Fictional Memoir Recounts Geisha’s Literary Coup

Nearly 1,000 years ago, a literary miracle occurred: Murasaki Shikibu, a woman in a male-dominated society, wrote not only the world’s first full-length novel but the greatest work in Japanese literature, “The Tale of Genji.” How this came about is the subject of “The Tale of Murasaki,” a novel by Liza Dalby, an American researcher described by her publisher as the only Westerner to have become a geisha.

In writing from Murasaki’s point of view, Dalby didn’t have to begin quite from scratch. Fragments of the diary Murasaki kept at the imperial court in Kyoto from 1007 to 1010 survive, as well as many of her poems, which Dalby weaves into the narrative. Still, the historical record is lean enough so that Dalby had the need, as well as plenty of opportunity, to fictionalize.

Her Murasaki, daughter of a provincial governor and scholar of Chinese literature, gets support from her father in two key areas: He encourages her artistic ambitions and tolerates her remaining unmarried longer than usual. In fact, Dalby’s Murasaki is bisexual. The romances of her youth are with other women or with outsiders, such as the son of a Chinese diplomat. Only when she is 25 and “nobody else would have me” does she become a subsidiary wife of a member of the powerful Fujiwara clan.

In the Heian period, Japanese emperors maintained various wives and concubines in their own quarters. For these ladies, it was important to maintain the emperor’s interest, not only through their beauty and charm but also through the intellectual brilliance of their salons.

Murasaki, whose stories of the “shining prince,” Genji, were already being circulated and admired, was enlisted in the service of the Empress Shoshi by Shoshi’s father, Fujiwara Michinaga, the country’s de facto ruler.

This gave Murasaki a perfect vantage point from which to describe court life in what Japanese still consider an apex of cultural refinement--an age in which vital messages were delivered by means of subtle turns of phrase in 31-syllable waka, and in which no well-bred woman would talk to a man with her face not hidden by screens and fans.

She also could observe the reality behind the facade: the cliquishness, the snobbery, the drinking and philandering, the struggles for political power.

The appeal of “The Tale of Genji” is that it reflects both the real and the ideal. Influenced by other emerging prose works such as Sei Shonagon’s irreverent “Pillow Book” essays, Dalby’s Murasaki consciously rejects the amazing adventures and supernatural interventions of folk tales in favor of plausibility.

Yet Genji himself is far above the imperfect men she knows. Even his flaw, a roving eye, is balanced by a sense of responsibility for the women he has seduced: As he ages, the obligations he has incurred weigh him down.

In Dalby’s novel (which takes the form of a memoir left by Murasaki to her only child, Katako), the gradual darkening of “The Tale of Genji” is also a product of Murasaki’s disillusionment with court life and literary notoriety. In very modern ways, she becomes the prisoner of her own creation and of her fans and detractors. When she retires from imperial service and enters a Buddhist convent, it’s with relief.

This modernity is the only source of unease in “The Tale of Murasaki.” Dalby does heroic labor in re-creating 11th century Japan and letting Murasaki take its peculiarities for granted. Yet she also makes us feel that Murasaki is not so different from us at all--a feminist heroine. Can we accept this? She did live a millennium ago; she was a genius.

John Fowles, in novels such as “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” and “A Maggot,” has shown how the English only a century or two ago lived in different universes from ours, psychologically. Can we bridge the gap to Murasaki so easily?