Now Murasaki herself has every quality which these earlier writers lack. She exploits character, in a very restrained way, it is true, but with an unerring instinct how to produce the greatest effect with the least possible display. And to this she adds not only an astonishing capacity for invention, but also a beauty of actual diction unsurpassed by any long novel in the world. For none of these qualities was she indebted in any way to such of her predecessors as survive. Concerning lost works it is useless to speculate.
I have said that besides the three early stories there are other prose works which have some bearing on the history of Japanese fiction. To begin with there are the Tales of Ise, written somewhere about 890 a.d. They consist of 125 short paragraphs (often only two or three lines) containing little poems and a description of the circumstances under which they were written. They appear to concern the love-adventures of a single person, but are quite disconnected. I have translated one of the longer episodes in my Japanese Poetry. The Yamato Tales, about half a century later, also centre round poems. They consist of rather trivial anecdotes about courtiers of the period.
We now come to the one book which, though it is not a work of fiction and though it lacks the qualities of deliberate art which make Genji so astonishing, at least seems to move in the same world of thought and feeling. This is the Gossamer Diary (‘Kagerō Nikki’).
The writer was mistress of the great statesman Fujiwara no Kane-iye (929–999). By him she had a son called Michitsuna, and her name not being recorded she is known to history as ‘Michitsuna’s mother.’ He made her acquaintance in 954 and Michitsuna was born the year after. But Kane-iye already had a wife, a legitimate family and numerous mistresses. Lady Gossamer (as we will for convenience call the writer of the Diary) could not expect undivided attention. This was a fact that she took years to recognize, and when the diary closes (in the twentieth year of their liaison!) she had indeed recognized her position, but was still as far from accepting it as at the start.
The record begins in 954, the year in which they met. ‘For twenty days he has not been here at all.’ ‘This month he has written only twice....’ Such entries are frequent from the beginning. Her grievance grew and grew. It became her whole life. When he did not come, she wept; when he came, she wept because he had not come sooner. She was immersed in perpetual devotions; while he, like our own eighteenth-century bucks whom in every particular he so strongly resembled, only turned religious when he was ill. Often he found her kneeling before an image of Buddha, lost in prayer; and one day, suddenly infuriated by this dismal reception, he kicked over her incense-bowl and, snatching the rosary from her hands, flung it across the room. He loved gaiety, noise, funny stories, practical jokes. She was shy, sensitive and, above all, terribly serious. His method of entertaining her was to repeat with immense gusto ‘every piece of silly clownery or tomfoolery’ that was current in the City, spiced with jokes and puns of his own.
She was incurably sentimental. Never for an instant could she recognize that time must bring changes, and after ten years she was still expecting him to court her with the ardour of arishi toki, ‘the times that were.’
One night when she is awaiting him she lights the candles. No! She will let him find her in the dark, as in those old days when their love was still a secret escapade. She puts the candles out and, hearing him fumbling at the entry, cries Koko ni! (Here!) and stretches out her hand as she had often done before. But to-night he is in no mood for hide-and-seek. ‘What game is this?’ he cries angrily, ‘light the candles at once. I cannot see my way into the room.’ Then he asks if they can find him a snack of something to eat; he has had no supper. He eats his fish in silence, then says that he has had a tiring day, yawns, and falls asleep. At dawn his sons, the children of her rival, come to fetch him, and he calls her to the window to ‘look what fine young fellows they have grown.’
His visits become more and more infrequent. She is desperately unhappy, talks of suicide, threatens to become a nun and on more than one occasion actually instals herself in a nunnery, but always allows herself to be ‘rescued’ at the last minute. The second flight was to a temple at Narutaki. Here she remained for many months in a state of the greatest agitation; but she did not take her vows, and in the end allowed herself to be fetched, quietly away by Kane-iye and her son Michitsuna, now a boy in his ’teens.
It was at this moment that she actually began the composition of the Diary, the first part of which is not a day-to-day record but an autobiographical fragment composed many years later than the events which it records. But henceforward the book has all the character of a diary and is indeed very minute; scarcely a shower passes unrecorded. A new phase in the story begins with the adoption by Lady Gossamer of a little orphan girl aged twelve, a child of her lover Kane-iye by a woman whom years ago he had seduced and immediately abandoned. The child grows up and is ultimately courted by the head of the office in which Lady Gossamer’s son Michitsuna is now working. Kane-iye gives his consent to the match; Lady Gossamer hears stories to the young man’s discredit, foresees for her adopted daughter a life all too like her own and opposes the plan.
Here (in 974 a.d., twenty years after she first met Kane-iye) the Diary ends abruptly.