Like the palace cats’, the eyes of the Lady Murasaki Shikibu were accustomed to the dark. The gloomy corridors of the vast complex of imperial buildings at Heian, where a wanderer could get waylaid or lost, were her home territory.
The half-light in which Japanese court life was lived in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries concealed nothing from her stare, though the obscurity was deep enough to make stories of mistaken identity among lovers credible.
Her powers of observation produced The Tale of Genji, which has some claim to be the world’s first novel: Genjfs intricate realism, recorded with the restraint of a Jane Austen and the depth of reflection of a Proust, gave it in its day a popularity which it has never lost. It also makes it, as novels go, a work of unexcelled usefulness to historians, recalling faithfully the cus toms and values of a long-vanished world.
Appearing like a modern serial, bit by bit, over many years, Genji became a part of the culture it described, titillating and tantalizing readers who vied for manuscripts of unread chapters, stimulating gossip, and reinforcing the peculiar ideals of Heian, ideals which elevated poetry above prowess, beauty above brawn, and which esteemed a sensitive failure more highly than a coarse success.
Genji was read by women together in the intimate seclusion of a palace full of secret recesses, as in this early twelfth-century illustration of a scene from Chapter Fifty (Azumaya, “The Eastern Cottage”). Hiding in her half-sister’s apartments, Ukifune is having her hair dressed while amusing herself with illustrations of the tale which a servant reads her. The landscape-screens were magic windows on distant scenes, which the inmates of the court were condemned never to see atfirsthand by the sedentary conventions of their way of life. Earlier sequences of illustrations to Genji certainly existed but have not survived.
