Murasaki Shikibu

I am not the kind of person to abandon herself completely to despair. And yet, by the same token, I cannot entirely rid myself of such feelings. On autumn evenings, which positively encourage nostalgia, when I go out to sit on the veranda and gaze, I seem to be always conjuring up visions of the past - 'and did they praise the beauty of this moon of yore?' Knowing full well that I am inviting the kind of misfortune one should avoid, I become uneasy and move inside a little, while still, of course, continuing to recall the past.

These words were written by the author Murasaki Shikibu. Of all the women who lived a thousand years ago, she is probably the most famous today. Credited as the founder of Japanese literature and author of the first psychological novel, she is a household name in Japan and even appears on the ¥2000 bank note. Her legacy in the country's literature invites frequent comparisons to Shakespeare. The East Asian beautyberry is named after her in Japanese. Her masterpiece Genji Monogatari, The Tale of Genji, has been translated into over thirty languages and is taught in classrooms across the world. Two craters on the asteroid Eros are named after its characters. The novel boasts fifty-four chapters, telling a sprawling tale across three generations of thwarted glory and heartbreak. Readers over the centuries have come to know the book's hundreds of characters, following the author's piercing gaze into their innermost thoughts. But what do we know about its author herself, Murasaki Shikibu? For behind this symbol of Japanese culture, there was a real woman, one who left behind far less about herself than about her most famous characters.

The woman who would come to be known as Murasaki Shikibu was born in the mid-970s. She was the daughter of Fujiwara no Tametoki, a mid-ranked bureaucrat known for his poetry and scholarship. In her youth, no one called her Murasaki Shikibu - this would be a nickname she acquired later when she entered into service at the imperial court. Her real name might have been Takako, Kyōshi, or Kaoriko, but no one knows for certain. It might seem odd that we don't even know the true name of Japan's most famous author, but women's personal names were considered intimate knowledge among the elite in Heian Japan. Court ladies took on nicknames based on a position held by a male relative. Shikibu referenced her father's position in the Shikibu Shō, the Ministry of Ceremonial. Her first moniker at court was Tō Shikibu, tō being an alternate reading of the 'fuji' in Fujiwara, meaning 'wisteria.' As for Murasaki, which meant 'lavender,' this was the name of the main female character in The Tale of Genji. It thus served as both a pun on her name and a reference to her magnum opus.

Her parents were both members of the illustrious Fujiwara clan, but they came from very minor branches of the family, making the Fujiwara empresses only distant relatives. Murasaki's mother died when she was very young. This meant that, unusually for a child in Heian Japan, she was raised by her father instead. Perhaps reflecting her own feelings, the character Lady Rokujō in The Tale of Genji remarks, "Even when a girl has a father to whom she can look with complete confidence, the worst thing is to lose her mother." The young Murasaki was a precocious child who easily outperformed her brother Nobunori at Chinese lessons. Chinese was essential for a man's future in the imperial bureaucracy, but it was considered unladylike for women to learn Chinese. In her diary, Murasaki Shikibu Nikki, she recalls how her father lamented, "Just my luck! What a pity she was not born a man!" And yet it was Murasaki, not Nobunori, whose fame as a writer would keep Tametoki's own name in the history books.

​Learning to hide her knowledge of Chinese in order to avoid criticism, Murasaki wrote in Japanese, as did other women of the period. The first Japanese syllabary, hiragana, was also called onnade - women's writing. Murasaki's The Tale of Genji was therefore written entirely in Japanese, making it the first Japanese-language work of fiction written by a named author. Earlier texts that would have inspired Murasaki were either anonymous, such as The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, or autobiographical, such as Kagerō Nikki by Michitsuna no Haha. By contrast, Murasaki's tale (or monogatari in Japanese) was a historical novel, set in the early tenth century, and featured a fictional cast of over 400 characters. The original intended audience was probably a small group of women in court circles.

The two main characters of The Tale of Genji are Hikaru Genji, a prince who can never become emperor, and Murasaki, one of his wives who he believes is his greatest love. Although commentators across the centuries have typically interpreted this novel as a romance, with Genji a model of princely behaviour, feminist scholars in recent decades have offered a more compelling alternative. Genji indeed embodies the qualities that were valued at the Heian court: beauty, depth of romantic passion, aristocratic birth, aesthetic sensitivity, poetic and artistic skill. But he uses the privileges these "ideal" attributes grant him to treat the women in his life as disposable objects of his own desire. The character of Murasaki suffers most of all, with her psychological pain at years of abuse from Genji exposed in harrowing detail. In fact, one of the earliest references to the story's title calls it Murasaki no Monogatari, indicating Murasaki, not Genji, as the main character.

Many characters privately criticize Genji's violent pursuit of women, particularly older female characters, but his beauty and aristocratic status make them helpless to act against him. Beneath the veneer of "the Shining Prince," as Genji is known, Murasaki Shikibu pens a sharp critique of the way aristocratic men fail time and again to take into consideration how their pursuit of "love" harms the women around them. Woman after woman in the Tale dies due to the psychological damage her relationships with men, especially Genji, have done to her. Some are driven to madness by jealousy when a man is unfaithful. Others seek refuge by becoming nuns or, when men forbid them from doing so, simply perish from despair. The Tale has plenty of nuance, of course: Many women in the story have deep character flaws, and there are other conflicts in the Tale regarding class, status, art, religion, nature, and mortality that have little to do with gender. But when it comes to the question of "romance," the authenticity of the psychological anguish experienced by the women in Genji's life makes it difficult to contest the reading of the Tale as a tragedy of men's romantic expectations pitted against women's harsh realities.

Genji's false appearance of virtue brings to mind the words of an earlier Heian writer, Mitchitsuna no Haha, whose Kagerō Nikki says in the opening paragraph: "As the days went by in monotonous succession, she had occasion to look at the old romances, and found them masses of the rankest fabrication." Kagerō Nikki, a memoir about the depths of a neglected wife's depression, is thought to have had a profound influence on Murasaki's writing. And yet, even contemporary readers sometimes interpreted Genji as the romantic hero his facade presents. Lady Sarashina, who wrote of desperately seeking out copies of the Tale in 1021, daydreamed of finding a man like Genji to sweep her off her feet (though even her imaginary romance with Genji ideally involves no more than receiving a letter from him once a year). Perhaps the conflicting views of Genji are best summed up by Murasaki herself. When she describes a scene where Genji leaves the house of a woman he has been aggressively pursuing, she writes, "To one viewer the vacant sky intimated romance, while to the other it suggested aloof indifference."

One feminist scholar has gone even further in her evaluation of Murasaki Shikibu's attitude towards men and women. In 1991, feminist lesbian and literary scholar Komashaku Kimi published Murasaki Shikibu no Messēji - Murasaki Shikibu's Message. She argued that not only was The Tale of Genji about the harm men inflicted on women in Heian Japan, but that Murasaki Shikibu herself was not romantically interested in men at all. Instead, she marshalled examples from Murasaki's writings to demonstrate that she was attracted to women. As one scholar has put it, this argument was met with "stony silence" from the Japanese literary establishment. Lesbianism had been discouraged in Japan since the Meiji Restoration, and while male homosexual activity was common throughout Japanese history, the concept of a self-identifying "lesbian" did not exist in Heian Japan. How could Murasaki Shikibu, the very icon of Japanese traditional culture, have been gay?

In 998, Murasaki married a man old enough to be her father, Fujiwara no Nobutaka. He already had a number of wives and children and was known for his flamboyant sense of dress and skill as a dancer. Murasaki was considered old for a Heian bride, waiting until her mid- to late-twenties to marry. After her marriage, she continued to live in her father's home in Kyoto, where her husband paid her occasional visits. This was normal for Heian couples of high rank, who did not usually live in the same household. In 999, Murasaki and Nobutaka had a daughter, Fujiwara no Kataiko, also known as Kenshi. Their marriage was fated to be brief: In 1001, Nobutaka died in a cholera epidemic. This short-lived marriage was the only relationship she was ever known to have with a man. Murasaki left almost no writings about him - his only mention in her diary is when she reflects sadly on the Chinese books in her house that go unread since he died. Her poetic memoirs, the posthumously compiled Murasaki Shikibu Shū, are often vague, leaving it unclear how many of the poems in the collection were exchanged with him. The general impression is that she was reluctant to marry him, quarreled with him during their marriage, shared an interest in literature with him, and mourned him (perhaps perfunctorily) when he died.

​Sometime shortly after his death, she began writing The Tale of Genji. Some have speculated that it was grief over her husband's death that motivated her to start writing the book. Other medieval sources report that Princess Senshi, the Kamo High Priestess, requested she write a novel. The author herself gives no indication of her motivation in writing, except perhaps that she enjoyed sending chapters to friends. However it began, the Tale ​quickly became popular throughout Kyoto and beyond. Because of her growing fame as a writer, Murasaki was summoned to serve at the court as a tutor of Empress Shōshi. The empress's family wanted the young queen to be surrounded by a salon of educated ladies-in-waiting. Murasaki was critical but fond of the empress and even taught her Chinese in secret. As far as we can tell, Murasaki served Shōshi until her own death sometime between 1016 and 1031.

Murasaki was originally intimidated by court life, but she soon became jaded. Her introverted personality was ill-suited to the social demands of life in the Palace. The court was constantly busy with ceremonies, important visitors, and unruly parties of drunken men. Unlike other court women like Sei Shōnagon, Murasaki was completely uninterested in love affairs with male courtiers. Empress Shōshi's father, Fujiwara no Michinaga, was a man too powerful for most women to feel able to refuse. His attempts to flirt with Murasaki, however, were met with cold dismissal. He is the only man in her diary described as handsome, but since he may have commissioned part of the diary to glorify his court, it is hard to parse Murasaki's true feelings about him. Some scholars believe that he inspired the figure of Genji, so how a reader interprets Murasaki's portrayal of Genji will also colour how they interpret her depiction of Michinaga. While some medieval scholars assumed she became one of his consorts, there is no evidence for this in either her writings or his own diaries. Her ambivalence about Michinaga aside, other men in her diary are portrayed as annoying, inappropriate, intrusive, and even a source of fear: When a suitor comes knocking on her door at night, Murasaki stays silent in terror until he finally leaves. 

The portrayal of women in the diary could not be more different. Murasaki does criticize plenty of women, to be sure, such as her infamous invective against the "dreadfully conceited" Sei Shōnagon. She experiences frequent anxiety about the gossip and jealousy of other women at court, a theme reflected in The Tale of Genji. But these passages are tempered with lovingly detailed sections about the women she knew best. There are three women at court with whom Murasaki was especially close: Lady Saishō, Lady Dainagon, and Lady Koshōshō. They were all approximately her age and rank slightly higher at court than Murasaki. In her diary, she describes each of their personalities and physical appearances in detail. Lady Saishō is plump with a refined air and an attractive smile that plays around the corners of her mouth. Lady Dainagon is petite, pale and lovely with luxuriously long hair and intelligent features. Lady Koshōshō is elegant and graceful like a weeping willow in spring, but her naive and vulnerable nature "makes one want to weep," leading Murasaki to conclude, "I do worry about her."

Murasaki and Koshōshō took down the separating panels that divided the bedrooms of ladies-in-waiting to combine their rooms into one. When Michinaga asked whether that would make things awkward when one brought over a man to entertain, Murasaki commented, "A tasteless remark. In any case, we are both very close to each other, so there would be no problem." The two of them helped each other get ready for palace ceremonies and huddled around the brazier for warmth in the winter. In one scene when they are commiserating about how tiresome a party was, they are dismayed to be interrupted by two men who sit outside their blinds talking to them late into the night. After they leave, Murasaki muses, "As they hurried away on their respective paths, I wondered what kind of women were waiting for them at home. Not that I was thinking so much of myself as of Lady Koshōshō: she was elegant and attractive by any standards, and yet here she was brooding over the melancholies of life." When Koshōshō is away from court, Murasaki sends her a letter that ends "these watching sleeves will never dry," a metaphor for sorrow that is only used in The Tale of Genji to describe missing lovers or dead relatives. The final incident recorded in Murasaki Shikibu Shū is about Murasaki grieving Koshōshō after her death, sharing an old letter Koshōshō had written with someone else who mourned her.
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Lady Saishō was another close companion. She was related to two other famous Heian women writers as the granddaughter of Michitsuna no Haha and the aunt of Lady Sarashina. In one story, Murasaki recounts how she was enjoying time with Lady Saishō when they were joined by Michinaga's eldest son Yorimichi. "I find him rather unsettling," she comments, recalling how he complained about the ways of women before departing. "I remember thinking how like the hero of a romance he looked." While Yorimichi's resemblance to a hero in a tale is unsettling for the women around him, she has a very different view of female protagonists in a later description of Lady Saishō:

Returning to my room, I looked in at Lady Saishō’s door, only to find her asleep. She lay with her head pillowed on a writing box, her face all but hidden by a series of robes – dark red lined with green, purple lined with dark red – over which she had thrown a deep crimson gown of unusually glossy silk. The shape of her forehead was enchanting and so delicate. She looked just like one of those princesses you find depicted in illustrations. I pulled back the sleeve that covered her face.
      ‘You remind me of a fairy-tale princess!’ I said.
      She looked up with a start.
      ‘You are dreadful!’ she said, propping herself up. ‘Waking people up like that without a thought!’
      I remember being struck by the attractive way her face suddenly flushed. So it is that someone normally very beautiful can look even more beautiful than ever on occasions.

This scene between Lady Saishō and Murasaki is unlike any other in Heian women's diaries. Komashaku Kimi and several other commentators since have read it as a clear expression of physical attraction. It is indeed difficult to see Murasaki's delight in Saishō's sleeping beauty and flushed annoyance as platonic. Elsewhere in the diary, when Lady Saishō is serving in a formal ceremony following the birth of Prince Atsuhira, Murasaki enthuses, "Her hair was done up specially for the occasion and she looked and acted quite perfectly. She is just the right height too, with a full figure, fine features and a beautiful complexion." At multiple points in the diary, Murasaki reserves special comment for Lady Saishō's physical appearance in a scene. While Sei Shōnagon writes with rapture about the beauty of the Empress, she never gushes about the beauty of her fellow ladies-in-waiting. Michitsuna no Haha, who writes about her unhappy marriage to a man, is silent about the physical appeal of other women. Murasaki Shikibu stands out among her contemporaries for her clear interest in women's bodies.

While the scenes with Lady Saishō are suggestive of romantic or sexual interest, they are not on their own evidence for a relationship. This comes with the final of Murasaki's three court companions, Lady Dainagon. At one point in the diary around 1008, Murasaki is spending time away from court at home. She writes of how she struggles to connect with many of her old friends and acquaintances these days. Instead:

It struck me as a sad truth that the only people left to me were those of my constant companions at court for whom I felt a certain affection, and those with whom I could exchange a secret or two, with whom I happened to be on good terms at the present moment. In particular I missed Lady Dainagon, who would often talk to me as we lay close by Her Majesty in the evenings. Had I then indeed succumbed to life at court?
      I sent her the following:
            How I long for those waters on which we lay,
            A longing keener than the frost on a duck's wing.
      To which she replied:
            Awakening to find no friend to brush away the frost,
            The mandarin duck longs for her mate at night.
      When I saw how elegantly it was written, I realised what an accomplished woman she was.

In the Penguin Classics edition of the diary, translator Richard Bowring adds a footnote at this point. Mandarin ducks, he explains, were a common metaphor for lovers because they were believed to mate for life. But "these poems should be seen as forming a conventional exchange between close friends - nothing more." Bowring's anxiety about readers concluding that Murasaki Shikibu yearned for Lady Dainagon as a lover belies the text's erotic tone. Staying up all night "talking" was also often deployed in The Tale of Genji as a euphemism for sex, as Royall Tyler notes in his edition of the Tale, but there is no mention of this in Bowring's notes.

Bowring's eagerness to dismiss queer readings of the text is echoed in the work of Edward Kamens about High Priestess Senshi, another of Murasaki's contemporaries. When discussing a poem from the women of Senshi's literary salon, Kamens says, "The unmistakably erotic subtext of this exchange is part of its poetic character: the two women are playing with images and sentiments that, in another context, would readily be read as explicit tropes of sexual desire." Joshua Mostow has called out Kamens for his "blindness to lesbian interpretations of texts," arguing that Kamens explains away "the simplest interpretation of a text in favor of a more complicated, but heterosexually normative, reading." Like Kamens, Bowring went out of his way to reassure readers that the obvious queerness of Murasaki's poem to Lady Dainagon was "nothing more" than friendship. Mostow, in contrast, advocates for the straightforward queer readings of Murasaki Shikibu and other Heian women to be taken seriously.

The poem from Senshi's salon made use of a very common metaphor for sexual companionship in Heian poetry: the moon. In exchanges between men and women, especially the customary "morning after" poem a man would send after sleeping with a woman, it was typical to compare an absent lover to the moon being hidden behind the clouds. It is this very same "unmistakably erotic" metaphor that Murasaki Shikibu uses in her most famous poem. While The Tale of Genji was the cause of her fame as a writer, Murasaki was also included among the one hundred poets honoured in the 12th century anthology Hyakunin Isshu. Each poet was represented by a single poem. The poem chosen to represent Murasaki came not from Genji but from Murasaki Shikibu Shū, and is given the following introduction:

I met someone I had known long ago as a child, but the moment was brief and I hardly recognised them. It was the 10th of the 7th month. They left hurriedly as if racing the moon.
            At long last we meet,
           but without a moment to recognise, -
           was that you, -
           you have hidden behind the clouds,
           like the light of the midnight moon.

This poem was written at some point early in Murasaki's life, before she wrote The Tale of Genji, before she came to court, and perhaps even before her marriage. The subject of the poem is an unknown woman. The next poem in Murasaki Shikibu Shū is about the same woman, who came to visit on the last day of autumn before departing for a distant place, leaving Murasaki bereft. Murasaki sends her a poem at dawn lamenting her inevitable departure, just as lovers do, comparing her longing and sadness to how the cicadas must feel when their songs must come to an end.

Illustrators of Hyakunin Isshu have painted many scenes inspired by this poem over the years. Several of them make it clear that Murasaki is missing a lover. Modern commentators have sometimes presented the fact that this is a love poem addressed to a woman as a curiosity or inconsistency. But when understood in the full context of the author's life, it is no puzzle: Murasaki Shikibu was a woman who loved women. Whether she also felt attraction to her husband or any other man is not known, but the evidence of her own writings makes her feelings for women clear. Even Genji, her fictional creation who is meant to be the most beautiful man who ever lived, is described as "so beautiful that one could have wished him a woman."

This illustration is set on the date mentioned in the poem, the 10th day of the 7th month. The year is 1000, or Chōhō 2 by the imperial calendar. Murasaki Shikibu lives in the family home in Kyoto. She has always lived here except for a few years spent with her father when he was a governor in the provinces. Tametoki has returned to Kyoto, hosting poetry salons in their home during the day. Since her sister died four years ago, she has been the lady of the house. Her husband is, as usual, not there, preoccupied with one of his other wives. Murasaki's infant daughter Kataiko sleeps in another room. She will grow up to great fame as a poet herself one day, and her mother's famous diary might even be addressed to her to prepare her for a successful career at court. But for now, she is curled up against the breast of her wet nurse while her mother stays up late into the night.

Although it is the start of autumn, it is the hottest time of the year, so the bamboo blinds are rolled up to let in what cool air the evening might bring. In keeping with the seasons, Murasaki wears the hagi or bush clover colour combination in her long robes of unlined silk: one layer of lavender warp with blue-green weft over a solid blue-green robe, and a cool white underrobe beneath. She isn't even known as Murasaki yet - she carries her birth name, now more or less lost to us. However, the lavender murasaki colour she wears suits her future moniker. Her biwa lute leans against a cupboard filled with Chinese texts and Japanese monogatari stories she has collected over the years - gifts from her husband, father and friends - which will inspire her greatest masterpiece, still to be written.

Tonight, however, her mind is far from ancient histories or fanciful tales. Her thoughts are filled with more immediate concerns. The waxing moon casts its light over the empty scroll she has laid out on her writing desk. Who was the recipient of her letter, that long-lost love of her childhood days? Will she even send this letter, or keep it tucked away for her diaries? Later, on another night when the autumn moon fills her heart with melancholy, Murasaki Shikibu will describe herself in her diary as someone who has "survived this far without having achieved anything of note." Little did she know that of all the women alive at that time, anywhere in the world, she would remain the most celebrated today.

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Well well well, here she is at long last: Murasaki Shikibu. She has always been on my list, of course. But what could I contribute to the discussion around such a famous woman? I knew I would draw her writing, but since she hadn't started The Tale of Genji yet in the year 1000, what would I draw her writing? When I learned about the queer readings of her life, it all started to fall into place. That was a few years ago, yet still I waited to draw her. I thought to myself, I should surely read The Tale of Genji first, before I could presume to say anything about her life. I never did finish the Tale, not even close, but as you can see, I still found plenty to say! What got me inspired to finally draw her was reading the novel Tangled Spirits by Kate Shanahan, which takes place at the time Sei Shōnagon is writing The Pillow Book. It was so fun being immersed in my favourite historical period that I decided it was time to bite the bullet and draw Murasaki Shikibu. She is most often depicted in art gazing at the moon that inspires her to write The Tale of Genji, so I enjoyed playing with that imagery by focusing on a different moonlit writing session that brings out her queer side.

You can find a few queer interpretations of Murasaki Shikibu around the Internet, but I wanted to draw more attention to this little-known part of her life. You can read a few other people talking about it here and here. There's also been yuri (lesbian) manga and some video games that posit a romance between Sei Shōnagon and Murasaki Shikibu. Not sure how they would have felt about that, since if they did ever meet, it seems like they did not get along! But it shows that Komashaku Kimi is not alone in picking up on the homosexual expressions in Murasaki's work.

Working on this picture brought a lot of emotional highs and lows. I loved drawing the clothing and researching the visuals. It was fun to reread Murasaki's diary and dive into scholarly works about her love life. But at the same time, it was very difficult to read about the darker aspects of The Tale of Genji. There is a reason I have not finished the book, and why it is much more fun to spend time in Sei Shōnagon's headspace than in Murasaki Shikibu's. The dark side of a woman's life in Heian Japan, even for the most privileged of women, is a difficult topic for me to spend so much time with. Not because I don't know it's true, but because it's just a dark place to inhabit psychologically. As much as I have enjoyed working on other aspects of this picture, it will be a relief to move on from that.

When working on this drawing, I rewatched Isao Takahata's swan song, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. It's based on The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, an important predecessor to Murasaki's work. It is without a doubt one of the most beautiful animated films ever made. That movie, too, deals with difficult themes about gender relations in Heian Japan. I couldn't help but feel that Isao Takahata and the other writer, Riko Sakaguchi, were channeling Murasaki Shikibu while making this film. It felt like a true spiritual successor to her work. When you look at the scenes they added to the original story, they really honed in on the dissociation and distress that women at the Heian court lived through, just like Murasaki does. The garden scene in my illustration is adapted from a background in the film, and I listened to the soundtrack extensively while drawing.

It's been seven years today since I started the Women of 1000 project. It all began in the same place as this one - Kyoto - with another famous author and lady-in-waiting. My mom said she thinks Sei Shōnagon would be jealous of what a nice picture I gave Murasaki! Would you believe me when I say there's more about Murasaki's life I didn't even manage to fit into this long description? Well, it's true, but I had to stop somewhere! Thank you to the friends who offered art help and encouragement while I was working on this drawing. And thank you to everyone who has been on this journey with me, whether you've been here the full seven years or just found Women of 1000 recently. I couldn't have done it without so much support! Happy LGBT History Month, happy Valentine's Day, and happy anniversary to Women of 1000!

Learn more on the website: https://womenof1000ad.weebly.com/murasaki-shikibu.html

Others in the series include...

🇲🇱The Merchant Wives of Tadmekka

🇵🇪The Spinners of Sicán

🇷🇺Nomolun

🇮🇶The Sister of Dayr al-Khuwāt

🇱🇺Adela van Hamaland

🇦🇸The Friends of Luatele

🇦🇫Hurra-yi Khuttali

🇺🇲The Spectators of Snaketown

🇳🇵Candramālī

🇨🇩The Spirit Mediums of Sanga