By Liza Dalby
Doubleday. 426 pp. $24.95

Reviewed by Elizabeth Ward, who is an editor with the Japan Times in Tokyo.

Sunday, July 23, 2000

"Why do we suffer so in the world? Just regard life as the short bloom of the mountain cherry," wrote Lady Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji. Like the melancholy poet of Ecclesiastes, the ancient Greeks or the languid aesthetes of fin-de-siecle Europe, the courtiers of 10th- and 11th-century Japan were exquisitely, painfully aware of life's transience. The poets and diarists of the Heian court, most of them women, perfected the cultivation of luxurious sadness. Nobody has ever quite matched their evocation of human existence as a gossamer affair shot through in equal measure with beauty and sorrow.

How ironic, then, is the rocklike longevity of their writing. Even their most casual jottings and fragments--and they made an art form of the fragment, as the Japanese still do--have survived a thousand years. These treasures have been available to English-language readers only within the last century, since Arthur Waley's monumental translation of The Tale of Genji in the 1920s first sparked the West's passion for them. Edward Seidensticker, whose luminous version of that immense work rivals Waley's, kept a diary throughout the 16 years he labored on it. "That is what scholarship is about," he wrote, "getting utterly lost in the pursuit of buried facts. They may tell you, they who do it, that it is the pursuit of truth; but the real point is getting utterly lost, and forgetting all about such illusory matters as the passage of time."

Liza Dalby got lost in Genji, too, with the same result. As she tells it, she first discovered Waley's translation when she was 16: "I read it slowly over the course of a summer, and each time I opened the book I was transported from a humid backyard gazebo in Indiana to the Japanese imperial court of a thousand years ago." Dalby never quite got over her enthrallment. She went on to live and study in Japan, was the first foreigner ever to become a geisha and is the author of two authoritative studies of aspects of Japanese culture, Geisha and Kimono. But Genji the Shining Prince and the mysterious Murasaki Shikibu who created him kept plucking at her imagination. The Tale of Murasaki is her creative response to that old obsession.

"Creative" is the key word here because, interestingly for an anthropologist, Dalby has cast her recreation of the Heian court, and of Murasaki's life, as fiction. Not that she has eschewed scholarship; she has merely taken Seidensticker's definition and modified it, getting lost in the pursuit of buried possibilities, like an archaeologist who must extrapolate a whole world from a few muddy shards. This "autobiographical" novel is rooted in Murasaki's scrappy diary (in fact contains "large chunks" of it), in the latest scholarship of the period, in The Tale of Genji itself and in writings by Murasaki's contemporaries. Furthermore, the poems composed by Murasaki and other "characters" in the story--poems were to the Heian court what e-mail is to us--are all authentic.

The result is undeniably a version of the truth, and a captivating one to boot. The most important thing Dalby has got right is Murasaki's voice, as we know it from her diary (in Waley's translation): "That I am very vain, reserved, unsociable, wanting always to keep people at a distance--that I am wrapped up in the study of ancient stories, conceited, living all the time in a poetical world of my own and scarcely realizing the existence of other people, save occasionally to make spiteful and depreciatory comments upon them--such is the opinion that most strangers hold. . . . But when they get to know me, they find to their extreme surprise that . . . I am quite a different person."

This is Dalby's Murasaki to a T: a lady with a "reputation for erudition, not charm," as she wryly puts it. But what a delightful chronicler she makes. By turns waspish, gentle, witty, melancholy, flirtatious, retiring, bookish and always, always diverted by seasons, scents, gardens and clothes, she is like an 11th-century Japanese composite of Jane Austen and Martha Stewart. One minute she is slicing and dicing suitors or colleagues or even her beloved Genji ("Michinaga and Genji both thought of themselves as objects of women's envy. Neither considered the fact that women really have no way of escaping the afflictions brought upon them by men unless they die or become nuns"). The next minute she is eagerly writing to her daughter about courtly fashion fads ("You may use these bits to make outfits for your dolls. Remember, if the gown is dark, the lining should be a shade paler, and if the gown is light, make the lining darker. . . . Lady Dainagon wore this set: pale green; white with a maroon lining; pale yellow; deep yellow; scarlet with a purple lining; and lavender lined in white") or unlocking the mysteries of sleeves. Ah yes, sleeves: Any reader of Genji knows how large these items loom in the Heian universe and it is nice, if not surprising, that Dalby the kimono scholar gets that right too.

All this, and much more, rings so true to the created milieu of Genji that one is inclined to indulge Dalby in all she has dreamed or imagined: the personalities of Murasaki's family and her elderly husband, Nobutaka; the circumstances of her courtship; what happened when she accompanied her father to a provincial posting before her marriage (it is not known whether she even went, let alone whether she had a romance with the son of a Chinese envoy while she was there, as Dalby has it); her passionate friendships with other women; her retirement from the world at the end of her probably brief life. Even the breezy contemporary English does not jar. Murasaki's style is so candid and lively, even filtered through Waley's stately prose, it is no stretch to believe she would have used words like "devastated," "smitten," "chat up" and "dumbstruck," had they been available to her. The only thing Genji devotees may not be able to stomach is the "missing last chapter," in which the characters Ukifune and Kaoru are awarded a happy ending of sorts.

That single false note aside, The Tale of Murasaki gets the big things right, including, indispensably, the dark undercurrent of sadness running below the bright, embroidered surface. The imaginary Murasaki, like the real one, never forgets that "a mere day is time enough for death to sweep another frail life to oblivion." To her credit, Dalby never injects into her heroine's consciousness even a hint of the contrary truth: that even a thousand years has not been time enough to sweep her frail Genji and his shining world to oblivion.