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

So 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 1,000 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. And 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 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. And 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. And 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 or 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 um 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 or i 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. 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. They're amazing, aren't they? So.

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 who

but he's not named. I mean, he seems peculiarly anonymous. And 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. The emperor is obsessed by a low-ranking intimate, and this is clearly offending court etiquette, but he's pursuing the affair anyway. Anyone who's read The Arabian Nights or something like that will feel that it's the kind of story in which this intimate is

is going to get pregnant and give birth to a prince. This will set the whole dynamics of the story in train. 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. 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 feted by all as the undoubted future heir apparent.

But 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 fairy tale 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. Yeah. 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. The boy grows up, he becomes ever more handsome, so much so that his nickname is the Shining Prince. I

As well as being stunningly handsome, he has incredible dress sense, amazing style, but also luminous talents. 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. 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 that Japanese were playing football? That cannot be right, Tom. Does everybody not know that it was invented at our 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...

His father is desperate that he doesn't waste his potential because the problem 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. So the emperor takes a drastic step. He officially removes the boy from the imperial family. 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. Okay. 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,

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. Right. And to be

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, 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. Okay. 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. The tale of Genji is being written while in England, Æthelred 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. 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. It'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 Rolter El, who

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. I mean, and obviously, I don't speak Japanese. I'm not familiar with Japanese history at all. So,

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. I 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 have been produced across Eurasia in this period. So in Persia, you have the great poet Fadauzi, he's writing the Shahnameh, the great epic of the Iranian people. And this is an epic that has so

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. All 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 it's kind of presaging the romances of chivalry that will emerge throughout Europe. And they're all kind of centered around either the supernatural or

or masculine heroism, or both. But the tale of Genji, despite the sense you get from the opening page, is nothing like any of those at all. 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. He 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. And then ultimately he arrives as a kind of honorary retired emperor. 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

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 and that kind of subtlety. And it's a very vivid, very sophisticated portrait of how the imperial court actually functioned. What wouldn't a historian of ancient Egypt? He would die for something like that. But 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. Okay. Or she's

I don't know, the daughter of his best friend, Genji O'Palin. He's all for it. Can't hold him back. 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, so there's plenty in English on the tale of Genji. Of course there is. But the thing about Genji, why he is so fascinating 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, you know, a thousand years as the kind of...

I suppose the definitive model of charisma. 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? 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. And 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... 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 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's...

It continues with details of what his son does and his grandson, and 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 lavender.

In his relationship with her, both his appalling qualities and his charming qualities are kind of intermingled. And 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 a 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 behavior 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.

And 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? Fifteen, 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.

And 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.

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. So 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 various women in his house, everyone knows that Murasaki, despite her 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, 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 they're

Their relationship is drawn with incredible subtlety and richness and compassion. So 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 marvelous, 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 you know 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 though right right yeah he's carrying on with loads of you know you said 12 year olds the friends of friends the

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. Right.

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 Bennet, but he's also got Emma there. He's got, I don't know, Fanny Price. He's got Miss Bates. He's got a whole range of women gathered around him. So you have all that. But also the other thing is that because you have this passage of time, because you see Genji himself and all the various women that he loves ageing,

The 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 Temps Pertus in Search of 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. But

But 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 that 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. 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, or is it out of time? And obviously, it isn't because it's the product of it. Yeah. It's written in 11th century Japan. Yeah. Right. Exactly. 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? And 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 phase.

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 realized 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

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No 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, and

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, he's charming, he's perfumed, he sleeps with all the ladies. Yeah, kind of wish fulfillment. Yeah, wish fulfillment. But no, this is the work of a woman. And her name, Tom, is Mirasaki 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, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And 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

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. I've just saved him on my WhatsApp. He just comes up as the podcast producer. Yeah. And of course, we do also have Tabby, but of course, Tabby is a woman. Do you know how I refer to Tabby? So Tabby, when she comes up on my phone, I just put, rest his history, foreign office. And we will explain why.

Because there are kind of slightly different rules governing how women in the Japanese court are named. So they have kind of a range of nicknames. They don't tend to have titles. So Genji's mother, for instance, who we introduced to in that opening paragraph, she is initially called...

the Kiritsubu Intimate, because she's sleeping with the emperor, so hence intimate. And she lives in a section of the palace called the Kiritsubu. And anyone who's familiar with the palace will know that this is not a bad place to be, but it's not the best bit. So it immediately establishes her kind of position in the pecking order. And then when she delivers Genji, her name changes and she gets called the Kiritsubu Haven.

Okay. A haven is a kind of unofficial title for a woman who has born a child to either an emperor or an heir apparent. And literally it means, I kind of read up on this, it literally means a place in which the august seed has found rest. Okay. So the feminist critics must enjoy that. Yeah, exactly. So if you are a haven, that's what's happened to you. Right.

But obviously, not everyone gets pregnant by an emperor. So not everyone's a haven. So what of women who don't have that status? You might be given a nickname that comes from kind of almost anything. So Murasaki Shikibu. Murasaki comes from the name of her heroine in the novel. She's identified with Genji's great love. So that's where it comes from. And Shikibu, it's the place where her father worked.

So he was a court official working in the Ministry of Ceremonials. So he's responsible for all the kind of parades and things like that. And so hence, that's why we call Tabby, rest his history, Foreign Office, because her father was a diplomat. So you're defined, if you're a woman, you're defined by your father's rank, basically. Yes. And this is the case with this Murasaki Shikibu. Yes. And she is very, very aware of politics.

the opportunities that are open to men that are shut to her as a woman. And she clearly has been since she was a child. Because in her diary, which you quoted from, her self-description. Yeah, that's an amazing piece of work, the diary. And she wrote that for a couple of years in the first decades of the 11th century. So while she's in the midst of writing the tale of Genji,

She recorded this incredibly telling episode from her youth. It was when her brother was being taught by her father the lessons that would be appropriate to him as a boy who's destined for imperial service. Murasaki wrote, "'I was in the habit of listening with him, and I became unusually proficient at understanding those lessons with which he was struggling. My father, a most learned man, was always regretting this fact.'

Just my luck, he would say. What a pity she was not born a man. Again, worth re-emphasising, this is being written in the age of the Anglo-Saxons. I mean, imagine if we had a diary like this. I know. Written by an Anglo-Saxon Mormon. I mean, it's unthinkable.

but it existed. People may remember we have the life of Edward the Confessor that was clearly inspired by Edith, his wife, but she doesn't write it herself, even though she's very educated. No, exactly. Whereas Murasaki, you know, there's no issue with that. And it is amazing. I think that, I mean, it would be anachronistic to call it feminist, but clearly the sense of resentment...

that men are monopolizing education. I mean, you get that through in China or in the Caliphate or in Latin Christendom, but you don't have anyone, I think, as far as I know, expressing it quite so personally as Murasaki does there. So obviously part of this must depend upon her own personal qualities. So you've mentioned them in your notes, the fact that she's very learned,

I mean, she's been listening to all the lessons. She's a very good observer. She's bright. She's determined. Yeah. You know, all of those things. Plus she's in the imperial court. So she's able to observe all this. Yeah. But what does it tell us about Japanese society? Because presumably there must be a deeper explanation for why a woman is able to produce this at this point in time at

at this place. Yeah. So I think there are kind of deep structural reasons for it and they're well worth exploring, not just for their own sake, but because they tell us a lot about how Japan kind of emerges as a distinctive civilization. So just sticking to Murasaki for a moment, one of the nicknames that she's given at court, and it really upsets her because it's meant kind of mockingly, almost cruelly, is Lady Chronicle.

The Chronicles in Japan are the two oldest surviving texts that we have. They were written in the early 8th century AD. The first of these was written in Japanese, and the second was written in Chinese. Between them, they give a history of Japan that actually begins with the creation of the universe. A lot of it is about the doings of the gods in the early years of the creation. It goes all the way up to the end of the 7th century.

They are very clearly written to explain the origins of the imperial line, the line of the emperors, and to justify its rule as something that is divinely sanctioned. So what you get from the chronicles is the fact that every emperor is descended from Amaterasu, who is the goddess of the sun.

This is something that is still part of Japanese imperial culture to this day. Charles III doesn't boast about being descended from Woden, but the current emperor, absolutely. He's descended from the sun. This is part of imperial ideology.

What we're told in the Chronicles is that the first emperor, a guy called Jimmu, which I think is a great name, is the great grandson of the sun. And he is sent down from heaven and he conquers all the various peoples of Japan, including men whose arms and legs are so long that people call them the earth spiders. And he reigns over Japan and he then dies at the age of 170.

and he is followed by a succession of 15 emperors, all of whom are very anonymous. They don't really seem to do anything except to have kind of madly, improbably long lives, kind of like the patriarchs in the Bible. They're living for kind of 400, 300 years, all that kind of thing. People do live for a long time in Japan though, don't they? Yeah, but not that long. Okay. Not that long. And when you add all these very long-lived emperors to the list of more recent emperors in the Chronicle, so those who did exist, who are historical, Japanese history is made to stretch back

thousands of years. And the reason that this matters is precisely because it doesn't stretch back thousands of years. Ah, interesting. It's actually very, very parvenu. It's actually appeared very recently on the scene. They're protesting too much. They are protesting too much because the imperial family until prehistoric

pretty recently, you know, a few hundred years before, had only been one of a number of kind of great competing families in central Japan and specifically the Yamato Basin. It's the kind of southern central region of Honshu, which is the largest island. So the island that Tokyo is on. Yeah, the middle bit. And

Even by the time of Murasaki, not all of Honshu had been conquered. So the northern reaches were still unstable. And Hokkaido, which is the northernmost island, the barbarians were still roaming there. So this is why it's incredibly important for the imperial dynasty and for the entire Japanese system that depends on it to big it up as divine as possible.

ancient as universal. In the 7th century, you get this ringing decree, there are not two suns in the sky, nor two lords

on the earth. This is aimed at the other Japanese families. There is only the one imperial family. In the middle of the 7th century, the Yamato monarch starts to call himself 'tenno', which means 'heavenly sovereign'. By the early 8th century, what had previously been Yamato, the region where this imperial family has come from, is starting to be called the 'root of the sun', which in Japanese is 'nihon',

from which the English word Japan ultimately derives. So I guess if you know nothing about Japanese history, like me, all of this sounds pretty familiar. It's not unheard of at all in Eurasian history for...

monarchies to become more centralized, more powerful. When they do so, they develop a kind of cult and they develop a myth, a backstory. So Japan in that sense is maybe not massively unusual. And of course, Japan is being influenced, isn't it, by a neighbor? Because Japan is not in a bubble. And Japan is not the only country in East Asia that has an emperor and that sees itself as the center of the universe. And of course, this brings us to its colossal mainland neighbor, which is China.

Right. And so you said, you know, this is quite a familiar story. I mean, there are perhaps elements here of Charlemagne crowning himself in Rome and aping the titles of the emperor in Constantinople. But China is a much more domineering superpower than Rome.

Byzantine Empire is in the Age of Charlemagne. It is the preponderant cultural influence in the region of Asia that Japan is attached to. That very decree that is issued saying that the Japanese emperor is the only sun in the sky, that is lifted absolutely from the Chinese. The word tenno, the title that

often translated as emperor. This also derives from China. It's a Chinese word and it means the pole star, which the Chinese saw as being the throne of heaven. This being so, the Chinese are a bit like the Byzantines with Charlemagne and they treat the pretensions of the Japanese with

utter contempt. Yeah. There's a lovely story about a letter, isn't there? I love this story. Yeah. So the Yamato court sends a letter to China in the early 7th century and they say, the child of heaven of the land where the sun rises. So again, that's this idea of Nihon, the root of the sun.

sends a letter to the child of heaven of the land where the sun sets. So that's China. And this is supposedly brought to the attention of the Chinese emperor, who retorts, this letter from the barbarians contains improprieties. Do not call it to my attention again. I love that. So that's the Japanese kind of dealt with. But these rebuffs do not stop the Japanese monarchy from kind of aping the Chinese model. And in fact, from kind of

consciously trying to model almost everything in Japan on the example of China. In the early 7th century, this kind of introduction of the Japanese monarchy on a Chinese model is termed by historians the Great Reform. As part of it, scholars and officials are sponsored to go to China

to study it and then to come back and report. They bring back Confucian ideals, so this idea of a great civil service serving the emperor, a centralized monarchy, a meritocratic civil service, all the things that we're familiar with from Chinese history, but also with the literary culture. Very rapidly, Chinese becomes, I suppose, what Latin is in medieval European courts. It's

the language that anyone with any pretension to education, anyone with any hope of kind of rising in the service of the emperor has to be able to read and speak. And when written Japanese is developed, it uses Chinese writing. So those chronicles, which are

describing and praising the antiquity of the Japanese monarchy. The first one's written in Japanese, as we said, but the second one is in Chinese. It's amazing that a patriotic history is being written in a foreign language. But I suppose you would write a patriotic history in Europe in Latin, conceivably, in the medieval period. And that's the comparison, right? You have the hegemon and its culture. Well, it's hegemonic, hence the name. Yeah. And in

And in the early 8th century, when the first permanent capital in Japan is founded - so up until that moment, the convention had been that every time an emperor died, the court would move to another location. But this is clearly not the Chinese way. The Chinese have a massive great capital, Chang'an. And so the Japanese monarchy founds its own capital, which comes to be called Nara. So again, in the region of Yamato where the family had emerged.

And it's directly slavishly modelled on the example of Chang'an. It has this kind of grid system. Large numbers of immigrants are invited over from China and from Korea. So these are not just scholars. They're also artists, architects, dancers, musicians, writers, complete Sinomania. And in fact, people who want to study early Chinese dance or music, because so much of this was wiped out by the Mongols,

In China itself, if they wanted to learn about it, they look at Japan, where it was kind of

better preserved. And just to quote Ivan Morris, who's written a brilliant book on the tale of Genji, The World of the Shining Prince. I mean, he writes, rarely in the history of the world has a country entirely free from external pressure as Japan was during this time. So avidly acquired the fruits of an alien culture. And I guess the only other real example would be the Meiji Restoration, which is when Japan had shut itself off from the world for what, 250 years. And then in the 19th century, it opens itself up to

the world of the West. But Japan doesn't become...

a new China, does it? Because it's got its own resilient national culture and sense of national distinctiveness. And there's a sort of, you know, there's a tension there, right? That the Japanese are both copying China, but also they are very conscious of their own Japanese-ness. Yeah. And also there's kind of massive pressures on society because the nobility haven't gone away and the Confucian supposedly meritocratic bureaucracy gets set up. But the nobles aren't interested in this at all. You know, they're not going to subordinate themselves to a load of civil servants who've passed an exam. Yeah.

Throughout the 8th century, while the monarchy is resident in Nara, they are furiously competing with one another, not to overthrow the monarchy, but to dominate it.

The way they do this is they're all competing to try and marry off their daughters to the emperor. If the emperor then has a son, their son will become emperor. It breeds escalating factionalism on the streets. The emperor finds it very difficult to keep control, and he finds his own authority being submerged by the intensity of noble factionalism. In the 790s, an emperor called Kanmu

decides enough is enough. Nara is hopeless. We can't maintain our control here. So we're going and found a new monarchy. It's actually rather like Louis XIV abandoning Paris. And he comes across the site of Versailles when he's out hunting. And Kanmu, likewise, comes across the site where he wants to plant his new capital while he is out hunting. And it's a location that seems to him ideal. So it's about 30, 40 miles from Nara.

And it is defended to the north, to the east, to the west by mountains thick with trees. It's linked by rivers to the sea, very navigable. The soil is very, very fertile and it's perfect. So Kanmu establishes his new capital there. He calls it Heian Kiyo.

the city of peace and tranquility. So Kiyo is city. And this is the city that in due course will come to be called Kyoto. And Kyoto, or Heian-Kyo as it is at this point,

It's interesting, isn't it? Because it's very, very explicitly modelled on a Chinese exemplar on Chang'an, the great imperial capital of China, but on a much bigger scale than Nara. Yeah. So you have this great palace, which is in the north. You have markets to the south, a bit like Manhattan. You have kind of great avenues and streets crossing each other at right angles. It's supposed to be entirely symmetrical. In fact, it very rapidly doesn't because...

it kind of drifts to the right and the left kind of gets slightly abandoned. I think that that's the kind of perfect metaphor for what is happening with Japan generally, that they continue to model themselves on China, but

Everything is being kind of transmuted into something kind of subtly different. So Chinese institutions do remain the kind of the great model of government. The prestige of Chinese culture remains paramount. Chinese merchandise continues to flood Japan. But increasingly, people in the Japanese court are thinking, well, we've got everything that we need now.

Again, a bit like Japan in the 20th century, having gone through a process of westernization, then thinks, fine, we don't need the West anymore, we'll improve it. Exactly a century after the founding of Heian-kyo in 894, the Japanese government therefore decides, as a matter of policy, that it will no longer send embassies to China. It cuts itself off, rather as it would go on to do in the 17th century.

So that by the time that Murasaki is born, the number of foreigners coming to Japan has kind of slowed to a trickle. It's really telling that in the tale of Genji, actually the only foreigner who speaks in the entire vast sweep of the novel is a Korean physiognomist who reads a child's future in his face. He's introduced to the seven-year-old Genji and says, wow, he's amazing. But

for some reason, he's not going to be an emperor. And this is one of the things that prompts the emperor then to do what he does. So that was set up this world of the future Kyoto, and we've got the relationship between Chinese and Japanese. What does that tell us about Murasaki and the origins of the tale of Genji? So we've compared Chinese to Latin, and

And of course, the thing with Latin is that for people who are speaking it in medieval Europe, it is a marker of tremendous status. And I guess that must still be the case in Japan, right? Yeah. And specifically of masculine status. So remember that passage where Murasaki describes her brother, who's clearly not as bright as her, struggling with his lessons. What he's struggling with is learning Chinese. Yeah. Murasaki learns Chinese to a great degree of facility. She loves it. But this is seen...

In the Japanese court, as unladylike, almost as freakish, a lady who speaks Chinese is faintly off-putting to men. So at court she tries to keep her knowledge of Chinese a secret, which is why she's so upset at being called Lady Chronicle. Clearly her fellow ladies-in-waiting have discovered it and are mocking her, I suppose as a kind of nerd. It's that kind of idea, I think.

And she's very upset by this, but she loves Chinese so much that she's not going to stop reading it. And in her diary, kind of very moving passage, if you have ever been a bookish child, you can kind of absolutely identify with it. She describes how she copes with a sense of loneliness and unhappiness by raiding

This great stash of Chinese texts that she's found a scholar has got. And she says how much pleasure it gives her to read them. But then she describes, it's like, you know, a bookish child being bullied at school. The other women gather behind my back.

It's because she goes on like this that she is so miserable. What kind of lady is it who reads Chinese books? When she goes on to teach the empress who she's serving Chinese, again, they do it in secret. In the tale of Genji, she portrays the daughter of a great scholar who teaches her lover to do the same. That's a real gender inversion that it's the woman who's teaching the man Chinese. But again, it has to be kept an absolutely deadly secret. The implication of this is that

Chinese, its script, its literature is for men, means by implication that to write in Japanese is for women. And by Murasaki's time, the Japanese have developed a kind of phonetic script. So hiragana, still called back to this day. But in Murasaki's time, it was called anadei,

So Woman's Hand, it's a script that is associated with women, whereas Chinese characters are so associated with men that they are called otokomoji, which apparently, my fluent Japanese kicking in, means men's letters. There's men's writing, Chinese, and there's women's writing, which is this kind of Japanese phonetic script. And presumably as with writing in Latin. Yeah.

With the language comes a set of expectations and formulas. Yeah, of classics, of models. So the men will write in a particular way. They will follow a Chinese model. But I'm guessing the women, if they're writing in kind of hiragan or onade, women's hand style,

They can do what they like, can't they? Because there's no Chinese model. Yeah, exactly. There's no rules. So they can do what they like. Absolutely. And it's clear that Murasaki is writing a kind of diary. There's clearly a sense that the court is the great focus of attention. And it's not much of a leap for Murasaki to say, well, I could make up a great courtier.

I could make someone up and situate him in a kind of a world that's faintly removed from reality. And there it is. There you have, you know, the great novel that she goes on to write. It's precisely because she's doing it in a woman's hand, in a form that has not yet been codified, as it were, and for which there are no models that she can effectively invent the Japanese novel. Right. And the evidence of the freedom to experiment that women have in the Heian court is fascinating.

The fact that she is not the only woman there to write a masterpiece, because in the next episode, we will be meeting a woman who writes another extraordinary work of literature. She's one of the wittiest, most elegant, most brilliant women who's ever lived. I mean, and again, kind of reading it is...

Just an amazing experience. The sense of an alien world being brought so vividly to life is just unbelievably exciting. This woman who is so elegant, so brilliant, Murasaki hated her. Perhaps unsurprisingly, because I think Murasaki, clearly you get the sense from her diary that she's much more introverted.

And what's fascinating is that the rivalry between these two great literary figures, these two extraordinary women, mirrors a very deep political rivalry at the very heart of the imperial court, the Heian court. So in the second episode, we will be looking at this rivalry, we'll be looking at the Heian court itself, the emperors, the ministers, the extraordinary women who are at this court, and which

Thanks to Murasaki and thanks to the other extraordinary women in this period who are also writing. I think we know in richer and more intimate detail.

than any court in history that had existed up until that point. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Tom. So that book is the pillow book, and we'll be talking about that next time. Tom, thank you so much for that. That was absolutely brilliant. Now, if you want to join our own imperial court, you can, of course, do so by going to therestishistory.com. And there you will find all kinds of perfumed and elegant delights, but you'll also be able to hear that episode right away. So on that bombshell, Tom, alle gato and sayonara. Bye-bye.