, Genji’s putative son, and the three sisters (Ōigimi, Nakanokimi, and Ukifune) with whom Kaoru becomes involved. In the third part, the focus of the book shifts dramatically from the capital and court to the countryside and from a society concerned with refinement, elegance, and the various arts to an other-worldly, ascetic perspective—a shift that anticipates the movement of mid-Heian court culture toward the eremetic, religious literature of the medieval period.
The Tale of Genji both follows and works against the plot convention of the Heian monogatari in which the heroine, whose family has declined or disappeared, is discovered and loved by an illustrious noble. This association of love and inferior social status appears in the opening line of Genji and extends to the last relationship between Kaoru and Ukifune. In the opening chapter, the reigning emperor, like all Heian emperors, is expected to devote himself to his principal consort (the Kokiden lady), the lady with the highest rank, and yet he dotes on a woman of considerably lower status, a social and political violation that eventually results in the woman’s death. Like the protagonist of The Tales of Ise, Genji pursues love where it is forbidden and most unlikely to be found or attained. In “Lavender” (Wakamurasaki), chapter 5, Genji discovers the young Murasaki, who has lost her mother and is in danger of losing her only guardian until Genji takes her into his home.
In Murasaki Shikibu’s day, it would have been unheard of for a man of Genji’s high rank to take a girl of Murasaki’s low position into his own residence and marry her. In the upper levels of Heian aristocratic society, the man usually lived in his wife’s residence, in either her parents’ house or a dwelling nearby (as Genji does with Aoi, his principal wife). The prospective groom had high stakes in the marriage, for the bride’s family provided not only a residence but other forms of support as well. When Genji takes into his house a girl (like the young Murasaki) with no backing or social support, he thus is openly flouting the conventions of marriage as they were known to Murasaki Shikibu’s audience. In the monogatari tradition, however, this action becomes a sign of excessive, romantic love.
Some of the other sequences—involving Yūgao, the Akashi lady, Ōigimi, and Ukifune—start on a similar note. All these women come from upper- or middle-rank aristocratic families (much like that of the author herself) that have, for various reasons, fallen into social obscurity and must struggle to survive. The appearance of the highborn hero implies, at least for the attendants surrounding the woman, an opportunity for social redemption. Nonetheless, Murasaki Shikibu, much like her female predecessor, the author of the Kagerō Diary, concentrates on the difficulties that the woman subsequently encounters, in either dealing with the man or failing to make the social transition between her own social background and that of the highborn hero. The woman may, for example, be torn between pride and material need or between emotional dependence and a desire to be more independent, or she may feel abandoned and betrayed—all conflicts explored in The Tale of Genji. In classical Japanese poetry, such as that by Ono no Komachi, love has a similar fate: it is never about happiness or the blissful union of souls. Instead, it dwells on unfulfilled hopes, regretful partings, fears of abandonment, and lingering resentment.
The Tale of Genji is remarkable for how well it absorbs the psychological dimension of the Kagerō Diary and the social romance of the early monogatari into a deeply psychological narrative revolving around distinctive characters. Despite closely resembling the modern psychological novel, The Tale of Genji was not conceived and written as a single work and then distributed to a mass audience, as novels are today. Instead, it was issued in very short installments, chapter by chapter or sequence by sequence, to an extremely circumscribed, aristocratic audience over an extended period of time.
As a result, The Tale of Genji can be read and appreciated as Murasaki Shikibu’s oeuvre, or corpus, as a closely interrelated series of texts that can be read either individually or as a whole and that is the product of an author whose attitudes, interests, and techniques evolved significantly with time and experience. For example, the reader of the Ukifune narrative can appreciate this sequence both independently and as an integral part of the previous narrative. Genji can also be understood as a kind of multiple bildungsroman in which a character is developed through time and experience not only in the life of a single hero or heroine but also over different generations, with two or more characters. Genji, for example, attains an awareness of death, mutability, and the illusory nature of the world through repeated suffering. By contrast, Kaoru, his putative son, begins his life, or rather his narrative, with a profound grasp and acceptance of these darker aspects of life. In the second part, in the “New Herbs” chapters, Murasaki has long assumed that she can monopolize Genji’s affections and act as his principal wife. But Genji’s unexpected marriage to the Third Princess (Onna san no miya) crushes these assumptions, causing Murasaki to fall mortally ill. In the last ten chapters, the Uji sequence, Ōigimi never suffers in the way that Murasaki does, but she quickly becomes similarly aware of the inconstancy of men, love, and marriage and rejects Kaoru, even though he appears to be an ideal companion.
Murasaki Shikibu probably first wrote a short sequence of chapters, perhaps beginning with “Lavender,” and then, in response to her readers’ demand, wrote a sequel or another related series of chapters, and so forth. Certain sequences, particularly the Broom Tree sequence (chapters 2–4, 6) and its sequels (chapters 15 and 16), which appear to have been inserted later, focus on women of the middle and lower aristocracy, as opposed to the main chapters of the first part, which deal with Fujitsubo and other upper-rank women related to the throne. The Tamakazura sequence (chapters 22–31), which is a sequel to the Broom Tree sequence, may be an expansion of an earlier chapter no longer extant. The only chapters whose authorship has been questioned are the three chapters following the death of Genji. The following selections are from the third part, after Genji’s death, beginning with “The Lady at the Bridge” (chap. 45) and the story of the Eighth Prince, his daughters, and Kaoru.
Main Characters
AKASHI EMPRESS: Consort and later empress of the emperor reigning at the end of the tale. Mother of numerous princes and princesses, including Prince Niou.
BENNOKIMI: daughter of Kashiwagi’s wet nurse, and later attendant to the Eighth Prince and the Uji princesses. Confidante of Kaoru.
CAPTAIN: former son-in-law of Ono nun. Unsuccessfully courts Ukifune.
EIGHTH PRINCE: eighth son of the first emperor to appear in the tale. Genji’s half brother. Father of Ōigimi, Nakanokimi, and Ukifune. Ostracized by court society for his part in Kokiden’s plot to supplant the crown prince (the future Reizei emperor). Retreats to Uji, where he raises Ōigimi and Nakanokimi and devotes himself to Buddhism.
EMPEROR: The fourth and last emperor in the tale, ascending to the throne after the Reizei emperor. Father of Niou.
GENJI: son of the first emperor by the Kiritsubo lady and the protagonist of the first and second parts.
JIJŪ: attendant to Ukifune.
KAORU: thought by the world to be Genji’s son by the Third Princess but really Kashiwagi’s son. Befriends the Eighth Prince and falls in love with his daughter Ōigimi but fails to make her his wife. Subsequently pursues his other daughters, Nakanokimi and Ukifune. Marries the Second Princess.
KASHIWAGI: eldest son of Tō no Chūjō. Falls in love and has an illicit affair with the Third Princess. Later dies a painful death. Father of Kaoru.
KOJIJŪ: attendant to the Third Princess and helps Kashiwagi’s secret affair with the Thi
rd Princess.
MURASAKI: Genji’s great love. Daughter of Prince Hyōbu by a low-ranking wife, and niece of Fujitsubo.
NAKANOKIMI: second Uji princess, daughter of the Eighth Prince. Marries Niou and is installed by him at Nijō mansion. Bears him a son.
NIOU, PRINCE: beloved third son of the last emperor and the Akashi empress. Looked after by Murasaki until her death. Marries Nakanokimi and later Rokunokimi. Pursues Ukifune.
ŌIGIMI: eldest daughter of the Eighth Prince. Loved by Kaoru but refuses to marry him.
ONO NUN: sister of the bishop of Yokawa. Takes care of Ukifune after her disappearance from Uji and attempts to marry her to the captain, her former son-in-law.
REIZEI EMPEROR: thought to be the son of the first emperor and Fujitsubo but actually Genji’s son.
ROKUNOKIMI: sixth daughter of Yūgiri. Becomes Niou’s principal wife.
SECOND PRINCESS: Second daughter of the fourth and last emperor. Principal wife of Kaoru.
TŌ NO CHŪJŌ: son of the Minister of the Left and brother of Aoi. Genji’s chief male companion in his youth. Son-in-law of the Minister of the Right. Father of Kashiwagi.
TOKIKATA: Niou’s retainer.
UKIFUNE: unrecognized daughter of the Eighth Prince by an attendant. Half sister of Ōigimi and Nakanokimi. Raised in the East. Pursued by Kaoru and Niou. Tries to commit suicide but is saved by the bishop of Yokawa and taken to a convent at Ono, where she becomes a nun.
UKON: attendant to Ukifune.
YOKAWA, BISHOP OF: high priest of Yokawa and brother of Ono nun. Discovers Ukifune, looks after her, and gives her the tonsure.
YŪGIRI: son of Genji by Aoi. Becomes the most powerful figure at court after Genji’s death. Marries his daughter Rokunokimi to Niou.
The Lady at the Bridge
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