The Diary of Lady Murasaki

At the peak of the Heian period, from the late 10th to early 11th century, as Japan sought to establish a unique national culture of its own it saw the genesis of early Japanese classical literature, which to a large part emerged from women's court literature. Through the rise and use of kana, aristocratic women court writers formed a foundation for classical court literature, according to Haruo Shirane. Women's writing showed a marked difference from men's, more personal and introspective in nature. , from his illustrations of The Tale of Genji (17th century) Emperor Ichijō's court, dominated by the powerful Fujiwara clan, was the seat of two rival imperial empresses, Teishi and Shōshi, each with ladies-in-waiting who were proficient writers producing works honoring their mistresses and the Fujiwara clan. The three most noteworthy Heian-era diaries in the genre of – Murasaki's The Diary of Lady Murasaki, Sei Shōnagon's The Pillow Book and Izumi Shikibu's – came from the empresses' courts. Murasaki's diary covers a discrete period, most likely from 1008 to 1010. Murasaki's given name is unknown. Women were often identified by their rank or that of a husband or another close male relative. "Murasaki" was given to her at court, from a character in The Tale of Genji; "Shikibu" denotes her father's rank at the Ministry of Ceremonial Affairs (). A member of a minor branch of the Fujiwara clan, her father was a scholar of Chinese literature who educated both his children in classical Chinese, although educating a female child was exceedingly uncommon. she gave birth to a daughter in 999. Two years later her husband died. On the strength of her reputation as an author, Murasaki entered service with Shōshi at court, almost certainly at the request of Shōshi's father, Fujiwara no Michinaga, perhaps as an incentive to continue adding chapters to The Tale of Genji. She began writing her diary after entering imperial service. ==Diary==

The diary consists of a number of vignettes containing lengthy description of Shōshi's (known as Akiko)'s eldest son Prince Atsuhira's birth, and an epistolary section. Set at the imperial court in Kyoto, it opens with these words: "As autumn advances, the Tsuchimikado mansion looks unutterably beautiful. Every branch on every tree by the lake and each tuft of grass on the banks of the stream takes on its own particular color, which is then intensified by the evening light." ). Fujiwara no Michinaga is in the foreground offering . The figure to his right might be Murasaki Shikibu, . The opening vignettes are followed by short accounts of the events surrounding Shōshi's pregnancy. She begins with a description of the Empress's removal from the Imperial palace to her father's house, the various celebrations and rituals that took place during the pregnancy, and the eventual childbirth with its associated rites in celebration of the successful delivery of a male heir. These passages include specific readings of sutras and other Buddhist rituals associated with childbirth. Several passages account Murasaki's dissatisfaction with court life. She describes feelings of helplessness, her sense of inadequacy compared to higher-ranked Fujiwara clan relatives and courtiers, and the pervasive loneliness after her husband's death. In doing so, she adds a sense of self to the diary entries. The diary includes autobiographical snippets about Murasaki's life before she entered imperial service, Bowring questions whether the current structure is original to Murasaki, and the degree to which it has been rearranged or rewritten since she authored it. Fujiwara dynasty , shown here in a 13th-century illustration of the diary. Unlike the imaginary courts of Murasaki's romantic novel The Tale of Genji, the descriptions in the diary of imperial court life are starkly realistic. The ideal "shining prince" Genji of her novel contrasts sharply with Michinaga and his crass nature; he embarrasses his wife and daughter with his drunken behavior, and his flirtations toward Murasaki make her uncomfortable. The child's birth and its lengthy descriptions, "marked the final tightening of Michinaga's velvet-gloved strangle-hold on imperial succession through his masterful manipulation of marriage politics." and Murasaki reading Bai Juyi's poems in Chinese. From the , 13th century. Michinaga dominated the child's father and attending priests throughout the birth ceremonies. After the birth, he visited twice daily, whereas the Emperor only made a single short imperial visit to his son. Murasaki chronicles each of Michinaga's ceremonial visits, as well as the lavish ceremony held 16 days after the birth. These include intricate descriptions of the ladies and their court attire: Shōshi appears to have been serious and studious, a royal who expected decorum from her ladies-in-waiting – which often created difficulties at a fractious court. When she asked Murasaki for lessons in Chinese, she insisted they be conducted in secret. Murasaki explained that "because [Shōshi] evinced a desire to know more about such things, to keep it secret we carefully chose times when the 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". seen here joking and flirting with ladies-in-waiting. Handscroll (), color on paper. Fujita Art Museum, Osaka, Japan. There are anecdotes about drunken revelries and courtly scandals concerning women who, because of behavior or age, were forced to leave imperial service. The women lived in semi-seclusion in curtained areas or screened spaces without privacy. Men were allowed to enter the women's space at any time. When the Imperial palace burned down in 1005 the court was itinerant for the following years, depending on Michinaga for housing. Murasaki lived at his Biwa mansion, the Tsuchimikado mansion, or Emperor Ichijō's mansion, where there was little space. Ladies-in-waiting had to sleep on thin futons rolled out on bare wood floors in a room often created by curtaining off a space. The dwellings were slightly raised and opened to the Japanese garden, affording little privacy. Bowring explains how vulnerable the women were to men watching them: "A man standing outside in the garden looking in[...] his eyes would have been roughly level with the skirts of the woman inside." The description of the clothing the ladies-in-waiting wore at an imperial event shows the importance of fashions, the arrangement of their layers, as well as Murasaki's keen observational eye: Combining layers of garments, each with multiple linings, to arrive at harmonic color combinations known as assumed an almost ritual fascination to the women. It required attention, and achieving an individual stylistic aesthetic was important. Ladies-in-waiting Murasaki suffered overwhelming loneliness, had her own concerns about ageing, Keene speculates that as a writer who required solitude Murasaki's loneliness may have been "the loneliness of the artist who craves companionship but also rejects it". The diary includes descriptions of other ladies-in-waiting who were writers, most notably Sei Shōnagon, who had been in service to Shōshi's rival and co-empress, Empress Teishi (Sadako). The two courts were competitive; both introduced educated ladies-in-waiting to their respective circles and encouraged rivalry among the women writers. Shōnagon probably left court after Empress Teishi's death in 1006, and it is possible the two never met, yet Murasaki was quite aware of Shōnagon's writing style and her character. She disparages Shōnagon in her diary: Murasaki is also critical of the two other women writers at Shōshi's court – poet Izumi Shikibu, and Akazome Emon who authored a . Of Izumi's writing and poetry she says: The diary and The Tale of Genji Murasaki's The Tale of Genji is barely mentioned in the diary. She writes the Emperor had the story read to him, and that colored papers and calligraphers had been selected for transcriptions of the manuscript – done by court women. In one anecdote she tells of Michinaga sneaking into her room to help himself to a copy of the manuscript. There are parallels between the later chapters of Genji and the diary. According to Genji scholar Shirane, the scene in the diary which describes Ichijo's imperial procession to Michinaga's mansion in 1008 corresponds closely to an imperial procession in chapter 33 ("Wisteria Leaves") of The Tale of Genji. Shirane believes the similarities suggest portions of Genji may have been written during the period Murasaki was in imperial service and wrote the diary. ==Style and genre==

. Heian-era diaries resemble autobiographical memoirs more than a diary in the modern sense. Few if any dates are included in Murasaki's diary and her working habits are not chronicled. It should not be compared to a modern 'writer's notebook', according to Keene. Although it chronicles public events, the inclusion of self-reflective passages is a unique and important part of the work, adding a human aspect unavailable in official accounts. According to Keene, the author is revealed as a woman with great perception and self-awareness, yet a person who is withdrawn with few friends. She is unflinching in her criticism of aristocratic courtiers, seeing beyond superficial facades to their inner core, a quality Keene says is helpful for a novelist but less useful in the closed society she inhabited. Bowring believes the work contains three styles, each distinct from the other. The first is the matter-of-fact chronicle of events, a chronicle which otherwise would typically have been written in Chinese. The second style is found in the author's self-reflective analysis. He considers the author's self-reflections the best that have survived from the period, noting that Murasaki's mastery of introspective style, still rare in Japanese, reflects her contributions to the development of written Japanese in that she conquered the limits of an inflexible language and writing system. The epistolary section represents the third style, a newly developed trend. Bowring sees this as the weakest portion of the work, a section where she fails to break free of the rhythms of spoken language. He explains that the rhythms of spoken language assumes the presence of an audience, is often ungrammatical, relies on "eye contact, shared experiences and particular relationships [to] provide a background which allows speech to be at times fragmentary and even allusive". In contrast, written language must compensate for "the gap between the producer and receiver of the message". ==Translations==

In 1920, Annie Shepley Omori and Kochi Doi published Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan; this book combined their translation of Murasaki's diary with Izumi Shikibu's (The ) and with the . Their translation had an introduction by Amy Lowell. which contains a "lively and provocative" analysis. of The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu, accompanied by cultural and literary analysis informed by anthropological scholarship. == 13th-century handscroll ==

In the 13th century, a handscroll of the diary was produced, the . The scroll, meant to be read from left to right, consists of calligraphy illustrated with paintings. Writing in "The House-bound Heart", Japanese scholar Penelope Mason explains that in an or , a narrative reaches its full potential through the combination of the writer's and the painter's art. About 20 percent of the scroll has survived; based on the existing fragments, the images would have closely followed the text of the diary. , held at the Gotoh Museum. The illustrations in the emaki follow the late-Heian and early Kamakura period convention of ('line-eye and hook-nose') in which individual facial expressions are omitted. Also typical of the period is the style of ('blown-off roof') depictions of interiors which seem to be visualized from above looking downward into a space. According to Mason, the interior scenes of human figures are juxtaposed against empty exterior gardens; the characters are 'house-bound'. In the diary Murasaki writes of love, hate and loneliness, feelings which make the illustrations, according to Mason, of the "finest extant examples of prose-poetry narrative illustrations from the period". Mason finds the illustration of two young courtiers opening the lattice blinds to enter the women's quarters particularly poignant, because Murasaki tries to hold the lattice shut against their advances. The image shows that the architecture and the men who keep her away from the freedom of the garden to the right. The scroll was discovered in 1920 in five segments by . The Gotoh Museum holds segments one, two and four; the Tokyo National Museum holds the third segment; the fifth remains in a private collection. The portions of the held at the Gotoh museum have been designated as National Treasures of Japan. == Gallery ==

File:Murasaki Shikibu Diary Emakimono (Gotoh Museum) 1.jpg|Leaf from the diary with calligraphy attributed to Kujō Yoshitsune, held at Gotoh Museum. File:Detached segment of Murasaki Shikibu Emaki.jpg|Fragment of the showing, on the left, an illustration of Shoshi with her newborn son, and on the right the text written in calligraphy. ==Notes==