All about Love

I grew up on the outskirts of London with a Dad who sat in a deckchair and read books in oriental languages while other dads mowed their lawns or fixed their houses. Our house was certainly in dire need of fixing, but it did have a lot of books in it. The rooms were lined with shelves of Chinese and Japanese volumes printed on rice paper, bound with silk and fitted into boxes, along with some translations. Among them was The Tale of Genji, ‘the world’s first novel’, as my Dad told me. The translator was Arthur Waley, a shy awkward man who never actually visited the East but who translated magnificently from many Asian languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Ainu and Mongol.

It was not until the late Seventies, however, that I sat down to read Genji. By then I had caught the Japan bug and was determined to go there. I assumed that this enormously long classic, written by a Japanese court lady a thousand years ago, would be hard going; but in fact I was utterly enthralled. I fell in love with Genji, a handsome, roguish, charismatic, badly behaved prince; although his behaviour was not bad by the standards of his day, only by our more buttoned-up ones. Genji was not in the least like Beowulf (written two hundred years earlier) or The Canterbury Tales (written three hundred years later). It seemed to me to be much more like Jane Austen. The author of Genji kept a diary, so quite a bit is known about her, but not her name. She is normally referred to as Murasaki, the name of one of her most dearly loved characters. Her ‘surname’, Shikibu, is the title of one of her father’s court positions. She was a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Akiko in the city we now know as Kyoto. While men wrote poetry in Chinese (the language of the educated élite, rather as French was in England after the Norman Conquest), women of the time used the Japanese alphabet, ideal for writing about everyday matters. The Tale of Genji is all about love and the search for the perfect woman, and is infused with a woman’s sensibility. Genji is so extraordinarily beautiful that people crowd to watch him pass on the street. He’s adept at the accomplishments essential to a well-bred man of his day. He plays the lute and the flute and is skilled at mixing perfumes and composing exquisite poems. He writes a beautiful hand and has immaculate taste in clothes. In fact, as the author disarmingly writes, ‘If I were to tell you of all his accomplishments you would think that he was soon going to become a bore.’ But what makes him most appealing is his tender heart, which leads him into all sorts of scrapes. He is forever falling in love. And even when he has lost interest in the object of his affections and long since moved on to someone else, he continues to take care of the women with whom he has had affairs. Genji is the son of the Emperor by the Emperor’s most beloved lady, who dies when he is a young child. Due to his mother’s low rank, Genji doesn’t have any of the connections that will enable him to advance at court. Instead the Emperor declares him a commoner and orders that he move away. This gives Genji plenty of time and opportunity to engage in his favourite pursuit – the conduct of love affairs. For Genji lives in a society in which any young nobleman worth his salt – and most particularly a man renowned as a paragon of beauty – is expected to pay court to virtually any lady of suitable (or even unsuitable) rank who happens to be around: ‘in view of his youth and popularity the young prince would be thought to be positively neglecting his duty if he did not indulge in a few escapades’. This was a society very different from our own. For a start women were generally speaking not supposed to be seen by men. Noblewomen had their own palaces (the aristocracy were the only people who counted, as far as Murasaki was concerned) and, when visitors called, received them hidden behind screens. When a noblewoman went out on to the tree-lined boulevards of the capital, Heian-kyo, she travelled in an ox-drawn carriage, hidden from view; though she made sure there was an exquisite silk sleeve draped gracefully out of the window so people could imagine just how noble and cultured the person inside was. As far as men were concerned this just made the women all the more mysterious. There was much standing on tiptoe and peeping through lattice fences, not just by the men, trying to catch a glimpse of these elusive creatures, but also by the women, when men such as Genji passed down the street. In one episode Genji happens to visit his foster mother who has become a nun and lives in a rather run-down back street. Looking around he sees beautiful pale foreheads through chinks in the blinds of the house next door, behind a wattle fence on which grow ivy and flowers. A little later a small girl emerges from the house bearing a heavily perfumed fan on which are laid some of the same flowers. When he looks at the fan he sees a poem ‘carelessly but elegantly scribbled’. His interest piqued, he sends back a reply. Genji has recently been discussing the possibility of ever finding the perfect woman. One of his friends asserts that only women of rank and breeding are worth considering. But they are all intrigued by the notion that ‘behind some gateway overgrown with vine weed, in a place where no one knows there is a house at all, there should be locked away some creature of unimagined beauty – with what excitement should we discover her!’ Seeing the poem, he wonders if the writer might be the ‘hidden flower’ he’s been looking for. Late at night he creeps into the lady’s chamber. In The Tale of Genji men regularly enter ladies’ palaces at night, make love to them in pitch dark and leave at daybreak. The servants, being well trained, studiously ignore the intruders though they know exactly who they are, as each man wears a powerful and very distinctive perfume which he has mixed himself. Genji becomes quite obsessed with the lady. It’s not so much her beauty that appeals to him as her fragility and pathos, the fact that she is so lovely and refined, yet living in straitened circumstances, next door to peasants and pounding threshing mills. He wants to make love to her somewhere more conducive and takes her to a deserted house. But then comes disaster. He falls asleep and has a vision of his jealous mistress standing over him, trying to tear the girl from his side. (The girl is, of course, far from the only woman in his life.) Moments later the girl mysteriously falls ill and dies. She has been killed by the mistress’s vengeful spirit. Some of the most memorable episodes in The Tale of Genji are humorous. In one, Genji hears about a princess who lives all alone (apart, of course, from her maids, who don’t count). One day he happens to hear her playing her zither. She does so with such skill that he assumes she must be very beautiful. He sends her poems, but she is so shy and awkward she doesn’t answer, which only piques his interest further. Finally he sneaks in. There is a delicious scent of sandalwood emanating from her clothes, surely evidence of extraordinary beauty. But when he wakes up the next morning he discovers that, far from being beautiful, she has a huge red nose and, worse still, wears very old-fashioned clothes. He’s so horrified he doesn’t even send the customary morning-after poem until evening. But in the end his tender heart is touched and he takes her too under his wing. The early part of the tale is full of stories like these, often poignant, sometimes humorous, sometimes truly tragic, detailing Genji’s youthful indiscretions and misadventures, at the end of which he has gathered a brood of women who each live in an apartment in his palace. But as Genji grows older, the story becomes darker. He suffers, he has terrible failures and disasters, and in the end he loses the person dearest to his heart – Murasaki, after whom the author is named. The Tale of Genji suffuses Japanese culture and society. It features in everything from art to the incense-guessing game, and episodes from it form the plots of many of the Noh plays. It enormously coloured the way Japan looked to me. Japanese, I should add, are usually amazed to hear that I’ve read and love it. For them it’s like Beowulf, so difficult that they too can’t read it in the original and rely on modern Japanese translations. These days Waley’s classic translation, the first into English, is generally criticized as being too free. Edward Seidensticker’s is said to be far more accurate. The most recent, by Royall Tyler, has been published in a magnificent boxed set with line drawings of some of the Japanese illustrations to The Tale of Genji, an illuminating introduction and plenty of footnotes which explain the allusions. It is translated respectfully, keeping as close as possible to the original and, as in the original, the characters do not have names but are referred to by their positions. Waley’s translation, by contrast, gallops along. It may be a little inaccurate but it reads like a dream. It’s a piece of literature in its own right. Picking it up again to write this, I found I couldn’t put it down.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 21 © Lesley Downer 2009