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Murasaki Shikibu. Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan
Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan
Table of Contents
TRANSLATORS' NOTE
INTRODUCTION. BY AMY LOWELL
DIARIES OF COURT LADIES OF OLD JAPAN
I
THE SARASHINA DIARY
A.D. 1009–1059
II. THE DIARY OF MURASAKI SHIKIBU[1]
A.D. 1007–1010
III. THE DIARY OF IZUMI SHIKIBU
A.D. 1002–1003
THE END. APPENDIX. A. OLD JAPANESE CALENDAR
B. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF EVENTS CONNECTED WITH THE DIARIES
Отрывок из книги
Murasaki Shikibu, Sugawara no Takasue no Musume, Izumi Shikibu
Published by Good Press, 2019
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Takasué's daughter shared with so many of her contemporaries the deep love of nature and the power to express this love in words. I have already quoted one or two of her entries on this journey. We follow the little company over mountains and across rivers, we camp with them by night, and tremble as they trembled lest robbers should attack them. We see what the little girl saw: "The mountain range called Nishitomi is like folding screens with good pictures," "people say that purple grass grows in the fields of Mushashi, but it is only a waste of various kinds of reeds, which grow so high that we cannot see the bows of our horsemen who are forcing their way through the tall grass," and share her disappointment when she says: "We passed a place called 'Eight Bridges,' but it was only a name, no bridge and no pretty sight."
They reach Kiōto and a rather dull life begins, enlivened only by the avid reading of romances, among them the "Genji Monogatari." Then her sister dies giving birth to a child, and the life becomes, not only dull, but sorrowful. After a time, the lady obtains a position at Court, but neither her bringing up nor her disposition had suited her for such a place. She mentions that "Mother was a person of extremely antiquated mind," and it is evident that she had been taught to look inward rather than outward. An abortive little love affair lightens her dreariness for a moment. Life had dealt hardly with the sensitive girl, from year to year she grows more wistful, but suddenly something happens, a mere hint of a gleam, but opening a possibility of brightness. Who he was, we do not know, but she met him on an evening when "there was no starlight, and a gentle shower fell in the darkness." They talked and exchanged poems, but she did not meet him again until the next year; then, after an evening entertainment to which she had not gone, "when I looked out, opening the sliding door on the corridor, I saw the morning moon very faint and beautiful," and he was there. Again they exchanged poems and she believed that happiness had at last arrived. He was to come with his lute and sing to her. "I wanted to hear it," she writes, "and waited for the fit occasion, but there was none, ever." A year later she has lost hope, she writes a poem and adds, "So I composed that poem—and there is nothing more to tell." Nothing more, indeed, but what is told conveys all the misery of her deceived longing.
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