Murasaki Shikibu — The Woman Who Wouldn't Write Even "One"

Not a Boy

"What a pity. What bad luck that this child is not a boy."

Her father sighed this all the time. We know because the girl he sighed over wrote it down herself.

At home, her brother Nobunori was learning to read Chinese books. He was a boy, and some say he was her older brother, some her younger.

The girl sat nearby and listened.

Nobunori was slow at reading. Sometimes he forgot what he had been taught. And the girl, who only listened from the side, learned it strangely fast.

Her father, Fujiwara no Tametoki, was a scholar known for his Chinese poems. He had given his life to learning. Perhaps that is why the sigh slipped out.

We do not know this girl's real name. We do not know exactly when she was born, either.

Later, people would call her Murasaki Shikibu.

And when she grew up, she would write this:

"I do not even write the character for 'one.' I am very clumsy, and it is shameful."

It is the easiest character of all. The woman who stopped writing even that one would write a very long story.

In 996, her father Tametoki was named a kokushi, a governor of a province. But the province first chosen for him was Awaji, a small one of low rank.

It is said that Tametoki handed in a paper of complaints, with a line of Chinese poetry added.

"On cold winter nights I studied in misery, and red tears overflowed onto my cloth. On the spring morning the appointments were announced, there was only a blue sky before my eyes."

The line moved the emperor, and the post was changed to Echizen, a large province. One line written in Chinese characters changed where her father was sent. A later collection of tales says so.

The daughter went down to Echizen with her father. It is said that this was the only time in her life that she lived away from the capital.

There was a friend who was sad to see her go. Each of them had lost a sister, and on the outside of their letters they wrote "Elder Sister" and "Middle Sister" to each other.

As they parted, she sent a poem.

"Give your message to the wings of the geese flying north. Write to me as if writing across the clouds, and never let the letters stop."

The road to Echizen went over mountains. On the mountain path at Shiotsu, the plants grew wild and thick. Men of low rank, in shabby clothes, were grumbling:

"This really is a hard road."

Later, she wrote down those words in her own book of poems.

In Echizen, the snow piled up deep.

One day the calendar said "first snow," and nearby Mount Hino looked buried under it. Her thoughts flew to Mount Oshio in the capital. Would snow be swirling around the pines there today, too?

Another day, the people raked up the endless snow into a heap like a mountain. They climbed it and called to her: come out and see it, at least.

Her answer was a poem.

"If only this were Mount Kaeru, on the road home. My heart might lift, and I would go out to look." The name Kaeru sounds like the word for "return."

Perhaps she did not go out to the snow mountain.

In time, she left her father in Echizen and returned to the capital.

On the way back, she crossed Mount Kaeru itself. At a place called Yobisaka, the cliff path was terribly steep. Even the men carrying her sedan chair could hardly go on. She was afraid.

Then many monkeys came out from among the leaves.

She sang to those monkeys.

"Monkeys, please call out to people far away too. Here at Yobisaka, where I can hardly go on."

Even on a frightening cliff path, a poem came to her.

Back in the capital, a man soon began to write to her again and again.

Crimson Tears

"When you speak of crimson tears, I like it even less. It looks like the color of a fickle heart."

On the letter that came from the man, drops of red vermilion had been scattered. The words with it said it was the color of tears.

That was how she answered the letter.

Her book of poems does not name the sender. A scholar of a later age believes it was Fujiwara no Nobutaka.

Nobutaka belonged to the same family as her father. He was much older than she was. He already visited several women, and had children.

Stories of his flashy ways also remain.

When people went to worship at Mount Mitake, it was the custom for even high-ranking people to dress in plain clothes on purpose. But Nobutaka is said to have called that silly. What's wrong with going in fine clothes? Surely the god of Mitake would not tell a man to come in rags.

So he climbed the mountain path with his son in a showy outfit of deep purple and golden yellow. The people going up and down were shocked. They had never seen anyone dressed like that.

And in that same year, Nobutaka was named governor of Chikuzen. People said he had been right all along.

The one who wrote down this story was Sei Shonagon, in her book The Pillow Book.

This was the man who began to court her.

"I have no second heart."

He kept saying this. But around the same time, word came that he was courting the daughter of the governor of Omi, too.

Annoyed, she answered with a poem. Plover calling to your friends over the lake, she wrote, if you must, then keep on crying out at harbor after harbor.

Once, something like this happened.

She heard that the man had shown a letter she sent him to other people.

She sent word not by letter but by word of mouth. If he did not collect all her letters and return them, she would not write back again.

The man said he would return every one, and sent angry complaints. This was around the tenth day of the first month of the old lunar calendar, the headnote says.

The exchange went on. At last the man got angry and wrote:

"I will say nothing more."

She laughed and wrote back a poem, the headnote says.

She did not give an inch to the older man.

They are thought to have married around 999. Soon their daughter Kenshi was born.

Then, in the fourth month of the old calendar in 1001, Nobutaka died. They had been married only two or three years.

A poem from that time remains in her collection.

She was mourning how fleeting the world is when she saw some pictures of famous places in Michinoku. One of them showed Shiogama Bay, where seawater is boiled down to make salt.

"Since the evening he became smoke, the name Shiogama has felt dear to me."

The poem has no word for husband. Still, it has long been read as a poem for her dead husband.

Later she wrote about the big cabinet in her room. On one of its two shelves, old books of poems and stories were turned into homes for insects. On the other, the person who had piled up books on purpose was gone, and no one touched them.

The person who had piled up the books is also thought to be her husband.

Looking back in her diary on the years before she went to court, she wrote this.

For years she did nothing much. She spent her days and nights gazing blankly outside. The colors of the flowers, the voices of the birds, the sky shifting through spring and autumn, the moonlight, the frost and snow. She saw them all, and thought only, so the season has come again. She could not shake off her uneasy fear of what would happen to her.

Even so, with friends who understood her, she exchanged heartfelt letters about trifling stories. That was how she eased her boredom.

She also wrote that she had never thought of herself as someone who counted for anything in the world.

We do not know when she began to write The Tale of Genji.

A story is told at Ishiyama Temple. Asked for a new story, she shut herself in the temple for seven days. On the night of the harvest moon, she saw the moon reflected in the lake and is said to have thought of a scene for her tale. An old picture scroll at the temple shows her there.

In that scroll, the one who asked for the story is the empress she would later serve. But the years she left in her own words were different: gazing blankly at the sky, and sharing letters about stories with a friend who understood.

In 1006, or the year after, on the night of the twenty-ninth day of the twelfth lunar month, she went to court for the first time.

She was to serve Shoshi, Michinaga's daughter, who had become the empress, the consort of Emperor Ichijo.

A poem from her first sight of the court is in her collection too.

"The sadness of my own life has come along inside my heart, and now, here in the palace, my thoughts are in a tangle."

The women who served high-ranking people at court were called nyobo, court ladies.

Those court ladies already hated the newcomer, before they had even met her.