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Lady Murasaki and the Craft of Fiction
M. Thomas Inge
South Atlantic Review 55.2 (May 1990): p7­14. Rpt. in
Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism. Ed. Jelena O. Krstovic. Vol. 79. Detroit: Gale, 2006. From Literature
Resource Center.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
Full Text:
[(lecture date 1989) In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1989, Inge claims that through her brilliant
and innovative narrative technique in The Tale of Genji, the Japanese writer known as Murasaki Shikibu invented the
novel in the early eleventh century.]
There has been considerable discussion recently about the importance of Western culture in education and the need to
return to our curricula a study of the great books of the past. At the same time, there are those who insist that we must
also take into account the neglected works of minority and disenfranchised authors: women, African­Americans, Native
Americans, Chicanos, etc. In a sense, both points of view are right.
Since we have inherited a society that has been defined by Western culture, it would be foolish not to attempt to
understand the ideas and works that have shaped its traditions. To do so, however, without considering the full cultural
complexity of that society, in particular the rich contributions of a multi­ethnic and feminine populace, is to come away
with only a partial understanding of what has made America special and different in the world at large. Yes, we are
Western but also culturally distinct in the variety of ethnic groups that have made America the unusual nation that it is.
Implicit in both arguments is a tendency to assume that only Western culture, be it canonical, ethnic, or feminine, is
worth studying. The idea is that the West has defined world civilization and that, because of our technology and science,
our culture is the only culture worth caring about. This is a kind of cultural arrogance that can lead us to make incorrect
and unwarranted assumptions about the values and accomplishments of our civilization.
I have been learning to teach Asian literature for the past few years, and how that came about is instructive in this
regard. I had the good fortune to work with the U.S. Information Agency in Washington for two years between 1982 and
1984 as the Resident Scholar in American Studies. My job was to find ways to encourage and support the study of
American history, literature, and society in all parts of the world on the assumption that to understand our culture is to
understand us as a nation better. It is a principle in which I then strongly believed, and I still do. I was, therefore, a
zealous representative of things American abroad.
When I lectured in some parts of the world that have a minor influence on world affairs, in particular Southeast Asia­­
Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand­­or China, I was frequently asked a question that stalled me. They said that it was
well and good that we wanted them to study our culture, given our influence in the world, but they asked, what were we
doing to encourage our children to understand the cultures of other nations? More often than not, I had to say precious
little, but I took the question to heart and have remained concerned about the answers I had to give.
Thus I decided in 1985 to devote a part of my teaching and research time to Asian literature, in an attempt to formulate,
at least on a personal level, a response to that frequently asked question. Fortunately, Columbia University, with funding
from the National Endowment for the Humanities, offered a summer seminar, which I was invited to attend, on "The
Classics of Asian Literature." The seminar was designed specifically for people like me who were preparing to teach the
subject. In six weeks we read over fifty classic works of Indian, Islamic, Chinese, and Japanese literature and engaged
in some ninety hours of seminar discussion. This experience, both exhausting and engaging, gave me a good
foundation and sense of direction for my preparation of the course. In 1988, I received a Fulbright grant through the U.S.
Department of Education that sent me along with a group of educators to China for a month; there we gained first­hand
experience with the people and culture in what we understood at the time as a rapidly progressing modern country. In
addition to developing my course, I have led study­tours to China and other countries so that our students could
experience first­hand the cultures about which they were reading.
It was in the Columbia seminar that I discovered a remarkable work of fiction that has entranced me ever since.
Teaching it annually has made me realize some things about the dangers of ethnocentrism. It is an imposing work, fifty­
four chapters long and 1,090 pages in English translation, with a cast of hundreds. We know it as The Tale of Genji,
written by an eleventh­century lady of the court in Heian Japan whom we have come to call Murasaki Shikibu. The truth
is, we do not know her actual name, and the name we give her is a combination of her father's ceremonial title, Shikibu,
and the name of a popular character from The Tale of Genji, Murasaki, used as a nickname by her friends at court.
We have few biographical details about her life, but what we do know suggests she was an unusual woman. She came
from a well­placed and literate family, her great­grandfather and her grandfather having been distinguished poets of the
tenth century and her father having been a master of the Chinese classics and poetry, in addition to serving in various
government posts and leadership roles under several emperors. Born near or after 970, she grew up in a household
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where great value was placed on scholarship and learning, but for men, not women. Chinese was the language of
government and politics, and women were not to bother their heads with it. Yet young Murasaki was unable to tether her
blossoming intellect. As she reported it herself in her diary:
When my brother, secretary at the Ministry of Ceremonial, was a young boy learning the Chinese classics, I
was in the habit of listening to him and I became unusually proficient at understanding those passages which
he found difficult to grasp. Father, a most learned man, was always regretting the fact: "Just my luck!" he
would say. "What a pity she was not born a man!" But then I gradually realized that people were saying, "It's
bad enough when a man flaunts his learning; she will come to no good," and ever since then I have avoided
writing even the simplest character.(Bowring 139)
While she may have avoided writing Chinese, happily she would turn to Japanese, the language of daily life, as an outlet
for her creativity.
As one might expect, she had a forceful personality that seldom won her friends. She recorded in her diary that other
people said she was "pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to
versifying, disdainful, cantankerous, and scornful" (Bowring 135). None of this pleased her very much, although she
seems to have taken great care to record every pungent adjective as if she cherished it.
In 998, Murasaki married Fujiwara no Nabutaka, a flamboyant and influential figure at court who was considerably older
than she and who had several wives already. Their short marriage, nevertheless, was apparently a happy one. She gave
birth to a daughter in 999, and in 1001 her husband died in an epidemic. Presumably, it was during her years as a widow
that she began her masterwork, perhaps writing it chapter by chapter as a series of connected stories until gradually it
became a massive, complex work of fiction, The Tale of Genji. Sometime around 1005 or 1006, she entered the court
as a companion and tutor to the Empress Shoshi. How long Murasaki remained in her service is not known, nor do we
know when she died, but her name does not appear in court records after 1015.
She was writing at a time of literary brilliance in Japan among a group of female authors, such as Sei Shonagon, whose
opinionated and insightful Pillow Book provided a delightful portrait of court life, as did The Gossamer Years, The Izumi
Shikibu Diary, and The Sarashina Diary. Shut out of the life of politics and the affairs of the world, the women turned to
sentiment and emotion as subject matter for their accomplished poetry and prose. While the diary seemed to be a major
genre, and Murasaki made her contribution to the impressive list, there were quite a number of fictional romances
available for their reading amusement, but there was nothing at hand comparable to The Tale of Genji in plan or
execution, nor was there any set of ideas or traditions to guide her. She practically invented its genre on the spot.
The plot of the romance involves the attractive and talented Genji, known for his charm and accomplishment as the
"shining prince." He cannot succeed his father as Emperor because he is the son of a favored concubine rather than his
chief wife. Despite his exceptional promise, Genji is fated to spend his life in pursuit of culture, the pleasures of the flesh,
and the perfect woman. He falls deeply in love with his father's mistress, Fujitsubo, whose beauty and appearance are
much like those of his mother, and despite her efforts to prevent a liaison, he fathers a child with her which the Emperor
takes to be his own. Chapter after chapter unfolds any number of amorous conquests by the prince as he perfects the
arts of poetry, dance, music, and love. In a holy retreat, he finds a little girl named Murasaki, the niece of Fujitsubo and
very much like her in appearance. Genji adopts and trains her until she reaches the age of fifteen, when he seizes her
sexually and takes her as his lover. (When this turn of events startles my students, I remind them of a popular American
singer who fell in love with a fourteen­year­old girl named Priscilla and moved her into his mansion where he educated
and later married her­­Elvis Presley, of course).
The plot is much more complicated than I can easily summarize here, and I fear that I have already made it sound
sensational and inconsequential. I have not even begun to mention the numerous characters who move into and out of
Genji's life, over 430 in all. A little over three­quarters of the way through the book, Genji suddenly dies, and the
remainder of the narrative recounts the stories of the next generation, before the work itself ends abruptly. It is the only
piece of fiction I know in which the hero dies before the book ends. What Murasaki accomplished thereby was a
remarkable effect. She demonstrated the consequences of Genji's model and actions by showing his influences on
those who followed him, a technique that reveals just how important people can be during their own lifetimes and after.
We do not know why she ceased writing the book. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, however, she gave her work
of fiction an attribute of life itself­­the open­ended nature of things. The world continues without us, and life never comes
to an orderly conclusion as in fiction.
What is even more amazing than the power and magnitude of the narrative, given Murasaki's lack of models or
examples to follow, is the presence of a calculated and technically accomplished narrative voice and a clear control of
the artistry by which she tells the story. She engages in a dialogue with the reader, asking us to forgive something that
has been left out (Murasaki 207), to use our own imaginations as to the contents of some letters (232), not to ask her to
provide us with a list of party guests, because it would "rather bore" her (568), and to allow her to discontinue the
narrative for a while, because to describe the events at hand "would be a bother and my head is aching" (302). Through
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her narrative voice, Murasaki becomes a character in the story, interacting with figures of her own creation. When Genji
leaves the court and a good deal of sadness behind him among his admirers, she tells us that she is "grief­stricken"
herself (220), and on another occasion notes, "I could have enjoyed a millennium of Genji's company ... so serene and
sure did he seem" (329). Such personal engagement lends verisimilitude to the narrative.
Murasaki is also conscious of herself as a woman in a restrictive male society. When she sets down some comments of
the dying Emperor, she notes that "it is not a woman's place to report upon them" (191), and describing a poetry contest
between professors and courtiers, she cuts it short with the comment that "it would not be seemly for a woman to speak
in detail of these scholarly happenings, and I shall say no more" (363). She allows her male characters to expose their
worst chauvinism. Genji ruminates after witnessing the results of a woman's jealous wrath, "The conclusion was
inescapable: women were creatures of sin" (620), and another character offers this description of the gender: "Women
are the problem, good for a moment of pleasure, offering nothing of substance" (805).
Murasaki allows such statements to stand without comment, typical as they were of the time and place, but she cannot
resist entering a note of complaint. At one point she asserts, "Such a difficult, constricted life as a woman was required
to live! ... Since [the world] chose to look upon women as useless, unfeeling creatures, should it not pity the fathers who
went to such trouble rearing them? Like the mute prince who was always appearing in sad parables, a woman should be
sensitive but silent" (699). As the book approaches its end, she has a character report, "Life is not good to us women. All
of us, high and low, have to live with unhappiness, in this life and all the others. I want to weep just thinking about it"
(952). Whether we can lay claim to Murasaki as an eleventh­century feminist is debatable, but she is certainly worth
examining from that perspective. At a minimum, she records accurately the gender attitudes of her day, including one
remarkable conversation among a group of men one rainy night in the second chapter about distinctions between
"upper­rank" women and "middle­rank" women. If Murasaki didn't overhear such a conversation in reality, she has done
an amazing job of creating the psychology of the self­absorbed, insensitive male ego.
As if the work itself in all its artistry was not enough, Murasaki has embedded in the narrative in chapter 25 an ars
poetica on the craft of fiction, at least two centuries before the subject would be taken up in any formal way by Japanese
critics. Coming upon the ladies of the court engaged in reading the romances of the day, Genji good­naturedly
challenges them to defend their reading of such trivial tales in which "there is scarcely a thread of truth." As the
discussion develops, Genji admits that, dealing as they do with "real emotions and plausible chains of events," they fill in
the gaps in history: "The Chronicles of Japan and the rest are a mere fragment of the whole truth. It is your romances
that fill in the details."
Noting that life is filled with both pleasure and pain, with good and evil, he continues: "If the storyteller wishes to speak
well, then he chooses the good things; and if he wishes to hold the reader's attention he chooses bad things,
extraordinarily bad things. Good things and bad things alike, they are things of this world and no other" (437). Thus
writers must be free to treat the whole of life in their fiction and not focus narrowly on the pleasures for the reader's
amusement. In effect, Murasaki has anticipated by almost 800 years. Henry James, who would write in "The Art of
Fiction" in 1884:
Art is essentially selection, but it is a selection whose main care is to be typical, to be inclusive. For many
people, art means rose­coloured window­panes. ... They will tell you glibly that artistic considerations have
nothing to do with the disagreeable, with the ugly. ... It appears to me that no one can ever have made a
seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase­­a kind of revelation­­of
freedom. One perceives in that case­­by the light of a heavenly ray­­that the province of art is all life, all
feeling, all observation, all vision ... all experience. This is a sufficient answer to those who maintain that it
must not touch the sad things of life. ...(James 722)
When Genji goes on to suggest that he would serve as an effective character in a romance himself, we are in the
presence of a kind of self­referentiality in fiction that borders on metafiction­­characters within a novel talking about being
characters in a novel. In any case, Murasaki's work is aware of itself as fiction and offers its own defense of its value to
society.
What I am leading up to, of course, is the fact that Lady Murasaki invented the modern novel almost a thousand years
ago. In its portrayal of complex, three­dimensional characters in a fully developed social and historical context; its
sophisticated and sensitive treatment of psychological and emotional states of mind; and its dramatically realized
scenes, she has anticipated Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and other novelists of the modern sensibility.
Even though she wrote for a few highly literate and sophisticated readers at court and her work would not see print and
mass distribution until centuries later, she produced a work that has the power and appeal of a twentieth­century novel.
Most reference books suggest that the novel had its roots in the fiction of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Cervantes, and the
compilers of the Arthurian romances; that it developed in the eighteenth century under the hands of Defoe, Richardson,
Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne; that it came to maturity in the nineteenth century in the work of Austen, Scott, Dickens,
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Thackeray, Hawthorne, Melville, Hardy, and Eliot; and that it reached its major era of achievement with James, Woolf,
Joyce, and Faulkner in this century. Lady Murasaki, it seems, was ahead of them all.
It is not entirely our fault that we have overlooked her achievement. The Tale of Genji was not translated into English
until 1933 by Arthur Waley, and a more accurate and complete translation by Edward G. Seidensticker did not appear
until 1976. Her example does suggest, however, that we should be very careful before making claims about the
accomplishments and values of Western culture. If we are going to canonize and require that our students master the
classics of Western literature, we should also require that they know some of the classics of other cultures as well. I
would nominate Murasaki Shikibu as a strong candidate for inclusion. Knowledge of her work would serve as a healthy
corrective to the sometimes myopic and ethnocentric claims of Western civilization. But it would also provide one of the
most moving and engrossing reading experiences of a lifetime.
Works Cited
Bowring, Richard. Murasaki Shikibu: Her Diary and Poetic Memoirs. A Translation and Study. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
UP, 1982.
James, Henry. "The Art of Fiction." Anthology of American Literature. Ed. George McMichael. Vol. 2. New York:
Macmillan, 1980. 713­26.
Murasaki Shikibu. The Tale of Genji. Trans. Edward G. Seidensticker. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Inge, M. Thomas. "Lady Murasaki and the Craft of Fiction." Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, edited by Jelena
O. Krstovic, vol. 79, Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=cmu_main&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CH1420067644&it=r&asid=3ce72ac864e1ab0936ffedf53417d781.
Accessed 7 Jan. 2017. Originally published in South Atlantic Review, vol. 55, no. 2, May 1990, pp. 7­14.
Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420067644
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