The Diary of Lady Murasaki Read Online Free PDF

years, it is the collection of poems to which biographers have constantly turned for help. But poetry collections, whether they are understood to be autobiographical or not, are false friends. Certainly, as we have seen, much Japanese court poetry was occasional in nature, and the habit of giving poems prefaces which explain the circumstances of their composition tends to give them a spurious air of reliability, but such is their conventional nature that any attempt to use them as historical record is fraught with difficulties. The standard Japanese biographies of Murasaki 3 lean too heavily on these poems, which are often put to work in dubious contexts. It is for this reason that we must avoid using the poetry as a biographical tool except in extremis . The following account will therefore be of necessity somewhat bald.
    Given the fact that close relatives were set against each other with monotonous regularity and that matters of rank were sacrosanct, it is only natural that Murasaki herself should feel that she had little in common with those in the higher echelons of the ruling Fujiwara clan, despite the fact that they shared a common ancestry. Her particular branch of the family had been coming down in the world for some time and was now on the very fringes of the establishment, filling posts such as provincial governorships, which gave ample opportunity for financial reward but alienated the holder from the tightly knit world of court and capital. The class is known by the generic term zuryō . Frequent visits to the provinces were regarded as onerous duties and indeed as a form of exile.
    If Murasaki’s family were in no way powerful, it had reason to be proud of its literary lineage. Her great-grandfather Kanesuke (877–933) had been closely associated with Ki no Tsurayuki, the driving force behind the rehabilitation of Japanese native verse that led in 905 to the compilation of the first imperial anthology, the Kokinshū (‘A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern’). He himself had fifty-seven poems chosen for various imperial anthologies thereafter. Her grandfather Masatada (910?–62) had also been close to Tsurayuki and had seven poems chosen for the Gosenshū (‘A Later Collection of Poems’, commissioned 951). Her father Tametoki continued the tradition of scholarship, but his main interests were in the Chinese classics and poetry in Chinese, and his chief claim to fame must be his role in the education of his daughter. All three of these men left personal poetry collections. 4
    Tametoki was dogged somewhat by ill luck and never rose very high in the court hierarchy. The first mention we have of him is as a boy in Tentoku 4 (960).3.29 at a poetry contest. From this we may deduce that he was born around 945. Soon after 960 he must have graduated as Master of Confucianism ( Monjōshō ), and the first part ofhis career seems to have been smooth. He became Junior Secretary Elect of Harima in 968 and served under Emperor Kazan, becoming Sixth Chamberlain and later Senior Secretary in the Ministry of Ceremonial ( Shikibu no Daijō ). This title is part of the origin of Murasaki’s name. When Kazan was forced to retire, Tametoki was left out in the cold and remained without an official post for the next ten years. Then in Chōtoku 2 (996).1.7 Emperor Ichijō appointed him Governor of Awaji, a very lowly post indeed. So indignant was he that for once in his life he asserted himself, addressing a memorial to the Emperor which included the lines: ‘Bitter study on winter nights brought blood-red tears to soak my sleeves; but in the spring morning on Appointments Day my hopes were high in the blue heavens.’ It appears that Ichijō may have been moved by the appeal, because Tametoki was given the more prestigious province of Echizen, whence he took Murasaki in 996.
    All that is known about Tametoki’s stay in Echizen comes from a preface to one of his poems to be found in the collection Honchō reisō , which