Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/90

78 Again, the dispassionate acceptance of all material, whether good deeds or bad ones, with no attempt at drawing a moral from them, is also an exceptionally advanced idea, especially for Japan, where it was shortly to be buried for many centuries.

It is when looking at The Tale of Genji in its historical surroundings that we feel most keenly its unique charm for us. We do not stand at a sufficiently great distance from the world and time of Proust to know what finally happened to the kind of people he described, but the melancholy fate of the Japanese court society is the subject of many of the novels of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. The most famous of them, The Tale of the Heike, begins:

"“In the sound of the bell of the Gion Temple echoes the impermanence of all things. The pale hue of the flowers of the teak-tree show the truth that they who prosper must fall. The proud ones do not last long, but vanish like a spring-night’s dream. And the mighty ones too will perish in the end, like dust before the wind.”"

This is the mood of the times which succeeded Murasaki’s. Less than a century after she finished The Tale of Genji with its picture of the most elegant society ever known, the country was torn by civil wars. The lovely capital was wasted by fires, plagues and famines. It was at one point decided to abandon the old city, and a boy emperor was taken off to a miserable mountain village. In such terrible times many men turned to religion for comfort. In The Tale of Genji religion plays quite an important part too, a religion which finds expression in pageantry, great ceremonies in which thousands of priests participate or in the marvellous variety of Buddhist art created for those who sought to obtain merit by rich donations to the church. The Buddhism of the centuries following Lady