Japanese Literature | Page 3

precede. The period of time
covered by the entire story is some sixty years, and this volume of
translation comprises the first seventeen chapters.
The aims which the authoress seems always to have kept in view are
revealed to us at some length by the mouth of her hero: "ordinary

histories," he is made to say, "are the mere records of events, and are
generally treated in a one-sided manner. They give no insight into the
true state of society. This, however, is the very sphere on which
romances principally dwell. Romances," he continues, "are indeed
fictions, but they are by no means always pure inventions; their only
peculiarities being these, that in them the writers often trace out, among
numerous real characters, the best, when they wish to represent the
good, and the oddest, when they wish to amuse."
From these remarks we can plainly see that our authoress fully
understood the true vocation of a romance writer, and has successfully
realized the conception in her writings.
The period to which her story relates is supposed to be the earlier part
of the tenth century after Christ, a time contemporary with her own life.
For some centuries before this period, our country had made a signal
progress in civilization by its own internal development, and by the
external influence of the enlightenment of China, with whom we had
had for some time considerable intercourse. No country could have
been happier than was ours at this epoch. It enjoyed perfect tranquillity,
being alike free from all fears of foreign invasion and domestic
commotions. Such a state of things, however, could not continue long
without producing some evils; and we can hardly be surprised to find
that the Imperial capital became a sort of centre of comparative luxury
and idleness. Society lost sight, to a great extent, of true morality, and
the effeminacy of the people constituted the chief feature of the age.
Men were ever ready to carry on sentimental adventures whenever they
found opportunities, and the ladies of the time were not disposed to
disencourage them altogether. The Court was the focus of society, and
the utmost ambition of ladies of some birth was to be introduced there.
As to the state of politics, the Emperor, it is true, reigned; but all the
real power was monopolized by members of the Fujiwara families.
These, again, vied among themselves for the possession of this power,
and their daughters were generally used as political instruments, since
almost all the Royal consorts were taken from some of these families.
The abdication of an emperor was a common event, and arose chiefly
from the intrigues of these same families, although partly from the

prevailing influence of Buddhism over the public mind.
Such, then, was the condition of society at the time when the authoress,
Murasaki Shikib, lived; and such was the sphere of her labors, a
description of which she was destined to hand down to posterity by her
writings. In fact, there is no better history than her story, which so
vividly illustrates the society of her time. True it is that she openly
declares in one passage of her story that politics are not matters which
women are supposed to understand; yet, when we carefully study her
writings, we can scarcely fail to recognize her work as a partly political
one. This fact becomes more vividly interesting when we consider that
the unsatisfactory conditions of both the state and society soon brought
about a grievous weakening of the Imperial authority, and opened wide
the gate for the ascendency of the military class. This was followed by
the systematic formation of feudalism, which, for some seven centuries,
totally changed the face of Japan. For from the first ascendency of this
military system down to our own days everything in society--ambitions,
honors, the very temperament and daily pursuits of men, and political
institutes themselves--became thoroughly unlike those of which our
authoress was an eye-witness. I may almost say that for several
centuries Japan never recovered the ancient civilization which she had
once attained and lost.
Another merit of the work consists in its having been written in pure
classical Japanese; and here it may be mentioned that we had once
made a remarkable progress in our own language quite independently
of any foreign influence, and that when the native literature was at first
founded, its language was identical with that spoken. Though the
predominance of Chinese studies had arrested the progress of the native
literature, it was still extant at the time, and even for some time after
the date of our authoress. But with the ascendency of the military class,
the neglect of all literature became for centuries universal. The little
that has been preserved is an almost unreadable chaos of mixed
Chinese and