Author: Liza Dalby
Publisher: Doubleday
Rating: WORTHY!
Murasaki Shikibu was a real person, who left us a diary and a novel - the earliest novel ever written of which we still have evidence - titled, The Tale of Genji hence Liza Dalby's own title. This novel (Murasaki's, not Dalby's!) was written almost a thousand years ago in what's now known as the Heian period of Japanese history. We only have it today because it was so popular in her own time that many copies were made and passed around. In modern terms, she would be a best-selling author even though she made not a single grain of rice off this novel.
Murasaki was not the only woman of that period who is remembered, curiously enough. There were several others, such as Akazome Emonis who was a waka poet, Lady Koshikibu, who was a contributor to a collection of stories titled Tales of the Riverside Middle Counselor, Izumi Shikibu, a poet whose mother (Michitsuna no Haha - her name is not known so this literally means Michitsuna's mom) wrote The Gossamer Diary, and Sei Shōnagon who wrote The Pillow Book. What a stunning group of women these were! Talk about strong females: these women were strong enough to last a thousand years and more!
Murasaki's success was in and of itself is quite remarkable, but she was distinguished in other ways, too. She was all-but unique in the fact that she could read and write Chinese, a prized skill found almost exclusively in men at that time - a time when women were not considered smart enough for "book learning"! This was important, too, because this was a period during which the Japanese were quite sycophantic about Chinese culture and language.
Most of the women mentioned above were not given, at birth, the names by which we now know them. These are nicknames or titles, describing them in terms of other things - such as a relative's occupation) rather than their family names or their given names. According to wikipedia, Shikibu is taken from her father's employment at the Ministry of Ceremonials, and Murasaki may have referred to the color of the wisteria flower. No one knows for sure what her real name was, but it may have been Fujiwara Takako (Fuji also refers to a violet color), which is the name I use here.
Fujiwara grew up pretty much with the same expectation of her that was held for all women of her time: that she would marry and produce male children for her husband. She had other ideas, however, and had a very strong personality and a real interest in and facility for learning. Her older brother was not very good at picking up Chinese, but Fujiwara, who would listen in on his lessons, mastered it. She was widely read and a good conversationalist.
As it happened she did marry, to an older man, and produced a daughter, but shortly afterwards, her husband died, and she wound up entering the royal court as a lady in waiting while someone else raised her daughter. This seems particularly odd to us today, but it was not considered out of the ordinary in her own time.
She spent some significant time at court and her relation of those days in this novel is as charming and engaging as it is revealing of court politics and antics. I loved the completely natural pace of the novel, the connection with the changing seasons, and real insight into Japanese minds from a thousand years ago. The novel is an easy read (not at all like modern historical fiction), and draws heavily upon actual historical sources with some creative fiction tying it together, written by someone who not only actually knows what she's talking about, but understands it completely. I recommend this highly.
