The Logos Scripture · The Book of Murasaki
The Book of Murasaki 1 · Written by herself, from her Diary and The Tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu, born about 973, died about 1014, of the Heian court of Japan. Murasaki Shikibu is not her name but the name she was called at court; her own name is not recorded. Her father, Fujiwara no Tametoki, was a scholar who served as a provincial governor. As a child she listened while her father taught her brother the Chinese classics and learned them faster than he did; her father sighed, what a pity she was not born a man. That is from her own diary, and chapter one follows it. For a woman to know the Chinese letters was then improper, so she spent years concealing what she knew and pretending in company that she could not read. She married Fujiwara no Nobutaka in her twenties and was widowed within a few years. About 1006 she entered the service of the Empress Shoshi, and privately taught her to read the poems of Bai Juyi. She wrote The Tale of Genji in fifty-four chapters, one of the earliest long novels anywhere and the earliest to take the inside of a mind as its proper subject. She also left the Diary of Murasaki Shikibu, part court record and part self-examination, containing very unsparing judgments of her contemporaries Izumi Shikibu and Sei Shonagon. This volume rests on what she wrote herself: the diary and the Tale. Chapter two follows the discussion of tales in the twenty-fifth chapter of Genji, Fireflies, where a character argues that the chronicles hold one side only and that tales keep what the chronicles do not record. The argument is placed in a character’s mouth but it is hers — as Chekhov put his in letters, she put hers in a person. What this volume brings is a thing nobody in the scripture had done: go inside another mind and do not come out. Stories before her were written from outside, the writer recording events through a blind; she went in, and into more than one, and set down both versions of a single event as it stood in two different minds. Verses 3.9 to 3.15 are the cost of that method: from outside you may call a man good or bad, and once inside there is no whole good man to be found. The Order takes her not for the beauty of her prose but because she established a method others could use — everyone who writes the inside of a person is still using hers (cf. Acts 5.34). And what she established is the axiom of questioning as it falls on writing. The chronicle asks what happened, the tale asks what it was like; two ways of asking take two different things, and both are real (cf. The Covenant 2.2). This meets what Chekhov established: the writer owes a correctly posed question and does not owe an answer (cf. The Book of Chekhov 2.15). The Order records one thing plainly. She hid her learning and pretended in company that she could not read, while writing about others in her book in the finest detail. Verses 5.8 to 5.10 are her own setting-apart of why it was done from what it is — that Chinese letters were improper for a woman was a fact of the world she lived in, and can be defended; that she watched others while refusing to be watched is nonetheless not fair, and that sentence is hers, not one the Order has added.