Chapter 8 Japan 321several remarkable things about this. The first is that women were allowed to
learn to read and write. The second is that our view of their lives is not filtered
through the imaginations of male authors writing about women but through
women writing about themselves and their times. And most remarkable of all,
since there were no established indigenous genres to channel their self-expres-
sion, they had the freedom to make up their own.
We see women enjoying liberties that elite women of many later periods
would envy, yet qualities of masculine and feminine were clearly drawn and
their worlds finely demarcated. Learning, as it came to Japan, was Chinese
learning, and only men were thought to be capable of the years of study
required, first to master Chinese, then to master the script and the difficult liter-
ature that came from China. Men of standing attempted to speak Chinese,
quoted Chinese sayings, and attempted to write philosophy and poetry in Chi-
nese. The situation was much like the role played by Latin in European societ-
ies for many centuries. However, very early, perhaps through later acquaintance
with Sanskritic syllabic scripts, Chinese characters were modified to produce a
syllabic form, called kana. The fairly simple phonemic system of Japanese
could be handled completely in kana, but by then the language had been so
enriched with Chinese loanwords and the evocative quality of Chinese charac-
ters themselves, that written Japanese never did abandon kanji (“Chinese writ-
ing”). Kana, then, became a kind of private, vernacular script for writing about
personal things, the emotions, the inner life, in the Japanese language. This sim-
plified script was easy to learn and was eagerly adopted by women at court
while not threatening status distinctions between men and women.
Women at court kept diaries and wrote about the life around them; in their
writings we have the wonderful reversal of a male world portrayed through
women’s eyes. The best and deservedly most famous of these works is The Tale
of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. It was written about 1000 C.E. as a 54-chapter
novel which is thought to be the first novel ever written anywhere. The first
English translation by Arthur Waley was published in six volumes; because of
its length, most people know the work in various abridgments. Lady Murasaki
was from a junior line of the great Fujiwara family whose father lamented that
his brilliant daughter was not born a boy. He was not of high enough rank to
give her a serious career at court, but she went into the service of Empress
Akiko for several years and then retired from court and wrote her novel.
The novel is a form of prose fiction that even the Chinese had not devel-
oped. Its emphasis is on characters more than plot; the main character of The
Tale of Genji is “the shining Genji,” a dazzlingly handsome, romantic lover,
poet, calligrapher, musician, and dancer: “A slight flush from too much drink
made Genji even handsomer than usual. His skin glowed through his light
summer robes.” We trace the life of Genji through episode after intense epi-
sode, most of them romantic intrigues triggered by the sight of a silken sleeve
and expressed in eloquent exchanges of poetic couplets under autumn moons.
Beneath the refined surfaces of Heian life—layered silk in matching pastels,