The Diary of Lady Murasaki Book

It has come to my attention through Goodreads that I'm quite the slow reader nowadays. Personally I blame the Internet, or rather I spend a great deal of time reading, but more of it turns out to be silly digital articles than books.

The upside of all this that when I do finish a book it becomes quite a significant milestone in my mind. This would explain why I feel there is so much to say about this rather slim thing of a diary left to us by Lady Murasaki, author of The Tale of Genji and court lady and tutor to an empress.

It is so slim in fact that many academics, as mentioned in the excellent foreword, keep having this nagging suspicion that this is a re-written version and perhaps just a fragment of the original. It sad to think of how much that is probably lost, that this sliver is so filled with so many descriptions of court life when you long to know more of the inner life of Murasaki.

Although, or perhaps because of, being a novice to all things Heian Period (794 - 1192), or Japanese history in general (I'm reading this in part due to my interest in women's history and in part as preparation to someday reading the intimidating The Tale of Genji), I found that the descriptions of court life and ceremonies quite intriguing. At one moment it all seems impossibly stiff and otherworthly, the next moment the very same people are drunk and crying at the sight of their son or flirting shamelessly with the closet person in sight.

My enjoyment of the court descriptions probably has to do with Murasaki's reflective style. When I compare her to the very formal diaries, all written in the male only Chinese, included in the Appendix, I realize how lucky we are to have her records.

That is not to say that reading her is a laugh-riot. She is somber and pensive to say the least. At the moment I'm telling myself that I have to finish this review before getting further along with The Pillow Book, the exuberant diary/notebook/list-fest of her contemporary Sei Shonagon. It appears that The Pillow Book is far more popular among the Goodread crowd and it's supposed to be a more lust filled and engaging read. To me it appears to be a question of different but equally intriguing styles. Murasaki is melancholy sure, but it is a beautiful melancholy with an incredible eye for pointing out the follies of those around her.

The tone almost reminds me of one of my first loves, Austen:

"Lady Koshosho is so indefinably elegant and graceful she reminds one of a weeping willow in spring. She has a lovely figure and a charming manner, but is far too retiring, diffident to the point of being incapable of making up her mind about anything, so naïve it makes one want to weep. Whenever someone unscrupulous tries to take advantage of her or spreads rumors, she immediately takes it all to heart. She is so vulnerable and so easily dismayed that you would think she was on the point of expiring. I do worry about her."

Doesn't that just sound like a description of Jane Bennet ?Though of course most of this book is in the tone of the later Austen, the Mansfield Park and Persuasion Austen. The seclusive Murasaki constantly withdraws from the court festivities she describes in such detail:

"Realizing that it was bound to a terribly drunken affair this evening, Lady Saisho and I decided to retire once the formal part was over. We were just about to leave when His Excellency's two sons, together with Kantetaka and some other gentleman, came into the eastern gallery and started to create a commotion. We hid behind the dais, but his Excellency pulled back the curtains and we were both caught.
'A poem each for the Prince!' he cried. 'Then I'll let you go!'"

"I felt quite depressed and went to my room for a while to rest. I had intended to go over later if I felt better, but then Kohyoe and Kohobu came in and sat themselves down by the hibachi. 'It's so crowded over there, you can hardly see a thing!' they complained. His Excellency appeared. 'What do you think you're all doing, sitting around like this?' he said. 'Come along with me!'"

Of course, being a very reflexive person she's well aware of her own rather gloomy aura:

"And when I play my koto rather badly to myself in the cool breeze of the evening, I worry lest someone might hear me and recognize how I am 'adding to the sadness of it all', how vain and sad of me."

This and similar reflections saves her from sounding all too bitter and self indulgent. And as a reader how can one not feel for her when all she tries to do is to be alone with her books:

"Whenever my loneliness threatens to overwhelm me, I take out one or two of them to look at; but my women gather together behind my back. 'It's because she goes on like that she is so miserable. What kind of lady is it who reads Chinese books?' they whisper. 'In the past it was not even the done thing to read sutras!' 'Yes,' I feel like replying, 'but I've never met anyone who lived longer just because they believed in superstitions!'"

We also learn a bit about how she became a learned lady, the teacher to the empress and her feelings of being an author:

"When my brother,…, was a young boy learning the Chinese classics, I was in the habit of listening with him and I became unusually proficient at understanding those passages that he found too difficult to grasp and memorize. Father a most learned man, was always regretting the fact: 'Just my luck!' he would say. 'What a pity she was not born a man!' But then I gradually realized that people were saying 'It's bad enough when a man flaunts his Chinese learning; she will come to no good,' and since I have avoided writing the simplest character." (my feminist hearts bleed for her)

"Then Her Majesty asked me to read with her here and there from the Collected Works of Po Chü-i, and because she evinced a desire to know more about such things, to keep it secret we carefully chose times when other women would not be present, and, from the summer before last, I started giving her informal lessons on the two volumes of 'New Ballads'. I hid this fact from others, as did Her Majesty, but somehow both His Excellency and His Majesty got wind of it and they had some beautiful copies made of the various Chinese books, which His Excellency then presented to her."

"I tried reading the Tale [of Genji] again, but it did not seem to be the same as before and I was disappointed. Those with whom I had discussed things of mutual interest - how vain and frivolous they must consider me no, I thought; and then ashamed that I could even contemplate such a remark, I found it difficult to write to them."

There is something about this book that sparks my imagination. Perhaps it is the fact that it is written over a thousand years ago and yet I feel like I would connect and be bffs with Murasaki straight away (which is obviously me fangirling, she would at the very least think me very uncultured for not knowing all the Chinese classics, I'll have to work on that). Here are a few of my favorite theories/fan-fiction ideas about this book:

- Murasaki is actually lesbian which would explain why she's constantly trying to withdraw from the public male places and go hang out with only the other court ladies, it would also work nicely with this passage:

"In particular I missed Lady Dainagon, who would often talk to me as we lay close by Her Majesty in the evenings. Had I then indeed succumbed to court life?
I sent to her the following:
How I long for those waters on which we lay
A longing keener than the frost on a duck's wing

To which she replied:
Awakening to find no friend to brush away the frost
The mandarin duck longs for her mate at night

(Footnote by the translator: Mandarin ducks were supposed to always go around in inseparable pairs. This common metaphor for lovers originally came from Chinese literature but had by this time become firmly a part of the Japanese poetic vocabulary. These poems should be seen as forming a conventional exchange between close friends - nothing more.)"

Obviously the translator is trying to destroy my fan fiction right here, but that doesn't really change anything.

- Murasaki meets Jane Austen, and perhaps Sai Shonagon, in a parallel universe and they discuss the pro and cons of living in the country side (both Murasaki and Shonagon hade fathers who were provincial governors, but at least Shonagon had a very snobbish attitude towards the countryside, Austen obviously abhors all thing city and/or court), the downside of having to downplay your intelligence and wit as to not offend society, the hilarity in male critics not taking your work seriously because you're a woman and you mention clothes in your books, the upside in not getting a formal education leaving you entirely free (you're upper class with time on your hands after all) to make up a much more interesting education on your own, deploring that you all had to rely on getting your education from male classics when you're well aware (now) that women have been writing since forever (considering asking Edhuanna to join the conversation)