561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)

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In spring, the dawn, when the slowly paling mountain rim is tinged with red, and wisps of faintly crimson-purple cloud float in the sky.

In summer, the night.

Moonlit nights, of course, but also at the dark of the moon, it's beautiful when fireflies are dancing everywhere in a mazy flight.

And it's delightful, too, to see just one or two fly through the darkness, glowing softly.

Rain falling on a summer night is also lovely.

In autumn, the evening.

The blazing sun has sunk very close to the mountain rim, and now even the crows in threes and fours or twos and threes hurrying to their roost are a moving sight.

Still more enchanting is the sight of a string of wild geese in the distant sky, very tiny.

And oh, how inexpressible, when the sun has sunk, to hear in the growing darkness the wind and the song of autumn insects.

In winter, the early morning, if snow is falling, of course, it's unutterably delightful.

But it's perfect too if there's a pure white frost, or even just when it's very cold, and they hasten to build up the fires in the braziers and carry in fresh charcoal.

But it's unpleasant as the day draws on and the air grows warmer, how the brazier fire dies down to white ash.

So, that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the most famous passages in all Japanese literature.

I would argue one of the most extraordinary passages of prose you will ever read.

It is the beginning of a really, really remarkable and original masterpiece called The Pillow Book, which was written in the early years of the 11th century in what is now Kyoto.

And Tom, we talked last time about the great Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji.

This was written around about the same time in what was then called Heian-kyo.

And as with the Tale of Genji, its author was a woman.

Yes, the woman was called Seishonagon.

And Murasaki Shikabu, the author of The Tale of Genji, knew Seishonagon and didn't like her.

So she wrote in her diary, Seishonagon was dreadfully conceited.

She thought herself so clever and littered her writings with Chinese characters.

But if you examine them closely, they left a great deal to be desired.

So like a kind of negative review of our podcast.

Left by the hosts of an inferior Goalhanger podcast.

No doubt.

Although, of course, I mean, you know, Murasaki and Sei Shonagun are both transcendent geniuses.

Right.

So actually, the analogy doesn't work at all.

It breaks down there.

Yeah.

So I think what you get there is a clear tone of envy.

I mean, you know, we're concerned of tones of envy.

We are.

I guess it's not surprising, actually, because the two women are in lots of ways quite alike.

So, say Shonagun, Shonogun, Sei is a family name, but Shonogon, like Shikabu, so Murasaki's kind of second name, is the name of a post in the Imperial Civil Service.

So, like Murasaki, Shikabu, Seishonagun is the daughter of a functionary, of a civil servant.

And Murasaki knew about Seishonagun because they had both served as kind of ladies-in-waiting to an empress in the Imperial court.

And also, like Murasaki, Sei Shonogun knew Chinese.

We talked about this in the previous episode, that for a woman to know Chinese seems very unladylike, very unbecoming.

And Murasaki tried to keep her knowledge of Chinese secret.

You know, she was embarrassed by it.

Her fellow ladies in waiting teased her about it.

But Seishonagon did not veil it.

She absolutely paraded her knowledge of Chinese.

She's absolutely unafraid to make a show of her brilliance.

And she does it with such style and charisma that it clearly makes her a kind of a massive star at court.

So unlike Murasaki, she boasts of how ready she is to kind of stand up and be the center of attention.

So she writes in the Pillow book, I am not renowned for my modesty or prudence.

So again, the comparison between Shay Shonagan, who's not renowned for her modesty, and the presenters of the rest is history, that rather breaks down there, doesn't it, Tom?

We're very shy and retiring like Murasaki.

Exactly.

Now, we talked last time when we were explaining about the tale of Genji and this world of kind of

9th, 10th, 11th century Japan.

We sort of talked about what a remarkable book it is to read.

And I have to say, in many ways, I think the pillow book is even more remarkable.

So I've been reading it over the last few days.

And what shines through on every page is the wit, the brilliance, the sophistication, the charm.

and the individual personality of the author in a way that I don't think I've ever encountered with any other work of medieval literature.

I mean, this really is, say, Shonagan's book, and you feel that you know her when you're reading it in a way you don't with any other author of the time.

I mean, I can't think of any work of ancient or medieval literature where charm and wit, as you say, is manifest on every page.

I mean, it's not what you associate really with kind of ancient literature.

And as you say, her personality...

is so vivid that you feel like you completely know her.

And I agree that like the tale of Genji, it feels dislocating.

You have to keep pinching yourself and reminding yourself, this is someone who's writing, you know, we keep saying this.

In England, this is the Anglo-Saxon period.

I mean,

it is amazing.

So how did she come to write it?

Because that in itself is a remarkable story.

Yes, and may well be made up.

So this is part of the fun of reading the pillow book is that Seishonagan is very, she's very playful.

You can never entirely trust what she's saying, I think.

So The name pillow book, it comes from the story of how she comes to write it.

So the story she gives is that a minister comes to the Empress, who is say Shonagan's mistress, presents the Empress with a great sheaf of paper and the Empress makes a gift of it to say Shonagan and she uses this paper to start recording observations, thoughts, experiences, whatever.

And she seems to have kept the sheaf of papers either under or next to her pillow.

And she then leaves the court and continues to write it.

And then one day, oh me, oh my,

she is disturbed by a governor who comes to pay his respects to her.

And so she pulls out the pillow for the governor to sit on.

And there are the sheaf of papers.

And Seishonagon is so mortified.

I scrambled to try and retrieve them, but he carried them off with him and kept them for a very long time before returning them.

That seems to have been the moment when this book first become known.

And she says,

I'm mortified, mortified that it's got out.

It's terrible that people have read this masterpiece that I've written.

And clearly, she's making play with the expectation that she, as a woman, was supposed to be mortified.

And this is kind of typical of the, I guess, the kind of the subtlety and the ambivalence that characterizes her humour throughout the book.

So, let's, for people who've not read it, which I'm guessing is most people listen to the show, let's explain exactly what it is.

Because, as you said, it's bonkers to think that while she is writing this, Ethereum the Unready is paying Daeingle to Olaf Tryggferson.

Yeah, it is mad.

And to give people a sense, it's a kind of a compilation of diary entries, journal entries, random thoughts about nature and the seasons, anecdotes about the imperial court, stories of love and romance, all jumbled together.

So you never know what's going to be next in each entry.

I mean, The Tale of Genji, you can recognise it as a novel,

but the pillow book is unlike really any anything that's been written since.

And I guess if you had to compare it to anything, perhaps to a blog, perhaps even to a kind of, you know, the best kind of podcast you could possibly imagine, where it's constantly kind of going off on various tangents, but every tangent is completely fascinating.

So the genius of it for Sejonagan is that essentially it's a framework in which she can write about anything that interests her.

So you get lyrical descriptions of the kind with which you open.

And often these are descriptions of things that make her happy.

And the sense of happiness that she conveys is something that I think people could still identify with today.

So so how delightful it is in winter on a fiercely cold night when you're lying there listening snuggled far down under the bedclothes and the sound of a temple bell comes to you with such a deep and distant reverberation that it seems to be emerging from somewhere buried so you're simultaneously there in 11th century japan the sense of a bell ringing but also i mean that is a a universal experience isn't it i mean the the the joy of being warm in bed in a cold night i mean it's incredible exactly the other thing she loves a list.

And actually, when I was in Japan, I realized that this is a continuing thing in Japan.

So you go to a castle and say, this is the fourth best castle in Japan, or that kind of thing.

You know, they love it.

And it clearly begins with Seishonigan.

So she will list, you know, top mountains, top ponds.

top horses, all that kind of thing.

Her list of top birds, she's not keen on the heron.

She says the heron looks horrible.

Horrible, yeah.

Very keen on the mandarin duck, which she says is very touching in the way the pair will change places on cold nights to brush the frost from each other's wings.

And I think the Japanese generally are very keen on the mandarin duck because it seems to have been an emblem of marital fidelity.

So Genji in Murasaki's novel, he's walking out under the moonlight with Murasaki, his great love, and he hears a mandarin duck.

He has this great Proustian rush of memory, thinking of all the times that he's spent with Murasaki, and it brings back fond memories of times now gone by.

But the best things are the lists that are simultaneously bonkers, but also the kind of things that people write on social media or on blogs.

So kind of listicles.

Yeah, listicles.

So you've got some of your favorites written down.

So a couple of mine are, she's got a list of things people despise.

One of which is people who have a reputation for being exceptionally good natured.

Yeah.

It's kind of almost like Oscar Wilde, isn't it?

Yeah.

Or rare things.

a son-in-law who is praised by his wife's father.

Likewise, a wife who is loved by her mother-in-law.

And then the next entry under Rare Things she's written is a pair of silver tweezers that can actually pull out hairs properly.

And embarrassing things.

And this will be so familiar, I think, to anyone who has ever been at the school gates.

Someone insists on telling you about some horrid little child, carried away with her own infatuation with the creature, imitating its voice as she gushes about the cute and winning things it says.

And Say Shonaghan generally doesn't seem to have been very fond of children.

So she also accuses three-year-olds of being smug and cocky, which is nice.

I mean, she's not wrong.

And so you've got all these incredible lists.

Repulsive things.

You say that?

Repulsive things?

The inside of a cat's ear.

I mean, that's true.

But also, I love this one.

The way a man must feel when his wife, who he's not really very fond of, is ill for a long time.

Yeah, it's wonderful.

And also there are kind of brilliant anecdotes about court life.

So there's an amazing story, for instance.

about how there's a great snowfall and the gardeners sweep up all the snow and they make a huge snow mountain.

And the Empress and all her ladies in waiting, including Seishonagun, have a kind of sweepstake on how long this snow mountain will last before it melts.

And Seishonagan says, oh, it'll last for weeks, weeks and weeks.

And everyone says, no, that's mad.

You'll never do that.

And she has a bet with the Empress.

And Seishonagan describes, you know, every day she goes to inspect the state of this snow mountain.

And gradually over the course of the weeks, it gets dirtier and dirtier and dirtier until it's completely black.

But it's still very solid there.

And she has a gardener who comes to report to her, you know, on the state of the mountain and everything.

And the evening before, it's still there.

She's clearly going to win the bet.

And in the morning, the gardener says, it's gone.

It's been vanished.

And it turns out that the Empress has had people come in and sweep it away and cheat.

And Seishenagan goes and complains to the Emperor about this.

And he smiles and remarks, well, I suppose she just didn't want to see you win.

And to think that this is...

an 11th century court.

I mean, that kind of anecdote.

You know, we said this in the last episode.

What wouldn't you give for a story like that from the court of Edward the Confessor or something?

But in a way, you couldn't have had a story like that because a literary document like that to come from the court of Edward the Confessor or any kind of early medieval European court would just seem unthinkable, wouldn't it?

It would seem impossible.

But as we said last time, it comes from a very specific set of circumstances.

And I guess the misleading thing when we read this is we think of Shay Shonagon as our contemporary, because we can recognise so much of what she's saying about the relations between parents and children and about annoying things that people do and tweezers that don't work properly and all of these kinds of things.

But she is still very alien.

I mean, she's from a world that could not seem more alien.

Yeah.

And she is clearly a product of the court culture that she adorns.

And I think it's evident

that

she is giving court culture the best spin that she possibly can.

And I think that's probably because she does love it, because she is such a brilliant figure at court.

I mean, that's, you know, she, that's wonderful.

And so there's this word, apparently, again, marshalling my fluent Japanese, akashi, which can be translated as

delightful, amusing, charming, fun, I suppose, exquisite, whatever.

And this is essentially the word she uses to describe so many things that happen at court.

But when you look at Murasaki's diary, which is a kind of parallel to the pillow book, she's much more introverted, much more morose, I think.

And she gives a darker portrait of life at court.

So, Seishonagan adores gossip.

I mean, she praises it.

What could possibly be more fun than talking about other people and criticizing them?

She writes.

Yeah.

She's not wrong.

Whereas Murasaki beats herself up about being a gossip.

And unlike her rival, she, you know, she confesses to loneliness, to isolation.

There's no doubt which of those women would fit in well as a guest on the rest of history.

Well,

yeah, you're probably right.

But I think when you combine, say, the writings of these two extraordinary authors,

what you get is a sense that

this court is kind of, if you want to say,

civilized to the nth degree.

I mean, it's kind of the epitome of civilization.

And when the Japanese, as they have done ever since the 11th century, celebrate the Heiyan court as

the kind of the great classical age of elegance, of sophistication, of style.

I mean, they're not wrong and dominic we after this episode we're going to be embarking on a six-part series on the life of peter the great

and there is a lot of kind of malarkey with drunk bears and bellows being shoved up bottoms and things correct peter the great's court is not elegant this court absolutely is that really would be a culture clash if these women are pitched up at the court of peter the great i suspect say shoenigan would have done quite well but murasaki probably would have hated it so tom a very good example of that degree of sophistication and kind of elegance is poetry.

And poetry matters enormously to Shay Shonagan, doesn't it?

As it does to Genji in the tale of Genji.

Yeah, so Genji is a brilliant poet.

And it has a significance that we might in the 21st century in Britain or indeed in any Western country really struggle to understand because mastery of poetry is enormously important as a badge of status and as a badge of elegance.

I mean, you know, to be a desirable, attractive person, an impressive person, you should be able to quote poems and come up with poems on the spot.

But also of your ability.

I mean, it's kind of, you know, people today have to have a mastery of IT or whatever.

In the Heiyan court, you have to have a mastery of poetry.

Right.

And to quote Ivan Morris, the composition, change, and quotation of poems was central to the daily life of the Heiyan aristocracy.

And it is doubtful whether any other society in the world has ever attached such importance to the poetic versatility of its members.

And so this is a crucial part of, say, Shonagan's fame at the court, is she's not just a brilliant poet, but she's also very, very knowledgeable about poetry.

And so if someone sends in a quote, she can rework it, she can refashion it in a kind of exquisitely witty way.

And it's no wonder that Vurosaki hates her because she's just brilliant at it.

It imposes incredible strain because if you mess it up, you know, if you misquote something, if your poem is felt not quite to hit the mark, then that's terribly damaging to your reputation.

And even, say, Shonagan admits this.

So somebody sends a poem, you become very anxious when you have to make a quick response to someone's poem and you can't come up with anything.

If it's a lover, there's no particular need to hurry to send a reply, but there are times when circumstances make it necessary.

And if it's some exchange with a lady, nothing special, and you feel you can just dash something off, that's precisely when you're inclined to make an unfortunate blunder.

So it gives a really vivid sense of, you know, the tension of not losing status and rank by sending out a kind of dud few lines.

Well, there's an amazing scene very early in the book where the Empress says to, she folds up a piece of paper and she says to all her kind of ladies in waiting, her courtiers, now, I want each of you to write here the first ancient poem that springs to mind.

And Shay Shonagun is in a complete and utter panic and she says to a male official, what on earth can I write?

And he pushes her the paper back.

He says, quick, write something down yourself for Her Majesty.

It's not a man's place to give advice here.

And she does write something down.

And she says, I felt a sudden sweat break out all over me.

But then she praises herself because she's very full of herself, isn't she?

She says, I do think, though, that the poem of mine isn't the sort of thing that a young person could have come up with.

She's very proud of herself.

You get this sort of sense of this really, this would taint her.

For years, people would laugh at her for years.

You know, when you're at the top, every slip will be fatal because there are lots of people who want to replace her as the, you know, the queen.

Well, not the queen, I mean, but you know, the queen bee, perhaps among among the ladies in waiting and a further cause of of anxiety is it's not enough just to compose it but you have to write it as as implied in the the passage that you quoted and writing calligraphy is also a crucial part of establishing yourself as as civilized so

Genji, for instance, in Murasaki's novel takes for granted that calligraphy is the surest window into a person's soul that you can possibly find and that beautiful writing equates to a kind of moral beauty and there's a whole chapter in the tale of genji where he and his mates just sit around and talk about calligraphy like it's the i mean for them it is one of the most important things in the world and they agree everything is going to the dogs except for calligraphy which has hugely improved and say shonagan likewise i mean it's it's it's often features in the list of things that she loves.

So things that make you feel cheerful, something written in very delicate strokes with just the tip of an almost impossibly thick brush on a lovely clean white sheet of michinoku paper i mean we're a long way from the anglo-saxon court there i think and the other thing that makes this if people are not interested in poetry i think well who cares about a load of poems

to be good at poetry and to be able to write these this beautiful kind of calligraphy this is really important not just for your social standing but basically if you want to have any sexual or romantic success you have to be good at this i mean you know it makes thinking up a good chat-up line look, you know, trivial by comparison.

I mean, it's kind of like opening proceedings on social media when you never actually met the person.

It's a little bit like that because the poem is seen as your window onto the world.

An erotic adventure at the court is a crucial part of kind of the broader social dynamics.

And it's celebrated by Seishonagan, who again seems to have been tremendously good at it.

I mean, she certainly gives that impression.

But Murasaki as well, even though in her personal relations, she seems to have been viewed actually as a bit of a prude.

And it reflects the way in which women are given a degree of kind of license

that I think in the Muslim or Christian world would have prompted a lot of anxiety on the part of male moralists.

There are absolutely rules, I mean, very strict rules, but the whole point is that you master the rules and then, you know, all kinds of opportunities open up.

And that's precisely the thrill and the fun of it.

So for women, especially, the reason that you want to be very good at poetry is that you are not supposed to show yourself to men who are courting you.

You stay behind a screen.

And so how then are you meant to establish relations with a man if the man can't actually see you, if you have to, you know, stay cloistered away behind a screen?

And this is where the poetry comes in.

You kind of exchange verses.

And if this goes well, and if the man thinks, yeah, that's witty, that's well expressed or whatever, then

other markers of taste can be unleashed.

And this is what Genji is so good at.

He is, in Murasaki's novel, the absolute master of these kind of arts of courtship.

So poetry comes first.

Then you might have incense mixing.

So remember, Genji is perfumed.

Seishonagan is very good on how wonderful beautiful scents are and how awful hideous ones are.

It's clearly very, very important in the court.

calligraphy of course there's a passage in the tale of genji where the war minister literally sobs over genji's calligraphy and you you know you can't kind of imagine i don't know pete hegseth weeping over jd vance's handwriting that's that's such a great image it's not going to happen and then of course there's it you know the the exquisiteness of dress and so on so the woman would wear perhaps very very long sleeves and she would very decorously allow perhaps just a glimpse from behind the screen.

So it's that kind of thing, you know, a glimpse of ankle.

And in due course, a woman who decides that she is happy to allow a man to pay court to her, this would initiate a series of secret nighttime visits.

And when I say secret, it's not really secret because there is effectively no privacy in these.

Right, because people would see you coming and going, wouldn't they?

Yeah, so the screens operate as walls within rooms.

But I mean, they're, you know, they're not permanent walls.

So they're ultimately, there isn't really any privacy.

And it means that in poetry, in prose, in both Tale of Genji and the pillow book, the coming of dawn is a repeated theme because it's absolutely touched with a sense of the erotic.

And Seishonagun is predictably brilliant on it.

So she writes, Summer provides the most delightful setting for a secret assignation.

The nights are so very short that dawn breaks before you've slept.

Everything has been left open all night, and there's a lovely cool feel to the expansive view.

The lovers still have a little more they must say to each other.

As they sit there murmuring endearments, they're startled into a sudden panicky sensation of exposure by the loud core of a passing crow.

A delightful moment.

So there's a lovely section at the beginning of the pillow book when she's describing a woman and her lover.

The lover has just left and another bloke is passing because he's leaving an assignation of his own and he sees through the sort of gap in the screen that she's still lying there on the bed and she kind of knows he can see her.

And it's a sort of passage, again, you know, your mind explodes trying to think about, you know, somebody at the court of Ethelred the Unready writing this with such delicacy and such a sort of sense of tenderness and melancholy and erotic feeling and whatnot that's just unimaginable in medieval literature otherwise.

It obviously reflects different.

social, cultural, sexual expectations.

And Christian Europe is a monogamous culture.

That's not the case in Japan.

So these courtships might lead to marriage or it might lead to a kind of polygamous relationship, a kind of secondary degree of marriage of the kind that Genji is so fond of, or it might just be a fling.

I mean, it's perfectly fine to just kind of have an affair.

And obviously, women are absolutely not passive actors in this.

You know, they have to project their erotic appeal as well, which is very difficult when you start behind a screen.

So there are certain things that are obviously very important to you.

And we touched on one of them already, and that is smell.

So it's an abiding theme in the tale of genji women are worried about that they might be you know about their perspiration that they might be giving off body odor where seishonagan typically riffs on this i mean she's kind of original so she says you know it's charming a lightly padded kimono that gives off a faint whiff of perspiration she she thinks that's actually quite erotic for a man and also she gives advice on ensuring because obviously it's a problem if a man is coming uh and the woman is behind a screen how is he to know that the woman is there i mean she might have gone to bed or something yeah so say shonagan and if I shift slightly to let the rustle of clothes alert him.

So all these kind of rules that I suppose you know are freighted with the erotic.

So they're all covered up, aren't they?

They're wearing, in fact, in the pillar book, in the Penguin Classics edition, there are pictures because clothes are so important.

Yes.

There are diagrams of how they're, you know, they're wearing these enormous, enormous robes.

And gowns and mantles and jackets and all kinds.

And I mean, that's in large part, as we will see in due course because it's very cold in winter.

But it means that clothing becomes a way again like poetry in which they can project their personality.

And so it's not surprising that Seishonigan and Murazaki are obsessed by clothes because the fabric, the cut, the style, the colouring, the pairing of colours, these are ways in which you can project your personality, I suppose.

Yeah, well, Chris Harding in his history of Japan that we were talking about last time makes the the point that our concept of fashion does not map onto Japan in this period because for them, this is everything.

You know, the way you construct your outfit,

the choice of colours, the way they match, it's much more than an optional extra, than a kind of add-on, that a hobby.

It's the key to your personality and the way you're perceived in the world.

And I think also the Japanese understanding of what makes a woman physically attractive is very different.

So obviously, if the courtship goes well, the key moment comes where a woman has to reveal herself.

The man hasn't seen her until this point.

And there are very distinctive standards of beauty.

So teeth have to be black.

And this is a kind of recurrent theme throughout the tale of Genji.

Women blackening their teeth.

Eyebrows are plucked and then painted back on.

And you have to have a degree of plumpness, I think.

If you're thin,

this is viewed as...

very, very erotically off-putting.

And there's a sense, I think, almost in which the naked body is seen as unattractive.

So Murasaki writes, the naked body is unforgettably repulsive.

It really does not have the slightest charm.

So this is not a society in which nakedness is seen as something appealing in any way.

And the real obsession is with hair.

And the longer it is, the smoother, the glossier, the better.

And again and again in the tale of Genji, I mean, Genji only has to see a glimpse of hair and he's off.

He's unleashed.

And in fact, what he will do the moment he gets a glimpse of hair, that's that's when he will start writing his poems.

You know, he'll start kind of pestering the woman with his poetry.

And it's hard to think, you know, of another culture in which the literary and the erotic are so interfused.

And I think that's a crucial part of explaining why the writings of women in this period are so potent in their effect and so admired by men as well as by women.

There's another woman, isn't there?

There's another poet called Izumi Shikibu.

And she was a contemporary of these two characters, Murasaki and Sei Shonagan.

And she was a great fanfatal.

And she kind of slept around the court and everybody thought, you know, she was a folk, is heroin the right word?

She's celebrated as the greatest poet of her period.

Yeah.

And the sense that she is a fan fatal is a crucial part of that.

So over the course of her life, she burns her way through two husbands, numerous lovers.

Two of these lovers are royal brothers who succeed each other in turn and both in turn then die.

So there's a slight quality of the vamp to Izumi Shikabu.

And it's a measure of her kind of glamour that within only a few generations, people are writing novels about her.

And it's a measure too of the high premium that is set on literary genius that her scandalous reputation never threatens her reputation as a great writer.

In fact, just the opposite.

So, you know, we talked about how the Japanese love a list.

There is a list that is drawn up in the Middle Ages of the 36 immortal poets.

And I think Izumi Shikabu is number three on that list.

I mean, she's very high-ranking.

And the other thing, right, you said she's a great poet, she's on the list.

She's on this list and she's a great poet, despite the fact that she is a woman.

And that is another contrast, surely, with the world of Christendom, or the world of the Romans, for example.

Or the Greeks.

Or the Greeks, right?

Where there'd be no, no thought that a woman could ever compete with a man in this domain.

So this for Japan is the classical age.

It's the equivalent of Periclean athens or augustan rome and in periclean athens the writers are all men in augustan rome the writers are all men but in heian japan so early 11th century almost every noteworthy author of this golden age of japanese literature is a woman and so it's i think unprecedented i can't think of another period that is rated as one of the great ages of literature where all the writers pretty much are female.

I mean it's really amazing.

And so it's not surprising, I guess, therefore, that Murasaki Shikabu or Seishonagan should have kind of been in love with a culture that gave them such a voice and absolutely taken for granted that this is the only place to be, that if you're not at court, what are you?

That everything beyond the court is kind of darkness and barbarism.

There is nothing beyond Heian Kio that is worth seeing, that is worth knowing, that is worth visiting.

So in the tale of Genji, Genji gets exiled,

and it's not terrible.

I mean, it's kind of the equivalent of being packed off to Bournemouth or something.

But the way he goes on about it, I mean, you'd think it was the worst thing ever, like he was Odysseus or Sinbad or something.

But I mean, it's really not that bad.

And Seishonagan, in her list of Japan's top mountains, doesn't name Mount Fuji.

the most famous of Japanese mountains, because it's too far.

You know, who'd be interested in seeing it?

And in the same way, there's an incredible tone of snobbery that runs through.

It's in the tale of Genji.

I mean, where basically no one who isn't from an aristocratic background gets a look in.

But Seishonagan makes an absolute art form of it.

And so, you know, inevitably, she has a list of vulgarities.

And top of her list of vulgarities is snow on the houses of common people.

because the sight of snow is exquisitely beautiful.

It's charming.

It's delightful.

You see it on the house of a common person awful and i think that she is kind of mocking herself there but obviously she's also simultaneously it's coming from deep wellsprings of snobbery and so effectively not to be part of heian kio is you know you might as well be dead but i guess tom a precondition for this world is that it's peaceful they can afford to be putting all their energy into calligraphy and being snobbish about snow on the houses of the common people and talking about how repulsive three-year-old children are precisely because Japan is at peace.

Yes.

But I guess the, I mean, one of the themes that runs through the pillow book is the sense of

time and aging and the passing of the seasons, and everything must have an end.

And I guess the writers of the Heiyan court, as much as anybody, are aware that,

you know, time is slipping away, as it were, and that this world of peace and tranquility and elegance elegance and sophistication may be for the ash heap of history.

Well I think there is absolutely a sense that the very exquisite quality of life at the court can never be taken for granted and that

it is always shadowed and in the second half perhaps we could look at some of those shadows.

Very good.

We'll see you after the break.

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Genji pretended not to look at her and gazed into the garden, but he gave her many a sidelong glance.

What was she like?

How glad he would be, oh, foolish hope, if their present intimacy had brought out anything at all attractive.

First, her seated height was unusual.

She was obviously very long in the back.

I knew it, he thought in despair.

Next came the real disaster.

Her nose.

He noted it instantly.

Long and lofty that nose was, slightly drooping towards the end, and with, at the tip, a blush of red.

Oh, a real horror.

In colour, she was whiter than snow, in fact, slightly bluish, and her forehead was strikingly broad, although below it her face seemed to go on and on for an extraordinarily long way.

She was thin, to the point of being pitifully bony, and even through her gown he could see the excruciating angularity of her shoulders.

Why had he insisted on finding out what all of her looked like?

At the same time, though, she made a sight so outlandish that he could not keep his eyes off her.

Her face showed how cold she was, and he felt sorry for her.

So that is a very well-known episode from the tale of Genji, Murasaki's novel.

Genji has been courting this woman for a very long time, a very arduous process.

She lives in genteel poverty in a decayed and overgrown palace called the Hitachi Princess, she is.

And finally, he's caught a glimpse and he's very disappointed with her nose, isn't he, Tom?

Very ungallant, I think, from Genji there.

Yeah, so the nose of the Akashi Princess is celebrated in Japanese culture.

You know, you've kind of drawings of it

for centuries and centuries.

And I guess that

this portrait of the hitachi princess is a counterpoint to say shonigan's portrayal of aristocratic life in heian kyo as you know delightful charming exquisite because she lives a completely miserable life her parents are dead she has no living relatives so she is lonely isolated i mean scared she's a very nervous woman she's so old-fashioned that she wears a comb in her hair And Murasaki just thinks this is hilarious.

And it's as you get, you know, she's not only, she doesn't look white, she looks blue.

Everybody is freezing.

Her servants are all sat around her, kind of shivering and chattering.

And the princess herself is reduced to wearing furs from Siberia, which, as everyone knows, is the kind of thing that only a very old lady would do.

Right.

And so she's a fright.

But Genji is, is sorry for her and anxious for her.

And so he rescues her and installs her in his palace.

And so in that sense, everything works out for the best.

But is it perhaps the case that this glimpse that we have of this woman who is cold and lonely and scared is a reminder that there's another side to the life at court and it's not all calligraphy.

And indeed, life of Japan or Germany is obviously not all calligraphy and kind of, you know, elegant witticisms.

There is a frigidity to it as well, maybe.

Yeah, and I think a darkness, a literal darkness as well, because If you're spending most of your time stuck behind a screen,

the way that the architecture functions, you know, there's a good deal of shadow and then you stick up a screen.

You're spending a lot of your time in a kind of twilight.

And we know this from the tale of Genji because there's an episode where Genji goes in to seduce one woman and ends up accidentally seducing the Empress and getting her pregnant, which is a key moment in the novel and actually results in his exile.

So it's dark, but also, of course, it's cold.

And having just come back from a holiday in Japan and stayed in a traditional Japanese house while it was snowing.

Right.

I mean it really is cold.

And the kind of the style of architecture means that when an icy wind is whistling you really feel it.

And so that is why women in the Heiang Court are wearing the in large numbers of layers that they are.

But I think even with those layers they're probably freezing a lot of the time.

And so the reality of life probably for most women at the Heiyan court is that it's it's very cold, it's very dark and it's it's pretty boring because you're not having men coming and calling on you most of the time.

But I don't think that that means to say that Seishonagan in the pillow book is lying when she portrays the Heian court as exquisite and delightful and charming.

And in the translation that we've been quoting from, the Penguin Classic translated by Meredith McKinney,

She places the pillow book in the context of a political crisis at court that was directly threatening Seishonagan's position there and the Empress that she was serving.

And so Meredith McKinney describes the pillow book as a work that not only resolutely refuses to acknowledge these sorrows, but that largely refuses to acknowledge sorrow itself and gives us in its place a world of exquisite delight.

And it'll sound a weird parallel, but I was kind of I thought of P.

G.

Woodhouse writing Bertie Wooster in the 30s that

this of kind of genial humour has no place really for depressions or wars or whatever.

And I think it's similar with the pillow book.

There's a deliberate determination not to admit the darkness.

So in other words, a work of great sophistication and sunniness depends on a context that is much darker and more conflicted.

So tell us about this

crisis at court, because actually the two characters we've been talking about, Murasaki on one side and Seij Shonogun on the other they are on opposite sides of this slightly game of thrones ish factional battle aren't they yeah and it's hinted in the very first sentence of the tale of genji which you read out in the previous episode and people may remember it it starts in a certain reign whose can it have been and this introduces a theme that runs throughout the novel which is that the figure of the emperor himself is kind of anonymous and passive and they're always kind of being retired and replaced by another one and they they kind of they have they have no real personality and this reflects the fact that when the emperor Kanmu people who listened to the last episode may remember that he had been in a capital called Nara and had felt that he as emperor was coming under the shadow of the great lords of Japan and he had gone off and founded Heiankio in an attempt to restore imperial authority.

What this suggests is that that effort hadn't worked, that over the course of the 10th century following the the foundation of Heian Kyo, the emperor had continued to be leeched of his power.

And although he remains the center of the government and the state, it's not in kind of any active sense.

So he has taken on the Chinese title Tennu, which we might translate as emperor.

And Tenno, we said this in the previous episode, means the pole star.

And as Joshua Friedman in his book on Japanese mythology puts it, the pole star does not do anything.

It simply sits, and by virtue of what it is, everything else rotates around it.

The tenno is theoretically the same.

He exists at the center of the government and all things orbit around him, but he himself does not need to do anything other than simply be.

And there's another word that is applied to the emperor, which could be translated as emperor, which is Mikado, as in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera.

And this is a bit like Pharaoh.

So Pharaoh means literally the great house.

It's identifying the figure of the ruler with the architecture of where he lives.

And Mikado literally means gates of the inner palace.

And these are the gates that keep the people out, but keep the emperor in.

So again, it's this idea that he's being kind of closeted away.

He's like a prisoner at the heart of the system.

Yeah, almost.

And when you go to Tokyo to this day, the palace, it has this amazing moat.

It has these great walls.

You can't see inside.

I mean, the emperor feels a kind of very invisible center, which I guess is what he is even back in the 11th century.

So if the emperor's not really, you know,

he's not the autocrat, he's not running the state.

Who is running the state?

Because we're not yet in the age of the shogun, you know, the great warrior.

And the samurai and feudal rivalries.

So who's in charge?

At the time we've been talking about, it's basically a single family, the Fujiwara.

And

they are...

very ancient, very distinguished.

So even back in the time of Nara, with all the faction fighting there, they had been kind of leading players.

But by the middle of the 10th century, they've effectively established themselves as the rulers of the court and therefore by extension, the whole of Japan.

And they do this not by kind of throwing their weight around.

You know, they don't have samurai at their beck and call.

They're not great military leaders.

They do it because they are brilliant.

at politics and at faction fighting and specifically at what Japanese historians call marriage politics.

And the essence of marriage politics is to get the emperor married to your daughter so that

you will be related by marriage to the figure who sits on the throne.

So, to quote Ivan Morris, by the 10th century, the Fujiwaras had imposed on the emperor a type of life cycle that was almost bound to keep him under the family's thumb.

He came to the throne as a callo youth and was promptly married to a Fujiwara girl.

Their son would be appointed crown prince, and when his father was obliged to to abdicate, usually at the age of about 30, this crown prince would succeed him and the cycle would start again.

So there's no way for the emperor to break free of the kind of marriage chains that the Fujiwaras are fettering them with.

And the effective ruler of Japan, when, say, Shonagan comes to court, is a man who by now is not unofficial, it's formal.

He is ruling as the regent.

for the emperor.

And he's done this by marrying his daughter, who is a woman called called Teishi,

to the emperor Ichijo, who is only 11 years old.

So very, very, you know, easy to be manipulated.

And Ichijo is always under Michitaka's thumb, partly because he's a boy, partly because there are three retired emperors on the scene.

You know, they've all been kind of, you know, retired off.

So that dilutes his authority, obviously.

And I think partly because he's raised and educated never to oppose the Fujiwara.

He just sits in his palace and

plays his formal role and that's it.

And so Taishi, his wife, she is the empress for whom Seishonagan,

whom she served, and the one who got Seishonagan to write all his poems and, you know, had the bet with her about the snow and all that sort of thing.

And Seishonagan thinks Taishi is great.

You know, she thinks she's funny, she's smart, she's stylish.

And in exchange, the presence of Seishonagan at Taishi's side as part of her retinue adds greatly to Taishi's prestige because Seishonagan is that famous, that celebrated.

Right.

But obviously, the position of both women is kind of precarious.

I mean, both of them are completely aware of this because it depends on Michitaka remaining on the scene and keeping hold of power.

And I think despite the

pretty consistent tone of sunniness and lightness that you get in the pillow book, occasionally there's the odd hint from Seishonagan that she is aware of this.

It's a little bit like the the black shorts in Bertie Wooster.

There's kind of a little hint of the darkness off stage.

So there's a scene where Seishonagan describes Michitaka.

She thinks he's great, looking wonderfully slender and elegant, pausing to adjust his ceremonial sword.

And then she describes how Michitaka's brother, the Commissioner Michinaga, did not just bow before his brother, but sank to his knees.

And she goes and relates to Teishi what she's seen and says, oh, it's marvellous.

It's such a beautiful scene.

And then she writes, when I kept mentioning to Her Majesty how Commissioner Michinaga, so the younger brother, had bowed before the regent, she smilingly teased me by referring to him as that perennial favourite of yours.

If she could have lived to witness the greatness he later attained, she would have realised how right I was to find him so impressive.

So she's writing at a time where Teishi has died and where

Michinaga has replaced Michitaka as regent.

And that happened in...

So Michitaka died in 995.

And what happens then is that the next brother in line succeeds Michitaka, dies within a few days.

And so Michinaga then becomes regent.

And for Teishi and Seishonagan, this is very bad news because obviously Michinaga is going to want to marry one of his own daughters to the Emperor Ichijo.

Oh, right.

Okay, so the fact that it's his niece...

It's his niece, right?

That's not good enough.

It's got to be his daughter.

He's not going to bump Teishi off.

He's not going to set her aside.

But what he is going to do is essentially ensure that there is a second empress.

So there will be two empresses of equal rank.

But this obviously destabilizes Teishi's position massively.

And it happens in the year 1000.

So Michinaga has a 10-year-old daughter called Shoshi,

and she gets married to the emperor.

And there are now two empresses, and there are two courts.

And Michinaga michinaga obviously knows seishonagan well you know they've been kind of bantering and seishonagan's been going on about how brilliant he is when he kneels before his brother and all that kind of stuff and he basically wants his daughter shoshi

to have a literary superstar as a lady in waiting as well and this is where murasaki shikabu comes in because she is not just celebrated for her learning and her literary genius, but she's actually a Fujiwara herself, albeit from quite a kind of minor branch of the family.

So she's perfect.

So Murasaki comes in and this, you can see why this would add an extra dimension to the rivalry between the two women.

And it's Murasaki, it turns out, basically, who has backed the winning side, because a few months after Shoshi has been promoted to the rank of joint empress alongside Teishi, so marrying Ichijo, Teishi dies in childbirth.

And so all eyes now are on Shoshi.

Will she be able to give her husband a son and thereby ensure her father's hold on power?

She's only 10 when she marries.

It's eight years before she finally gets pregnant.

And then again, there's massive tension because will she survive childbirth?

And if she does, will she deliver a boy?

And it's amid this mood of tension that Murasaki begins her diary.

I mean, it's incredibly dramatic moment.

And so she describes her majesty listens to her ladies in waiting, engaged in idle gossip.

She must be in some distress.

Again, amazing.

It's an account of an event that is so important in monarchies throughout history and across the world.

Will the wife of a ruler give that ruler a son?

And here you have one of the greatest writers of all time describing it in journalistic fashion.

Yeah, as though it's in real time.

And big spoiler alert.

Shoshi does survive childbirth and she does have a son, which is brilliant for Michinaga because he's now his his power base is now secure yeah and so he's he stays securely in power until he dies in 1028 and no one thinks to challenge him and by the time he dies he has been brother-in-law to two emperors uncle to one uncle and father-in-law to Ichijo so that's another one and grandfather to two more emperors so I mean

he is he's absolutely at the center of power in the in the imperial palace for Seishonagon and Murasaki Shikabu for the former, the death of Taishi spells the end of her time at court.

And so you can see, I think, therefore, that the pillow book, much of which she must have written in retirement,

actually there is, it is written with a real consciousness of bereavement almost.

And, you know, and if it's a eulogy to joy, which it undoubtedly is, it's one of the most joyous books you could possibly read.

I think it is also testimony to the fleeting nature, the insubstantiality of joy.

Murasaki, I mean, she seems to have come out as a winner.

So she ends up so close to Michinaga that there are all kinds of far-fetched stories told in the decades and centuries that follow that she'd actually had a relationship with him.

And I think there's no doubt that Genji as a character and his rise to greatness is kind of modelled a bit on Michinaga.

And Ichijo, he loves stories and so he loves the tale of Genji.

And it may well be that it's this that encourages Murasaki to write it at the length that she does.

And of course, Michinaga is delighted about this because it intensifies Ichijo's devotion to Shoshi, to Michinaga's daughter.

So you can see the way in which literature isn't at a remove from power politics, but is absolutely kind of woven into it.

Yeah.

You know, does this make...

Murasaki happy.

I don't think she's a particularly happy person.

And much more readily than Seishonagan is in her diary, but even more so and more powerfully in The Tale of Genji, the fleeting nature of joy and the pain that you can feel in recalling moments of joy is kind of one of her great themes.

There's a famous scene, isn't there, later in the book when Genji meets,

he's old at this point, he meets a woman that he'd been in love with for many years, and he writes her a poem, very sort of,

who else but we too knows all that has brought us here, and so may address the pines of Sumiyi Yoshi witness to the gods own time.

So what does that what does that draw on Tom?

Well they're lines that are drawing I guess on the kind of the primal beliefs of Japan the Shinto beliefs so you you have pines that are so ancient that that like at so much of the natural world whether it's rivers or mountains or whatever that they must be held divine you have the god's own time which equates to eternity and therefore you have a sense that love itself can cheat time but the thing is that even as Genji is composing these lines, he doesn't actually in his heart believe it.

And the reason for that is that

all the manifestations of Chinese culture that we've been describing, the writing, the poetry, the fashions, the song, the dance, the stars of government, these are not the only legacy of that kind of, you know, those centuries of Sinomania because...

And we haven't yet touched really on the sacral.

There is another aspect of Chinese culture which

takes off in Japan to a momentous degree, and that is Buddhism.

Well, you say the sacral, Tom, but they wouldn't have the that word would be slightly meaningless to them when it would because the very idea of religion would be meaningless because there's no distinction between the secular and the religious in Japan.

God Almighty, I'm sounding like Tom Harris.

You are sounding like me.

Yes, you are absolutely right.

But let's call it Buddhism for want of

a better word.

And it arrives in Japan probably in the sixth century it flourishes at nara in the eighth century um nara's boasts the most wonderful buddhist temples astonishing statues i mean you're just about to go to japan aren't you i think this will blow people's minds i'm actually going to stay in a buddhist monastery in japan are you going to nara I'm going to Nara.

It's not in Nara.

It's on Mount Koya, which is the sacred Buddhist mountain.

Now, I know this is not part of the persona.

And so I hate to tell people this, but our podcast personas are not our entire personality.

It's quite, quite white Lotus as well.

Well, yeah, I hope there won't be white lotus style.

So Nara is a kind of great Buddhist city.

And that's one of the reasons actually why

the capital gets moved is because the monks there are wielding such power that the emperor is feeling in their shadow as well.

And by the ninth century, going into the 10th and 11th century, native and Buddhist traditions are kind of merging to create a definitively Japanese form of Buddhism.

And this is manifest everywhere in Heian Kyo.

So that temple bell, which Seishonogun hears ringing in the dead of night when she's tucked up under her bedclothes, that's a Buddhist bell.

And Murasaki, when she's describing how the Empress Soshi is preparing to give birth to her child, she hears, she describes hearing voices in ceaseless recitation of sutras, which are the voices of Buddhist monks.

And there is a town called Uji, which is about 10 miles south of Heiankyo, where the final chapters of the tale of Genji are set.

And Michinaga buys a villa there, which is then converted by his son into a great Buddhist temple.

This temple appears on one of the Japanese coins.

And it contains what is one of the few surviving masterpieces of Heian art, which is this colossal wooden sculpture of the Buddha.

So Buddhism is an absolutely fundamental part of Heian-kyo,

this world described by the great writers of the period.

But if you think of it, you mentioned Shinto before.

These are not competing religions in the sense that we would think of Christianity and Islam or Christianity and paganism, right?

They are, even today, lots of

Japanese people struggle when they're asked, do you believe in Shintoism or you're Buddhist?

Because they don't understand the concept that you would be picking and choosing different belief systems entirely.

Yeah, I mean, it's really striking having written so much about Christianity and its emergence in antiquity and pagan antiquity.

Buddhism in Japan is such a contrast.

So whereas Christianity banishes the ancient gods of the Mediterranean, that doesn't happen in Japan.

I mean, there are definitely tensions.

There are elements of the kind of the native traditions that really oppose the introduction of Buddhism, but they are not driven out.

So in the time of Murasaki and Seishonagon, the emperor, as the emperor today does, is still claiming descent from the sun goddess.

His virgin daughter will be serving as the sun goddess's priestess in what is the greatest shrine in Japan.

And you still have this sense that the divine is imminent in the natural world that was kind of evident in that poem that Genji writes.

But Buddhism, although it is able to coexist with these beliefs,

it does teach that the gods worshipped, you know, in these various shrines or whatever, are themselves

part of the illusory world along with the beauties of the natural world love the world itself in fact

and

this is what everybody that we've been talking about in this episode and the previous episode believes uh so so shenagon does and it it's said

we don't know with what reliability but it but it's often repeated that at the end of her life She follows the example of what lots of other people at court, including emperors do, which is to renounce the world.

And she throws away her beautiful clothes and she shaves off her beautiful hair and she becomes a nun.

And this is something that Murasaki, we know, was very tempted by

because she feels dread that as a woman, she is fated not to attain enlightenment, that she's bound to be reborn, that she'll have to be reborn as a man before she can have any prospect of enlightenment.

And she writes about it, I think, very painfully and movingly.

Someone with as much to atone for as myself may not not qualify for salvation.

There are so many things that serve to remind one of the transgressions of a former existence.

Everything conspires to make me unhappy.

And I think

it's that capacity to worry that everything that is beautiful and a cause of happiness is itself an illusion that gives the tale of Genji its distinctive character.

that it expresses such love for the beauties and joys of the moment, but also such a sense of sorrow that these beauties and joys will ultimately vanish.

And in fact,

you have to reject them

if you are going to attain the eternal beauty and joy of enlightenment.

And so Murasaki, you know, she says, I want to give it all up.

I want to become a nun, but she also dreads it.

And she writes, supposing I were to commit myself and turn my back on the world, I am certain there would be moments of irresolution before Amida came for me riding on his clouds.

So

who is Amida?

He's a version of the Buddha?

Is that right?

So he is a Buddha.

He is the Buddha to whom the Heian courtiers seem particularly to have prayed.

So in Uji, this great temple, the great statue carved out of wood and gilded there is Amida.

And the appeal of Amida, I think there are two aspects.

to it.

The first is that he seems to promise enlightenment to everyone.

So this is why he's particularly popular with women.

He seems to offer the promise to women that, you know, that they don't have to be reborn necessarily.

But also, he seems to promise that love can survive death.

Because what he is supposed to have done is that when he attained enlightenment, the Amida Buddha creates a paradise in the uttermost west, and that

people who pray to him for salvation can attain this kind of this paradise, this western pure land, and they will be reborn there and they will live in this essentially it's a kind of paradise that precious metals are living, jewels grow from the ground and people themselves, when they are born there, emerge from lotuses into eternal light.

They're free from any sort of sin.

And though in due course they will die, then they will attain enlightenment.

So it's a kind of, it's a final stage, a beautiful final stage before

finally attaining the enlightenment that is the desire of every Buddhist.

And this is the paradise that Murasaki believes could be hers, right?

Yes, and Genji, and they hope that they will meet and be able to renew their love there.

So on her deathbed, Murasaki mourns that she would go alone into the unknown and the thought filled her with great sorrow.

But she has consolation from the thought that in due course Genji will be able.

to join her and Genji tells her that one day we will share one lotus throne in the life to come.

That is the hope that he cleaves to, even while he's shadowed by anxiety, that of course he may not attain it.

And so this sense of the yearning for things that have gone, a sense that things that go must go, a sense that everything is insubstantial, an awareness that time is a kind of treacherous dimension, all these things that kind of echo, you know, great modern European writers, Proust and so on.

i mean they

they derive from the in the context of of murasaki from the very specific cultural context in which he is born lives and dies as you would expect right well

i mean i can't recommend the pillow book too highly i loved reading it i think it's an extraordinary work of literature and i think what's so joyous about it is not just that you can read it in and of itself as a as a as a just a brilliantly entertaining um book but you could hardly find a better window into the world, this sort of incredibly alien and to us, very strange world

of

early medieval Japan.

So, I mean, you loved this, didn't you, Tom?

You would never, it's like Trafalgar.

It's like something you just, you were sucked into this black hole.

Yeah, I did.

One of the additional reasons why I've so enjoyed doing the series is, as we said earlier, I cannot think of a greater contrast to the six-part epic that you are going to be leading directly after this, which is on Peter the Great.

Yes, if you enjoy battles, the Great Northern War,

the rise of Russia and the decline of the Swedish Empire,

dwarfs being baked in pies, people having bellows inserted into them, Peter the Great going on holiday to the Dutch Republic and to England in disguise.

If you like the sound of all that, you can hear all six parts on Monday by signing up to the Restis History Club at the restishistry.com.

And if you do that, Tom, you will be welcomed into into an imperial court of almost unparalleled beauty and sophistication.

That's right, isn't it?

Oh, so beautiful, so sophisticated.

Right.

Well, on that characteristically humble note, I will say Aragato, Tom, and Sayonara.

Sayonara.