Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/85

Rh they are attributed. I can only reply that they were in every case composed upon the spur of the moment, and the makers were no better pleased with them than you are.”

She was undoubtedly a most elegant and sophisticated lady, aware of her genius as a novelist, and possibly incurring enmity for that reason. As a novelist, she stands without rival in her time, but there were several other women who were exceptionally talented in poetry and essay-writing. Indeed, it was an age of women writers, principally because the men preferred to devote themselves to writing in Chinese, leaving the women to express the genius of the time in the native language.

The Tale of Genji is a novel of a society, the extremely civilized, perhaps even decadent court of tenth-century Japan. We should not, however, be misled into imagining that Lady Murasaki has given us a realistic portrayal of contemporary conditions. Rather, her novel is the evocation of a world which never quite existed. She tells us that the events she describes occurred at some indefinite time in the past, and hers was essentially a romantic view of a now-faded golden world. Even within the time covered by the novel, we find an increasingly pessimistic tone, and when the hero, the peerless Genji, dies, his successors are no more than likeable young men, no more, in fact, than the kind of people who really did live at the Japanese court. In this respect and many others the novel betrays an obsession with the idea of time similar to that observable in much of Japanese poetry. The splendour and beauty that marked every aspect of the career of Prince Genji fade away. Even as he watches some particularly graceful dancer or the blossoms falling from a lovely tree, there is the almost painful awareness that these things must pass. Or when, riding