Part 7

I shared it with several of the younger girls. We were all so tired that we did not bother about anything, and went straight to sleep. Our room was in the east wing, and had a sliding door leading into the passage under the eaves at the back of the building. The bolt of this door was missing, but we did not notice it. Our host, however, who was naturally familiar with the peculiarities of the house, presently came to the door, and, pushing it open an inch or two, said in a queer, hollow voice: ‘May one venture?’ This he repeated several times. I opened my eyes, and there he was, standing behind a chink that was now about five inches wide. No doubt about who it was, for he happened to be in the full glare of a lamp we had put behind our screen. It was really very funny. In an ordinary way he was the last person in the world to take liberties; but he apparently had some curious idea that having the Empress in his house entitled him to treat the other guests as he pleased. ‘Look what is there!’ I cried, waking the girl next to me. ‘Would you ever have expected it?’ At this they all raised their heads, and, seeing him still standing at the door, burst into fits of laughter. ‘Who goes there?’ I challenged him at last. ‘Show yourself!’ ‘It’s the master of the house,’ he answered, ‘come to have a word with the lady in charge.’ ‘It was your gate I complained of,’ I said. ‘I never suggested that our door needed attention.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ he answered, ‘it is just that business of the gate that I have come about. Might I venture for one moment...?’ ‘No, of course he cannot,’ said all the girls in chorus. ‘Just look at the state we are in!’ ‘Ah well, if there are young persons[95]...’ and he disappeared, closing the door behind him, amid loud laughter.

Really, if a man finds the door open, the best thing he can do is to walk in. If he solemnly announces himself he can hardly expect encouragement.

Next day when I was with the Empress I told her about this. ‘It sounds very unlike him,’ she said, laughing. ‘It must have been your exploit yesterday (the allusion to the story of Yü Kung) that interested him in you. But he is a kind fellow, and I am sorry you are always so hard upon him.’

Her Majesty had been giving orders about the costumes for the little girls who were to wait upon Princess Osako. Suddenly (and this time I really think one could hardly be expected not to smile) Narimasa came to ask whether her Majesty had decided—what colour the facings of the children’s vests were to be! He was also worried about the Princess’s meals. ‘If they are served in the ordinary way,’ he said, ‘it won’t look well. To my mind, she ought to have a _tayny_[96] platter and a _tayny_ dish-stand....’ ‘And be waited upon by the little girls for whom you have designed such lovely underclothes,’ I added. ‘You should not laugh at Narimasa,’ the Empress said to me afterwards. ‘I know everyone does it; but he is such a straightforward, unpretentious creature ...’ and I was glad of this scolding.

One day when I was with her Majesty and nothing particular was going on, someone came and said that the Superintendent wished to see me. Her Majesty overheard this and said, laughing: ‘I wonder how he means to make a butt of himself this time! You’d better go and see.’ I found him waiting for me outside. ‘I mentioned that unfortunate business about the gate to my brother Korenaka,’ he said, ‘and he thought it was very serious. “I should advise you to obtain an interview with the lady at an hour when she has leisure to discuss the matter in all its bearings.” That was what my brother advised.’

How very interesting! I was wondering whether he would not make some reference to his strange visit the other night. But he merely added: ‘So I trust you will allow me to wait upon you in your room. At some spare moment when you have nothing better to do ...’ and with a bow he took his leave.

When I went back into the room the Empress asked me what was the matter. I told her what he had said, adding: ‘I don’t understand why he sent for me, specially when I was on duty too. Surely he might have come round to my room later on.’ ‘He thought,’ replied the Empress, ‘that it would give you pleasure to hear what a respect Korenaka has for you; that is why he was in a hurry to tell you. You must remember that Korenaka is a tremendous figure in his eyes.’ She looked so charming while she was saying this!

Three months later, the Empress’s second child, Prince Atsuyasu,[97] was born. In the second month of the next year (A.D. 1000) she was raised to the rank of Imperial Consort, that is to say, was made of equal importance with the Emperor himself, having previously been merely a sort of chief Queen. In the fourth month she returned to the Palace, and in the eighth fell seriously ill.

Meanwhile the Emperor’s attention was concentrated chiefly upon his new concubine, Akiko (daughter of the Prime Minister, Michinaga), who had arrived at the Palace just a year ago, at the age of eleven.

Speaking of this time, the _Eigwa Monogatari_ (Chapter 7) contrasts the gloom of the sick Empress’s quarters with the scenes of winter-carnival that went on in the Emperor’s apartments.

‘Certain princes, still faithful to the Empress, came constantly to inquire after her, and in conversation with her ladies-in-waiting described how the _gosechi_ festival had been kept in various great houses of the Capital. These gentlemen were received by Sei Shōnagon or some other of her Majesty’s ladies.’

On the 29th day of the twelfth month (A.D. 1000) the Empress Sadako died, having a few hours previously given birth to a daughter, the Princess Yoshiko.

What became of Sei Shōnagon after her mistress’s death we do not know. We hear no more of her till 1009, when Murasaki Shikibu, author of _The Tale of Genji_, writes in her _Diary_: ‘Sei Shōnagon’s most marked characteristic is her extraordinary self-satisfaction. But examine the pretentious compositions in Chinese script which she scatters so liberally over the Court, and you will find them to be a mere patchwork of blunders. Her chief pleasure consists in shocking people; and as each new eccentricity becomes only too painfully familiar, she gets driven on to more and more outrageous methods of attracting notice. She was once a person of great taste and refinement; but now she can no longer restrain herself from indulging, even under the most inappropriate circumstances, in any outburst that the fancy of the moment suggests. She will soon have forfeited all claim to be regarded as a serious character, and what will become of her when she is too old for her present duties I really cannot imagine.’

And what did become of her? There is a tradition (_Kojidan_, vol. ii) that when some courtiers were out one day they passed a dilapidated hovel. One of them mentioned a rumour that Sei Shōnagon, a wit of the last reign, was now living in this place. Whereupon an incredibly lean hag shot her head out of the door, crying: ‘Won’t you buy old bones?’ This, if we are to accept the story, was the last of Shōnagon’s famous ‘literary allusions’; for there is here a reference to the story of Kuo Wei, who maintained that there were racehorses so precious that even their bones were worth procuring.

There is, too, in the _Zoku Senzaishū_ (Book 18) a poem sent by Shōnagon ‘when she was old and living in retirement to someone who tried to visit her’:

Tou hito ni If to those who visit me ‘Ari’ to wa e koso ‘She is at home’ Ii-hatene I cannot bring myself to say Ware ya wa ware to Do not wonder, for often in consternation Odorokare-tsutsu. I ask myself whether I am I.

The character of Shōnagon appears in her book as a series of contradictions. She is desperately anxious not merely to be liked, but to occupy the foremost place in the affections of all whom she knows. Yet her behaviour, as she herself records it, seems consistently calculated to inspire fear rather than affection. Again, she seems at some moments wholly sceptical, at others profoundly religious; now unusually tender-hearted, now egotistical and cold. Yet all this does not imply that her character was in reality complicated to an unusual degree, but comes from the fact that she reveals herself to us entirely and, as it were, from every facet, whereas most writers of diaries and the like, however little conscious intention they may have of publishing their confessions, instinctively present themselves always in the same light. Her detachment about herself is paralleled by a curious aloofness from all the associated emotions of a scene, so that she can describe a sick-bed as though it were a sunset, without the slightest attempt to arouse pity, or for that matter the least fear of provoking disgust.

Perhaps the strongest impression we get is of her extreme fastidiousness and irritability, which must have made her a formidable companion. She probably got on better with the Empress than with anyone else because her reverence for the Imperial Family compelled her in the August Presence to keep her nerves in check.

As a writer she is incomparably the best poet of her time, a fact which is apparent only in her prose and not at all in the conventional _uta_ for which she is also famous. Passages such as that about the stormy lake or the few lines about crossing a moonlit river show a beauty of phrasing that Murasaki, a much more deliberate writer, certainly never surpassed. As for Shōnagon’s anecdotes, their vivacity is apparent even in translation. Neither in them nor in her more lyrical passages is there any hint of a search for literary effect. She gives back in her pages, with apparently as little effort of her own as a gong that sounds when it is struck, the whole warmth and glitter of the life that surrounded her; and the delicate precision of her perceptions makes diarists such as Lady Anne Clifford (whose name occurs to me at random) seem mere purblind Hottentots.

This gift manifests itself incidentally in her extraordinary power of conveying character. Yukinari, Masahiro and Narimasa, despite their uniform absurdity, live with extraordinary distinctness; as does the Empress herself, the only other woman whom the authoress allows to figure in her pages.

Her style is very much less ‘architected’ than Murasaki’s; but there are moments when she begins building up a huge network of dependent clauses in a manner extremely close to _Genji_, and often one feels that the earlier book leads us, so to speak, to the brink of the other. This fits in with the presumed dates. _Genji_ was probably begun in 1001, when Murasaki lost her husband, and the _Pillow-Book_ seems, with the possible exception of two or three entries, to have been written before the twelfth month of 1000, when the Empress Sadako died.

Shōnagon has often been spoken of as learned. Our only source of information on the subject is her own book. In it she shows signs of having read the _Mēng-ch’iu_, a collection of edifying Chinese anecdotes, much studied by Japanese children from the ninth to the nineteenth century. She knows too some poems by Po Chü-i (the easiest of Chinese writers) and refers once to the Analects of Confucius. In Japanese literature she knows the usual round of poems from the _Kokinshū_ and _Gosenshū_. To speak, as European writers have done, of her vast acquaintance with Chinese literature, is an anachronism; for in her time only fragments of this literature had reached Japan. The great poets of the eighth century, for example, were entirely unknown. But the term ‘learned’ is in any case a relative one. A modern lady-in-waiting who had read a little Greek (or even only a little Gilbert Murray) would certainly pass as learned in her own circle; while at Girton no one would be impressed. And it is likely enough that the attainments by which Shōnagon dazzled the Palace would at the Fujiwara Academy have passed quite unnoticed.

It is, in fact, her extreme readiness of wit rather than her erudition that makes Shōnagon remarkable. I have not been able in my extracts to do her full justice in this respect, because in order to appreciate her allusions and repartees one must be in a position to grasp them immediately. Wit, more often than not, evaporates in the process of explanation.

But the brilliance of an allusion such as that to the Analects[98] may perhaps be vaguely surmised. That anyone possessed of such a gift should enjoy using it seems natural enough. Almost every anecdote in her book centres round some clever repartee or happy quotation of her own. For this she has been reproached, and Murasaki has made her colleague’s _shitari-gao_ (‘have done it!’ look, i.e. air of self-satisfaction) proverbial. In life Shōnagon may indeed have been as insupportable as Murasaki evidently found her; but in the _Pillow-Book_ her famous _shitari-gao_ makes no disagreeable effect. We feel that Shōnagon displays her agile wits with the same delight as an athlete takes in running or leaping.

The Japanese excelled at portraiture. But the portraits that survive are those of statesmen and priests. The ‘Yoritomo,’ by Takanobu (the obstinate-looking man in black triangular garments squatting with a white tablet hugged to his breast[99]), and the Shōichi Kokushi (that old one-eyed priest spread out over a great armchair), by Chō Densu, are among the greatest products of Japanese art. But I recollect no portraits of women till a much later date. Murasaki and Shōnagon we know only as posterity imagined them—that is to say, as conventional Court beauties of the Heian period. One does not, however, in reading the _Pillow-Book_, get the impression of a woman in whose life her own appearance figured in any very important way. Had she, on the other hand, been downright ugly, it would have been impossible to secure her a post as lady-in-waiting. We may suppose then that her looks were moderate. We certainly cannot accept the argument of M. Revon: ‘Si elle n’avait pas été distinguée de sa personne elle n’aurait pas raillé comme elle fait, les types vulgaires’—reasoning which shows a fortunate unfamiliarity with the conversation of plain women. But we have no reason to doubt that Shōnagon had many lovers. Stress is usually laid on her affairs with Tadanobu, to which, however, she devotes only some few, rather insipid pages. I imagine that her real lovers were for the most part people of her own rank; whereas Tadanobu, rather circuitously (it was owing to his sister’s marriage with the Empress’s brother) soon became a _pezzo grosso_. But in the ’eighties of the tenth century he was well within Shōnagon’s reach, and if they were ever lovers, it may have been before her arrival at Court.

Here is the longest passage which deals with their relationship:

Tadanobu, having heard and believed some absurd rumour about me, began saying the most violent things—for example, that I wasn’t fit to be called a human being at all and he couldn’t imagine how he had been so foolish as to treat me like one. I was told that he was saying horrible things about me even in the Imperial apartments. I felt uncomfortable about it, but I only said, laughing: ‘If these reports are true, then that’s what I’m like and there is nothing more to be done. But if they are not true, he will eventually find out that he has been deceived. Let us leave it at that....’ Henceforward, if he passed through the Black Door room and heard my voice from behind the screens he would bury his face in his sleeve, as though the merest glimpse of me would disgust him. I did not attempt to explain matters, but got in the habit of always looking in some other direction.

Two months later matters had advanced some way towards a reconciliation, for Shōnagon writes:

He sent for me to come out to him, and (though I did not respond) we met later by accident. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘why have we given up being lovers? You know now that I have stopped believing those stories about you. I cannot conceive what is the obstacle. Are two people who have been friends for so many years really to drift apart in this way? As it is, my duties bring me constantly in and out of their Majesties’ apartments. But if that were to stop, our friendship would simply vanish, with nothing to show for all that has taken place between us.’ ‘I have no objection to our coming together again,’ I said. ‘In fact, there is only one thing I should be sorry for. If we were seeing one another in the way you mean, I should certainly stop praising you[100]—as I constantly do at present—in her Majesty’s hearing, with all the other gentlewomen sitting by. You won’t, I am sure, misunderstand me. One is embarrassed under such circumstances, something inside one sticks and one remains tongue-tied.’ He laughed. ‘Am I then never to be praised except by people who know nothing about me?’ he asked. ‘You may be certain,’ I said, ‘that if we become good friends again I shall never praise you. I cannot bear people, men or women, who are prejudiced in favour of someone they are intimate with or get into a rage if the mildest criticism of someone they are fond of is made in their presence.’ ‘Oh, I can trust you not to do that!’ he exclaimed.

I will end with a more general question. Women, it will have struck the reader, seem to play an inordinately large rôle in the literary life of the Heian period. How came they here to secure a position that their sex has nowhere else been able to achieve?

As far as the production of literature went, women did not, in fact, enjoy so complete a monopoly as European accounts of the period would suggest. But convention obliged men to write in Chinese,[101] and not merely to use the Chinese language, but to compose essays and poems the whole attitude and content of which were derived from China. It may be objected that a potentially great writer would not have submitted to these restrictions—that he would have broken out into the vernacular, like Dante or Paracelsus. But this is to demand that a literary genius should also possess the many qualities essential to a successful reformer. The use of the native _kana_ (the only form of character in which the Japanese language could be written with reasonable facility) was considered unmanly, and to use it would have made a writer as self-conscious as a London clubman would feel if he were to walk down Bond Street in skirts.

Women, anthropologists tell us, are often the repositories of a vanishing or discarded culture. And their conservatism becomes more marked where the mastering of a new script is involved; for women, though quick at acquiring spoken languages, have seldom shown much aptitude for the study of difficult scripts. To a minor degree, the same phenomenon was repeated in Japan a thousand years later. While the energy of male writers was largely absorbed in acquiring a foreign culture, and their output was still too completely derivative to be of much significance, there arose a woman[102] whose work, hitching straight on to the popular novelettes of the eighteenth century, has outlived the pseudo-European experimentations of her contemporaries. The fact that the men of the ’nineties in Japan were absorbed in imitating Turgenev does not, however, explain the occurrence of such a prodigy as Ichyō (a working seamstress who in the years between nineteen and twenty-four produced twenty-five longish stories, forty volumes of diary, and six of critical essays); nor does the convention which obliged men to write in Chinese explain the appearance during the Heian period of such female geniuses as Ono no Komachi, Michitsuna’s mother, Izumi Shikibu, Sei Shōnagon and Murasaki—a state of affairs all the more remarkable seeing that from the fourteenth to the end of the nineteenth century not a single woman writer of any note made her appearance in Japan.

The following tables will facilitate comparison with the original:

+Translation+ +Original+ _Page_ _Section_ 24 301[103] 25 160 32 32 34 3 35 20 37 86 56 124 58 75 62 45 68 72 73 156 77 194 78 94 80 46 82 46 83 286, 291 84 89 88 82 90 48 92 60 93 66, 230 94 87, 200 95 257, 268 96 252 101 263 103 103 112 287 113 31 114 30 116 21 118 24 A & B 119 295 121 270 123 132, 133 125 83, 109, 63 127 183 128 187, 113 129 232 130 234, 271 131 235 132 285 133 284 135 297 139 6 155 116

+Original+ +Translation+ _Section_ _Page_ 3 34 6 138 20 35 21 116 24 118 30 114 31 113 32 32 45 62 46 82 48 90 60 92 63 126 66 93 72, 82 74, 88 83 125, 90 86 37 87 94 89 84 94 78 103 101 113 128 116 155 124 56 132, 133 123 156 73 183, 187 127 194 77 200 94 232 129 234 130 235 131 252, 257 96, 95 263 101 268 95 270 121 271 130 284, 285 133, 132 286 83 287 112 295 119 297 135 301 24

_Other Translations by Arthur Waley_ ————————————————————————————————————

The Tale of Genji

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