The four major court memoirs written in the late 10th and early 11th century are the "Kagero nikki" (translated by Edward Seidensticker as "The Gossamer Years"), the "Izumi Shikibu nikki" (Lady Izumi's Story), the "Murasaki Shikibu nikki" (Lady Murasaki's Journal), and the "Sarashina nikki" (The Sarashina Memoir).
The first of these covers the period 954 to 974, and was written by a woman known only as the wife and mother of two major court officials. In it she states that hers is "a diary concerning myself only," and there is rarely any doubt as to her feelings. So much is given up to complaint that, as the late scholar Earl Miner has said, "it is difficult to decide whether she is the most realistic of the major diarists or simply the most tortured by ordinary human realities."
More equitable is "Lady Izumi's Story." The author was a fine poet and left an estimable collection. She was also more satisfied by ordinary human realities and seemed to have taken advantage of some of them. She was said to have had a large number of lovers even considering the generous Heian standard.
The journal of the famous Murasaki Shikibu (author of "The Tale of Genji") covers only the brief period from the early autumn of 1008 to the beginning of 1010 and is devoted mostly to the doings of the court. What the author of "The Gossamer Years" found nearly insupportable is here celebrated as official felicity, but there are moments of displeasure.
Lady Murasaki could not stand Izumi Shikibu and considered her life a very loose one. She was also irritated by the way she was looked at by Sei Shonagon, author of the entertaining "Pillow Book." She also writes of courtiers looking at her Genji story, which seems to have been read as, of all things, court history.
The author of "The Sarashina Memoir" was the niece of the author of "The Gossamer Years," and her stepmother was related to the daughter of Murasaki. Born in 1008, she grew up in a literary court and hers is perhaps the most enjoyable of the four diaries to read.
Perhaps this is because it is the only one of the four to cover the whole life of the author. It begins when she was 12 years old and ends when she is probably about 60. She loved "The Tale of Genji" and imitated it in her other writings including, perhaps, this memoir.
These four journals then offer a rare view of the actualities of court life a thousand years ago, and in this study John Wallace analyzes them for their individual characteristics and what they suggest of Heian life.
For him the women writers are not the passive objects sometimes portrayed but individuals who confronted their difficulties by writing about them.
They did so in a script that was then relatively new. Hiragana, vernacular graphology, was replacing the Chinese-based magana and was being used for delineation of what some scholars have called a private space as contrasted to the public space institutionally oriented from China. This new space was increasingly populated by women writers for whom hiragana became an alternative means of expression -- so much so that the script was sometimes called a "woman's hand."
Wallace sees that the social situations of these Heian hiragana-prose writers was remarkably similar. Their contributions can be read as a conversation about unsecured and awkward relationships, and their own present and future places in high social life.
All of these authors arrived in this high society as compromised women. They were widows or divorced, and they were ladies-in-waiting. This post has been defined by one scholar as something like our contemporary "hostess."
This was then a position that found them highly educated yet at the same time servants. They were expected to be able to educate their betters and yet had to become party flirts to achieve the status that only men could give. Their ingenuity, talent and bravery make their stories more than court documents. They become human records.
It is this aspect that Wallace's meticulous and scholarly account emphasizes. In so doing he gives us a view into a world that, thanks to these memoirs, is still alive.
For those wishing to read the complete journals a number of translations are in print: "The Gossamer Years" by either Edward Seidensticker or Sonja Arntzen, as well as a partial translation by Helen McCullough; "Lady Izumi's Diary" by either Edwin Cranston or Miner; "Lady Murasaki's Journal" by Richard Bowrings and "The Sarashina Memoir" by Ivan Morris.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.