Lady Murasaki Shikibu: Did she write the world's first novel or what?

The next two posts are about Heian Era Japan. For context on the Heian Era, I leave you in the capable hands of acclaimed novelist John Green:

Here’s the skinny on the Heian Era in case you didn’t watch the video (which you should): The Heian period spanned from 794-1185 CE and is sometimes called Japan’s “Classical Age” – meaning that it was a period of great cultural achievements that helped lay the groundwork for later Japanese culture. As John Green mentions in the video, it was not a period with a super strong political or economic system, but it was stable enough for the elites to have ample leisure time to take the culture of the Tang Dynasty (remember them from last week?) and run with it until they came up with something thoroughly Japanese. 

Notably, for my purposes, elite women of the Heian Era left behind louder voices than many other women of pre-modern times in part because elite Heian women could write, meaning they left behind diaries, as well as sentimental works of literature. While it would be a mistake to say that Heian women were powerful, or even equal to men, it is true that elite women in Heian Japan were more valued and had more rights than their contemporaries elsewhere. They’d had even better position prior to the Heian Era, but the arrival of Chinese culture eroded their status. (A similar process took place amongst the once powerful elite women of Vietnam.)

Murasaki Shikibu and Her Novel

In earlier periods of history, poetry was the only serious literary pursuit and novels were pretty much relegated to “cheap trash.” Early novels were something of a “women’s” genre – a way that literate elite women kept themselves entertained. The Tale of Genji is one such example of women telling stories to entertain themselves. 

Murasaki Shikibu is a nom de plume or nickname: we don’t know her real name, as it was not considered important to record the name of a daughter. We also don’t know terribly much about her life despite the portions of a diary and the vivid novel that she left behind. We do know that she lived in the late Heian Period (c. 978-1014) and that she was a member of the ruling Fujiwara clan. She was married, and had a daughter, but she was widowed after only two years of marriage. 

After the death of her husband, Murasaki Shikibu was summoned to court. The reason is not known for sure, but historians speculate that her literary talents made her an ideal Lady in Waiting for the Empress and her job was probably to keep the Empress and other ladies entertained with her stories.

It is unknown how long it took Murasaki Shikibu to write her 54-chapter epic, chronicling the courtly intrigues and love affairs of Prince Genji. Her story has endured not only as an entertaining piece of literature, but also as a peek inside the minds of the Heian Elite. Although Genji’s adventures are fictional, the narrative shows us the social milieu of the late Heian Court, while also demonstrating the important aesthetic principles of the time. 

Tune in next week for another Heian Babe: Sei Shonogan and her Pillowbook. 

Encyclopedia Britannica Murasaki Shikibu

Harvard Magazine

Writers of the Heian Era

The Met: Heian Period

Heian Japan: An Introductory Essay.  This is a great intro to the Heian Period. Unfortunately, sometimes the server gets cranky and it won’t load.

Emakimono

Empress Wu Zetian: Dragon Lady or Benevolent Leader?

Here are two depictions of Empress Wu Zetian, neither created during her lifetime:

These two likenesses of the only woman who ruled China outright (instead of from behind a puppet) epitomize the historical debate that has shrouded her for centuries. She could have been a ruthless dragon lady who even Cersei Lannister would find off putting – OR, she could have been suffering the same plight as female leaders of today: rampant double standard. 

Wu’s path to power was – shall we say – murky. Not much is known for certain about her early life but she came to be a part of the Tang Imperial court as a concubine to the Taizong Emperor. She didn’t have any children with him and he may not have found her especially interesting compared to his other consorts. However, there is speculation that she had an affair with one of the Taizong Emperor’s son’s – Li Zhi – while the old man was still kicking.

After the Taizong Emperor’s death, Li Zhi (Wu’s Boo) succeeded him as the Gaozong Emperor. Wu, but this point, had been bundled off to a Buddhist convent where, as tradition dictated, she was supposed to live out her days as a chaste nun – but Wu wasn’t much for tradition, so she made her way back to the Tang court where the newly-minted emperor made her one of his concubines. 

Here, the details get murky again. There was clearly (as one would expect) competition among the Emperor’s women over his favor and influence at court. The most toxic of these rivalries was between Wu (then Consort Wu) and the Empress Consort Wang.

As far as my understanding goes, the Empress was sort of like the Emperor’s wife and was the only woman in the harem who had any real status unless the Emperor’s mother, aka Empress Dowager, was still kicking. Concubines – who had a ranking system unto themselves – we sort of like secondary wives whose only official roles were to make babies and please the Emperor. Any children of concubines were legitimate issue of the Emperor - a nice insurance policy in case the Empress was infertile, and something that certain European kings with lots of bastards and no legitimate heirs might have benefited from.

Following this logic, Wang had more status than Wu, but the Emperor seemed to have liked Wu more. Wang had no children, while other concubines – Wu included – did, leading to a further point of contention. This rivalry came to a head with the death of Wu’s infant daughter. Wu blamed the infant’s death on Wang, leading some to believe that Wu might have killed her own baby to make Wang look bad. Some conceded that maybe Wang did kill the kid due to jealousy, while still others suggest that the baby could have died due to carbon monoxide poisoning since the Tang court burned coal for heat and lacked proper ventilation systems. We will never know. But what we do know is that the infant’s death resulted in Wang’s dismissal and Wu’s ascension as the new Sheriff in town – i.e. she was now Empress Consort. 

Further machinations may have ensued and after the death of the Gaozong Emperor, Wu acted as regent to her sons (possibly favoring an easier to manipulate one) and ruled in the fashion more common for women – guiding the actions of her young, impressionable son – before seizing power in her own right, something unprecedented, and indeed, unrepeated, in Chinese history. 

The anomalous way in which she came to power, may account somewhat for how she was traditionally viewed in Chinese historiography. As Mike Dash phrased it in his blog post for Smithsonian Magazine,“…imperial history was written to provide lessons for future rulers, and as such tended to be weighted heavily against usurpers (which Wu was) and anyone who offended the Confucian sensibilities of the scholars who labored over them (which Wu did simply by being a woman).”

 But, with the distance of several centuries, some historians are re-evaluating Wu’s contribution, suggesting that she may have protected and fostered certain developments that made the Tang Dynasty a Golden Age. 

Wu was Empress fairly early in the Tang Dynasty which lasted from 618-906 CE. Wu ruled unofficially from 683-690 as regent, and held power officially until she “retired” a few months before her death in 705, and some of the hallmarks of the Tang Dynasty were certainly in place during Wu’s time, if not implemented by Wu herself. The Tang Dynasty was an internationalist, cosmopolitan, cultural giant and regional superpower enriched by the Silk Road trade that passed through the capital of Chang’an. As merchants are wont to do, they brought not only goods, but also ideas. Chang’an was said to have Buddhist and Taoist temples, Christian Churches, and Mosques. Buddhism in particular became a popular religion in Tang China – spreading from there to Korea and Japan – something that Wu may have also had a hand in, given her support of the religion. (Another reason she would be in the Historical Dog House since some Confucians viewed Buddhism as a “barbarian” religion that by Confucian standards encouraged “selfishness.”) 

Wu also supported certain aspects of Confucianism – such as by implementing the famous meritocratic civil service exam system. (Unlike in the United States, bureaucrats were the elite, not reviled bean counters.) She also extended Confucian mourning rites to be applied to one’s mother, as well as one’s father. 

It is debatable how much Wu herself had to do with it, but the Tang Dynasty was a relatively good time to be an elite woman in China. Funerary objects (see video) suggest that women could engage in most of the same activities as men at the time, and were not as restricted in their social movements or styles of dress as they would be in later dynasties. (No footbinding yet!) I personally suspect that the cosmopolitan outlook of the empire as a whole, and the prominence of Buddhism over Confucianism were much more responsible for the relative freedoms of women during this period, than any edicts that Empress Wu made. 

So, yes, Wu may have murdered her children, knocked off rivals, and had a sexual appetite – but, when weighed against her accomplishments, imagine how those behaviors might have been judged if she were male.

 Better yet, take the behaviors of kings – like Henry VIII and his six wives. How might he have been judged differently if he had been Henrietta who had six husbands, whom she regularly abandoned for younger, more attractive men, punished (sometimes with execution) for not giving her sufficiently gendered children, who probably contracted syphilis from said love affairs and passed it on to her husbands, who became obese, and in her 50s married a 19-year-old? Suffice to say, as much as we love to hate Henry VIII, we would probably hate Henrietta more. 

 

Sources:

I highly recommend Mike Dash’s post for Smithsonian Magazine: The Demonization of Empress Wu

Old Faithful: Wikipedia

The Met Museum: Tang Dynasty

The Met Museum: Internationalism in the Tang Dynasty

Although I did not personally read it for this post, if you are interested in this period, you may want to check out China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty by Mark Edward Lewis