560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)

0:10In a certain reign, whose can it have been? Someone of no great rank, among all his majesty's consorts and intimates, enjoyed exceptional favour. Those others who had always assumed that pride of place was properly theirs despised her as a dreadful woman, while the lesser intimates were unhappier still. The way she waited on him day after day only stirred up feeling against her, And perhaps this growing burden of resentment was what affected her health and obliged her often to withdraw in misery to her home. But His Majesty, who could less and less do without her, ignored his critics until his behaviour seemed bound to be the talk of all.

0:58So that is the opening paragraph of the supreme, unchallenged, canonical classic of Japanese literature. it's a novel called the tale of genji and to give you a sense of the sheer weight of it in the translation by royal tyler which we'll be quoting from a fair bit today that book is more than 1000 pages long now tom we're not the rest is literature so what is a japanese novel doing on a history podcast please explain two answers so as you said this is the great classic of japanese literature. I guess the obvious parallel might be with Don Quixote and the role that it plays in Spain. I mean, maybe even with the plays of Shakespeare in England.

1:43And I will quote the novelist who in 1968 won Japan's first Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata, in his acceptance speech. And he described it as the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature. And as a Nobel Prize winner, I mean, he would absolutely know. He's not wrong. It's had a massive influence, right it's had an influence all through japanese culture on anime and manga and all kinds of tales right the way up to the present day but going all the way back through medieval japan because this novel is by the standards of the western novel i mean unbelievably ancient so it's written in the early years of the 11th century and it has profoundly profoundly shaped the japanese sense of what it is to be japanese so it's kind of a historical artifact in its its own right But I think also it opens an absolutely brilliant window onto what is often described as the classical age of Japan, the first great golden age, 10th and 11th centuries in Japan.

2:43And this is a Japan that is emerging for the first time, really, as a distinctive civilization. So it's long existed in the shadow of China, but this kind of cultural cringe that it had long had, it's got rid of. It is expressing ideals of kind of beauty and grace that will, again, run throughout Japanese history. And to be honest, if you're a historian of, say, ancient or medieval history, to read it is quite a mind-blowing experience because you are being given an insider's vision of an imperial court that is much, much richer, I think, than anything that we have from, I don't know, ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia or Persia or Rome or Baghdad or even China.

3:33And I've just been to Japan. I read it while I was in Japan. And I have to say, it was one of the great reading experiences of my life. Well, Tom, I know when you say something like that, you genuinely mean it because the only other book that I've heard you say those words about, the only other moment I've heard you talk about with the same sort of respect and even, dare I say, awe, was the chapter on snooker in my book, Who Dares Wins? No, not just the chapter on Snooker, Dominic, the whole vast tome. Wow. And I would say that Who Dares Wins, your great book on the first two years of the Thatcher government, even longer than the tale of Genji, I think in a thousand years time will be looked back on with similar awe.

4:14I mean, Tom, that's really kind of you. You're obviously not the first person I've heard that from. And it probably won't be the last, but it's lovely to hear it all the same. Anyway, you're welcome. Let me just echo what you said. And we'll be talking a fair bit about the classics produced during this kind of classical golden age of Japanese culture. And I have to say, you know, I was a little bit suspicious when you first mentioned this subject. And then I started reading them and my mind was blown. I couldn't believe that this was being produced in the same period as the Anglo-Saxons were kind of, you know, smashing each other on the head with mallets or whatever.

4:43They're amazing, aren't they? So we're going to use this as a window into Japanese history and culture. But before we do that, let's get back to the novel itself. And actually, let's kick off with that first paragraph that I opened with. So the stuff about the consorts and intimates and his majesty and all of that stuff. So unpack that a little bit for us. What's all that about? Well, I mean, there are kind of various pointers to the character of the Japanese court in this period, even in that opening paragraph. So we have this emperor, but he's not named. I mean, he seems peculiarly anonymous.

5:14And he's in the early 11th century, just to be clear. So the 10 hundreds. The Tale of Genji is actually a historical novel. So it's set in the 10th century. Okay, so the 900s. Yeah. We're told whose reign can it have been? It's deliberately anonymous. He clearly has a kind of harem. There seem to be two orders of women. So there are consorts who are clearly higher ranking. And then there are intimates who seem to be slightly lower. And the emperor, he's obsessed by a low ranking intimate. And this is clearly offending court etiquette, but he's pursuing the affair anyway. And I mean, anyone who's read, you know, the Arabian nights or something like that will feel that it's, it's the kind of story in which this intimate is going to get pregnant and give birth to a prince.

6:00And this will set the whole dynamics of the, of the story and trade. Of course. And initially it seems that this is the kind of book that we're reading because it only takes three more paragraphs before the intimate is indeed pregnant by the emperor. And she delivers him a son. and as would happen in any kind of folk tale, the baby turns out to be kind of luminously good looking. So to quote from the tale of Genji, his majesty had the child brought in straight away for he was desperate to see him and he was astonished by his beauty. His elder son, born to his consort, the daughter of the minister of the right, enjoyed powerful backing and was fated by all as the undoubted future heir apparent.

6:38But he could not rival his brother in looks and his majesty, who still accorded the heir apparent all due respect, nevertheless lavished his private affection on the new arrival. So that really is fairytale stuff. You've got the older brother who's going to be the next emperor and the younger brother who's obviously much nicer and better looking, who's sort of put down in some way because of his inferior background. Right. So you feel that you know the rules of the game. The emperor dotes on this kind of beautiful younger son, but he knows that it's impossible to appoint him as his heir because the intimate is not of sufficient social standing.

7:11The boy grows up, he becomes ever more handsome, so much so that his nickname is The Shining Prince. And as well as being stunningly handsome, he has incredible dress sense, amazing style, but also luminous talents. And in due course, he will be renowned for his genius as a poet, as a musician, as a calligrapher, as a mixer of incense, all these great qualities that are fated at the imperial court. and he's even good at football which is described in the novel as a rough game but lively and requiring skill quirky who knew i didn't know that who knew the japanese playing football that cannot be right tom does everybody not know that it was invented at a great public schools this is shocking i'm not entirely sure what the rules were but it clearly involved kicking a ball right so this younger son he's very very talented and his father is desperate that he doesn't waste his potential because the problem is is that if he just remains a prince the emperor worries that he'll be a kind of drone because he will never get to inherit the throne.

8:09And so the emperor takes a drastic step. He officially removes the boy from the imperial family. And he does this by giving the boy what no emperor ever has, namely a surname. And the surname the boy is given is Genji. And as a Genji, he now belongs to two realms. So the realm of his father's palace, the great center of Japanese imperial life, but also the realm of the nobility who provide the great public figures who serve the palace. And the novel of which he is the hero, The Tale of Genji, is in large part the story of how he negotiates these ambivalences, his role as a prince who is kind of simultaneously a nobleman, one of the great kind of ministerial figures of the court.

9:01Okay. So you set up the boy. Now let's talk a little bit about the world. So anybody who knows anything about Japanese history and culture or who, for example, has played the new Assassin's Creed video game or has seen the TV series Shogun will have a sense automatically of the world that Genji is moving through. So, you know, there's the amazing temples. There's the samurai. There are people taking their own life because they've been humiliated in some way. Yeah, Bushido, the warrior code, all of that, all of that stuff. But this is all rubbish, right? This isn't operating at this time. Right, because the Tale of Genji is much earlier than all that.

9:37Right. And to be honest, it's older than kind of most of the traditions that I guess in the mind's eye people have about medieval Japan. So samurai? No samurai? No samurai. Geishas? No geisha. No sushi. No sushi? Shocking. No kabuki. I mean, none of that. People drinking tea? Surely there's people drinking tea. There probably is people drinking tea, yes. I'm not absolutely sure about that. But I think there probably is. Let's pretend that there is just for the purposes of the podcast. I mean, certainly eating rice. But I mean, this is just a measure of how old it is. And you said how extraordinary it is, is that this is the same time as all the events we were describing in our series on 1066.

10:15The Tale of Genji is being written while in England, Ethelred the Unready is busy extorting silver to pay off the Vikings. I mean, just imagine if you had a novel written by the Anglo-Saxons, a thousand pages long that gave you such an amazing window. So, God, historians would be sobbing with joy if such a thing existed. It's unbelievable. But it kind of couldn't have existed because Anglo-Saxon society didn't have the conditions for it to exist, right? But Japanese society does. Right. So, in Europe, I guess the first novel of modern Europe is Don Quixote. So, Tale of Genji is 600 years older than that.

10:52It's 700 years older than Robinson Crusoe, which is generally thought to be the first English novel. It's often called the world's oldest novel. It's not strictly speaking because the Greeks and the Romans had fictions written in prose, but I think it is indisputably, as Royal Terrell, whose translation we're using, describes it in his introduction, the oldest novel still widely recognised today as a masterpiece. But for all the reasons that you're touching on, the fact that you are getting a glimpse into such a distant, alien, ancient world. To me, it seemed one of the most extraordinary works of literature that I'd ever read.

11:31I mean, and obviously I don't speak Japanese. I'm not familiar with Japanese history at all. So, you know, Keats writing about, you know, he couldn't speak Greek. And then he comes across this translation by Chapman and he talks, doesn't he, about being like Stout Cortez with eagle eyes staring at the Pacific or whatever. I mean, I felt a bit like that, that this was a glimpse into a world that I had never imagined seeing. And it's incredible. And it's a bit like, I don't know, discovering that somebody had been recording rock and roll in the 14th century, or that there'd been cubists in Renaissance Florence or something.

12:05I mean, it seems weirdly out of time. And all the more so when you think about Japan as an island off Eurasia, and you think of all the other works of literature that being produced across Eurasia in this period. So in Persia, you have the great poet Ferdowsi is writing the Sharnamay, the great epic of the Iranian people. And this is, it's an epic that has sorcerers and giant talking birds and Alexander the Great and all that kind of stuff. And in Baghdad and Cairo, you're starting to get the Arabian Nights in this period. And that's all kind of gin and, you know, all that. People hiding in vases.

12:39All that. And in France, you have the Song of Roland, the story of the great heroic figure in Charlemagne's court, who sees off attacking enemies and is kind of presaging the romances of chivalry that will emerge throughout Europe. And they're all kind of centered around either the supernatural or masculine heroism or both. But the tale of Genji actually, despite the sense you get from the opening page, actually, it's nothing like any of those at all. So you might expect that he's going to end up fighting a murderous civil war against his brother or something like that. He doesn't. There is no real tension between him and his brother whatsoever.

13:21He doesn't go around fighting monsters. He doesn't roam the world seeking out adventures. And in fact, aside from a single spell of exile, he spends pretty much his entire life in the imperial capital in Japan. And the novel is basically about the things he gets up to in the palace and in the city that surrounds it. And there are essentially two things he gets up to. So the first of these, he serves his father as his father had wanted him to, as one of the great public servants of Japan. You can trace him going through all the various levels of the imperial bureaucracy. And he begins as a kind of very junior official.

13:58And then ultimately he arrives as a kind of honorary retired emperor. Right. You know, he's given this kind of honorary post. He's reintegrated back into the imperial family. And this is tracked in immense detail. So if you are interested in how politics functions in the imperial court, the tale of Genji is absolutely for you. The Antony Trollope. Exactly. And it's drawn in that kind of detail. Right. And that kind of subtlety. And it's a very vivid, very sophisticated portrait of how the imperial court actually functioned. You know, what wouldn't a historian of ancient Egypt or. Oh, yeah. He would die for something like that.

14:33But the other thing he does, so I will quote from a friend of the show, Chris Harding, who's got a history of Japan that's coming out. I got sent a preview of it. Yeah, I was reading that last night, would you believe? It's a very good book. A short history of Japan. Yeah. And in it, Chris describes Genji as irrepressibly amorous, which is basically to say he's a massive shagger. Right. He never stops. Basically, he only has to see a woman and he's trying to seduce her. And it doesn't matter if the woman is married to the emperor or she's only 12 years old or she's his ward or she is the daughter of his ex-lover.

15:07Or, I don't know, the daughter of his best friend, Genji or Palin. He's all for it. Right. Can't hold him back. Yeah. So he's not very me too. I mean, you very much get cancelled today. I was kind of reading up on this because I was kind of interested to see what Japanese feminist critics today think of it. And apparently there's a whole trend. It's called Genji Girai, which means Genji bashing. I love the image of you reading up on Japanese feminist criticism of the tale of Genji. Just to be clear, you're reading up on that in Japanese, right? I'm afraid I'm not. No, I'm afraid I'm not. But, you know, it's a great classic of Japanese literature.

15:43So there's plenty in English on the tale of Genji. Of course there is. But the thing about Genji, why he is so fascinated as a character, why the novel is so kind of complex and subtle, Even while he's often behaving terribly, he has simultaneously served the Japanese for a thousand years as the kind of, I suppose, the definitive model of charisma. I mean, I suppose today we would call him a sex pest. He's a very generous, caring, kind sex pest. Oh, that's lovely. Isn't that nice? I mean, the measure of that is that he never abandons a woman who he has seduced. He's not a Don Juan. He doesn't kind of seduce and dump.

16:23And over the course of his life, he installs all his various conquests in this kind of vast palace that he has. Even those he no longer fancies, which I think shows that he's, you know, what a lovely man he is. What a lovely man. And he's incredibly glamorous, isn't he? Unspeakably glamorous. So I read in your notes that he is literally perfumed. Yes. That's unusual by the standards of sort of 10th century Japan, presumably, or is it? Well, there's almost a supernatural quality to it. And in fact, Genji dies about three quarters of the way through the novel. And it continues with details of what his son does and his grandson.

16:59And they both have this kind of perfumed quality as well. But Genji is absolute knockout. It's kind of almost pheromonal. So all the women in his palace wonder, how does he manage to be as though in him blooms opened on spring willow fronds? People talk like that about me. Anyway, continue. Slapping on the aftershave. Yeah, right. And at the heart of the novel, so he has all these women, but there is one woman in particular who is the great love of his life devoted to throughout the novel. And she is called Murasaki. Lady Murasaki, Murasaki means a lavender. In his relationship with her, both his appalling qualities and his charming qualities are kind of intermingled.

17:40And I think this is the measure of how psychologically complex this is as a novel. It's not a novel in which Genji is a type. He is a complex living psychological figure in exactly the way that you might meet in Tolstoy or someone like that. So who is Murasaki? So she, rather like Genji's mother, she's socially unimportant. So she's the daughter of a prince by a kind of minor consort. And so she has no prospects at all in life. Genji meets her when she is a young girl and he adopts her. And some, frankly, appalling behaviour then ensues. So why does he want to adopt her? It's because Murasaki, and she's just a girl at this point, reminds him of the Empress.

18:29And by this point, Genji has already seduced and got pregnant the Empress because the Empress reminds Genji of his mother. That's a hell of a lot going on there. Quite a lot, yeah. None of it good. For this rather dubious reason, Genji's very taken with her, adopts her, raises her. And then when she comes of age, he forces himself on her. And Murasaki finds this a deeply traumatic experience. How old is she at this point, coming of age? 15, I suppose. Okay. Yeah. And we're told she had never suspected him of such intentions. And she could only wonder bitterly why in her innocence she had ever trusted anyone with such horrid ideas.

19:09And she's devastated. Genji's a bit offended. goes away, comes back. She's still sobbing. And his response is, well, what a fuss you're making. Oh, Genji has let Japan down. Because it's clearly not anachronistic to see this as appalling behaviour. Right. It's written into the fabric of the novel that Murasaki is traumatised, that Genji doesn't seem to understand why. But Murasaki remains devoted to him, I suppose, in part because she is dependent on him. She knows that she would be suffering penury without him. We're told throughout the novel that a young girl without prospects who outlives her parents' faces to, quote, becoming a nun or drowning herself in the sea.

19:49So neither option is one that Murasaki wants to embrace. So she sticks with Genji and Genji remains devoted to her. She forgives him, becomes devoted to him. And although there are all these kind of various women in his house, everyone knows that Murasaki, despite her kind of low social status, is the real chief wife. She's referred to as the lady who reigns over Genji's household. And their love, very movingly, I think, kind of deepens over the course of the years, because it's so long that you are tracking them going from, in Genji's case, from birth to death. And their relationship is drawn with incredible subtlety and richness and compassion.

20:31So shortly before his death, Genji gazes at Murasaki, how he wondered, was it possible that year to year and day to day, she always had about her something marvellous, something new. And when she dies, it breaks him and he dies himself soon after. And it's the complexity of the way in which he seduces, he behaves appallingly. And yet, simultaneously, you have this sense of an incredible love affair by the end of their life. It does everything that you'd want from a novel, I think. And this is happening in the 11th century. It's amazing. But also, he's carrying on with other women at the same time there, right?

21:06Right. Yeah, he's carrying on with loads of, you know, you said, 12-year-olds, the friends of friends, the daughters of friends, the friends of daughters. Right. And this is something that is entirely acceptable. It's entirely acceptable for a great nobleman in this period in Japanese history to have a main wife, subordinate wives, people you seduced. and all these relationships likewise are drawn with great kind of subtlety and complexity and it's often very funny so it's a bit like you know mr darcy has settled down with elizabeth bennett but he's also got emma there he's got i don't know fanny price he's got miss bates he's got whole range of of women gathered around him right so you have all that but also the other thing is because you have this passage of time because you see genji himself and all the various women that he loves aging.

21:56The novel is very moving about the passage of time and about how the kind of intense experiences of joy and sorrow and love are repeatedly portrayed as being kind of as ephemeral as cherry blossom, which is the great metaphor in Japan. I mean, they love that. A cherry blossom metaphor in a Japanese novel, Tom. You astound me. Well, I think that this novel is blazing the path for that. And again and again, these characters are kind of in search of lost time, which of course is the title of another great modern European novel, A La Recherche du Tompédu, In Search for Lost Time by Marcel Proust, which is widely held to be, I guess, one of the two or three greatest novels of the 20th century.

22:39But it's published a thousand years later. Yeah. And I thought kind of reading it, I was endlessly being reminded of it. And I thought, am I just imagining it? And again, I went and kind of Googled it when I got back home and discovered that the comparison is absolutely not original to me. I mean, there is loads and loads of kind of writing on this. And I found actually that this is a comment by J. Keith Vincent, who is professor of Japanese studies at Boston. And he gave a lecture on this very topic about three months ago, apparently. And this is the praise he gave in his advert for it, talking about Tale of Genji and Proust's novel.

23:10that both novels tell of the suffering caused by desire of the way human beings seek replacements rather than renouncing their earliest loves and how everything withers everything perishes including grief itself moving very moving so that's a pretty extraordinary comparison to make isn't it when you think they're a thousand years apart and obviously it's not the only one that people make so some people have compared it to anna karenina or war and peace or something yeah so tolstoy is the other great comparison yeah is it therefore well is it out of time And obviously it isn't because it's the product of it.

23:43Yeah, it's written in 11th century Japan. Yeah, right, exactly. So how do we explain that? How do we explain that something that seems to us so modern is coming out of a society that, well, it's a medieval society. It's a society of people with swords and, you know, I guess castles or whatever or palaces and a world that just seems completely out of sync with the culture that you think it's producing. I think that question of how is it that a literary form that kind of achieves its canonical status in Europe in the 19th and 20th century, how is Japan producing an equivalent novel in the early 11th century?

24:20And that's why I think it belongs on a history podcast, because that's a fascinating question. And I think also that trying to answer that question will open a window onto the politics, onto the culture, onto the society of Japan during its first golden age. Yeah. So that's what we'll be doing in the second half, kind of trying to answer those questions. And we will begin it by answering perhaps the most obvious question of all, which attentive listeners will have realised, you know, has been left hanging. Very obvious question. Who actually wrote the tale of Genji? Golly. Well, for the answer to that mystery, come back after the break.

25:03No one liked her. They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous and scornful. But when you meet her, she is strangely meek, a completely different person altogether. So that is a self-portrait written by the author of the tale of Genji, who was a courtier at the Imperial Palace. And you will have guessed from that reading that she was, of all things, a woman. So Genji is not a male fantasy figure, as you might have thought he was. You might have thought this was a kind of male, you know, his charming, his perfumed, he sleeps with all the ladies.

25:51Yeah, kind of wish fulfillment. Yeah, wish fulfillment. But no, this is the work of a woman. And her name, Tom, is Murasaki Shikibu. And I read she was born in the early 1970s and died in 1020. I say she was called Murasaki Shikibu. Well, she was known as Murasaki Shikibu. But was that actually her name? No, we don't know her real name. And the reason for that is that in the Imperial Society of the Japanese court, only servants tended to be called by their real names. And this is true of men as well as women. So men are called by their titles. So Genji, to take the obvious example, over the course of the novel, he is called successfully, I'll just read some of them, the captain, the commander of the right, acting grand counsellor, his grace, the palace minister, etc, etc, etc.

26:37And of course, he ends up as the honorary retired emperor. And throughout the novel, people tend to be referred to by their titles. And this can be quite confusing because, you know, someone gets promoted midway through a chapter. Oh, and their title changes. Suddenly, quite difficult to work out who he is. So actually, we already do this, don't we? Because, I mean, we call him Theo when we're recording just to please the audience. But in reality, we just call him you and I when we're talking about him. We just call him the podcast producer. Yeah, that's his name. Yeah. I mean, to me, that's who he is.