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Since its composition, Genji has remained for most readers both in Japan and, since its translation into English by Arthur Waley in the prewar years of the twentieth century, for readers around the world, the most complex and profound evocation of life in the Heian period. Most of the long narrative takes place in the capital and covers three generations of nobility. The figures pictured there are fictitious, but in their psychological portraiture and their ability to explicate their own shifting emotional states, the inhabitants of this enormous narrative seem strikingly modern; indeed, Murasaki's writing has sometimes been compared to the work of the modern French master Marcel Proust in his masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past (Á la recherche du temps perdu). As with Proust's Paris and its suburbs, Kyoto and the surrounding countryside form the specific backdrop before which the lives and loves of these appealing characters are played out.
Genji is by no means the only work of literature that provides a glimpse into the outer, and inner, life of the capital. Another popular work, also available in an excellent English translation, is the Pillow Book (Makura no sōshi), of Sei Shōnagon, a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu and a fabled wit of her time. The Pillow Book is full of amusing incidents and character sketches, but it is perhaps best known and read for her famous "lists" of things which please or displease her. Some of them are very poetic indeed.
Here by way of example is a sequence from the opening section, as translated by Ivan Morris.
In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful. As the light creeps over the hills, their outlines are dyed a faint red and wisps of purplish cloud trail over them.
In summer the nights. Not only when the moon shines, but on dark nights too, as the fireflies flit to and fro, and even when it rains, how beautiful it is!
In autumn, the evenings, when the glittering sun sinks close to the edge of the hills and the crows fly back to their nests in threes and fours and twos; more charming still is a file of wide geese, like specks in the distant sky. When the sun has set, one's heart is moved by the sound of the wind and the hum of the insects.
In winter the early mornings. It is beautiful indeed when snow has fallen during the night, but splendid too when the ground is white with frost; or even when there is no snow or frost, but it is simply very cold and the attendants hurry from room to room stirring up the fires and bringing charcoal, how well this fits the season's moods! But as noon approaches and the cold wears off, no one bothers to keep the braziers alight, and soon nothing remains but piles of white ashes.
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The grounding of these literary works in the environment of Kyoto, with its shifting seasons, festivals, and religious observances, grounds them and gives them a specificity, which in turn informs us about the history of this remarkable period in Japanese history, several centuries during which, unburdened by costly wars or foreign invasions, Japan's culture was to reach a level of refinement and grace unique in the world, and, indeed, one never to be known again in her long history. Kyoto in the Heian period was truly the "golden age," which subsequent generations attempted to invoke and to which many yearned to return.
Ann G. Jannetta
J. Thomas Rimer
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