During the Heian period, Japanese literature was dominated by a certain class of aristocratic women who influenced and corresponded with one another through poem and prose. With one’s literacy being so important to their social standing in the Emperor’s court, the high-class gradually became a class of avid readers. However, with the duties of governance and other bureaucratic work being left to the men, women were the only ones who had the opportunity develop this reading passion into writing skills.
Surprisingly, the tail end of this era also brought about intense spiritualism, and despite its popularity and widespread appeal, fiction was deemed a frivolous read that only distracted one from their religious duties and from the possibility of enlightenment and ascension. A contradictory belief that was still held by a lot of the aristocracy.
Nonetheless, a certain little girl happened to love those stories.
She was thirteen. It had been a few years since her father took her to the province he governed, leaving her mother in the capital to manage their assets. Her father brought along a step-mother to help take care of her and her sister alongside their respective nurses, and that step-mother happened to be the grandniece of the illustrious Murasaki Shikibu.
The little girl, as it happened, was born in the exact year the masterpiece of Murasaki began circulating as a complete manuscript. Finding the coincidence amusing, and wanting to entertain the two sisters during the moonless evenings, her step-mother decided to tell them the stories of The Tale of Genji.
“Once I knew that such things as tales existed in the world, all I could think of over and over was how much I wanted to read them.” So she declared later on.
The tales of her beloved step-mother could never satisfy her, for her hunger for the fantastic world created by Murasaki was much greater than anyone’s memory could handle.
Once, she drew herself an image of the Healing Buddha in a secret room of her house and prostrated herself before it, wishing fervently that she’d go back to the capital, where tales such as these were distributed, so that she could read the entirety of the saga.
She repeated this prayer, incongruous with the schism between fiction and religion, quite a few times in the coming months. By the power of Buddha, the time came when the family would go back to the capital.
It was then that the little girl learned how much she hated partings. Walking through the already empty house, illuminated by the last full moon she’d see from there, she once again went to her secret room of prayer. Realizing she’d never set foot there again, she wept.
Perhaps that was why she loved literature so much. These words, shared and transcribed between so many networks of friends and family, have managed to escape the ephemerality of life. She came to know the immortal power of writing. After all, one of her ancestors was as renowned as to be mentioned in the Tale of Genji itself, and her own aunt had attained quite a bit of fame with her published diary just a generation ago.
Sadly, the same couldn’t be said about the people around her. She had already matured past the age in which children can believe in the eternal quality of relationships when she left her mom for the first time.
During the travel to the capital, she parted ways with the nurse that had been with her as long as her own mother. The woman was pregnant and couldn't continue the journey. The little girl would remember vividly the pale moonlight that illuminated thair faces as they bid goodbye, when they promised they’d meet again.
But the nurse died shortly after.
When she arrived, her step-mother gave her own goodbyes. She promised to visit next spring, and the two of them continued exchanging letters for the rest of their life.
But the visit never happened.
She was now a young woman.
At the very least, she finally had the chance to truly read the tales she so adored. Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji, Sei Shônagon’s Pillow Book, her aunt’s Kagero Diary… She immersed herself in literature of all kinds — many of them gifted by a relative named Lady Emon no Myôbu. Each day of her life was dedicated to reading these works and discussing them with her older sister. So enthralled she was by the fantastic nature of these tales that the young woman even started seeing the world in the same fantastical way.
She had heard of a notorious noblewoman who died the same day her nurse died, and relating the two, had wept just as much for the unknown woman as she did for the beloved nurse.
One night, her older sister revealed that she had had a dream. The noblewoman appeared in it to reveal that she felt the emotion the young woman showed by crying for her, and that she had reincarnated as the cat that frequently visited their house to pay them respect.
The two sisters adopted the cat in secret. Taking care of it in their own rooms. Their moonlit evenings now consisted of reading, discussing and taking care of their pet.
While looking at the moon and petting their cat, her sister once said: “How would you feel if I were to simply fly away and disappear right now?”
No. She couldn’t. Didn’t her sister read the same stories read the same stories she did? That wouldn’t be a very happy ending, it would be very anti-climatic instead. She should stop saying such things.
Her sister laughed and changed subject, the two continued to chat through the night.
A few days later, their house burned down. The cat died in the fire.
The next year, her sister got pregnant and subsequently died during childbirth.
Upon seeing the moonlight, as bright as it was during that ominous night in the previous year, shining on the faces of her newly born nieces, the young woman shuddered in fear.
Ephemerality had once again surprised her. She wasn’t part of the tales she so loved.
She was now an adult.
An adult, and yet unmarried. She spent her days reading and writing in her family’s home. Multiple opportunities for pilgrimages and other religious activities had been offered to her over the years, but she had become just as disillusioned with it as she had with the reality of her life.
What was her life anyhow? Social gatherings and family duties were the only important activities to fill her days, yet she didn’t feel any importance in them. Would she live like this until the end? Seeing the days go by like her sister and nurse and all before them?
Where was the excitement? Why was she the only one seemingly unsatisfied with the ordinary life all of them led?
Desperately wishing for the extraordinary while experiencing only the opposite, the years went by.
She eventually started working part-time as a lady-in-waiting for the princess, her first venture into the court that was the setting for so many of her favorite books.
And yet, she was older now, too old to start pursuing a career there. She felt desperately alone in that place, surrounded by people who weren’t as exciting as the characters she loved, in rooms that didn’t feel as magical as they had been described.
The woman wasn’t alone in this world. She had many friends with whom she shared correspondence over their favorite literatures, and yet, during the nights she slept at the castle, she felt truly alone. Wishing only to return to the comfort of her house and family.
[Water birds] are just like me,
awake until dawn, sleeping
fitfully in the water,
struggling to brush away
the frost on their wings.
So she eventually wrote. Like the reflective surface of a frozen lake, she laid there, in company but alone, in the place of her dreams after having them dashed. She was frozen, stuck to the trappings of an ordinary life in what she though was a place of the extraordinary. In that silent night, she found herself to be living a life so exciting as to be compared to a dreamless sleep.
But someone heard her poem, and responded.
Just try to imagine,
even from your own transient sleep,
on the water,
how I struggle every night to
brush the frost away.
You might have to face the loneliness of this career once in a while, but I've always been here to suffer it.
Of course she wasn’t alone. How many more sought something beyond their reality in the stories she so admired? How could she leave the cold night so that she might lead them there?
If this poem managed to reach someone like that, maybe the diary itself was the answer.
Years went by.
She was married. She didn’t want the arrangement at first, and didn’t like her husband for quite a while, but the two eventually grew close and had three children.
As she grew older, the tales she once read as a child grew more and more distant. She still read and wrote just as avidly, and still loved them just as passionately, but she had resigned herself to the mediocrity of real life. Her only hope was the diary, that it would carry her name way beyond her time, just like it did for her aunt and so many of her favorite authors.
She had also started to take religion more seriously. Let down by the impossibility of escaping ordinary life through fiction, she grasped at the thoughts of a satisfying afterlife.
Even then, the dissatisfaction brought about by the real world would never leave her.
It happened that, during a pilgrimage, she almost died.
“How might my court service have turned out if I had only been able to devote myself to it single-mindedly?”
It happened that, after returning from a business trip, the husband she had come to love passed away.
“Long ago, rather than being infatuated with all those frivolous tales and poems, if I had only devoted myself to religious practice day and night, I wonder, would I have been spared this nightmarish fate?”
Between suffering the ordinary and seeking the divine, she had forgotten her true passions in fiction.
“Since I had ended up as one without one thing going as I had wished, I had drifted along without doing anything to accumulate merit.”
The woman was reminded of how much she hated partings. Grieving and despairing, she found no respite even in the tales she so loved. No meaning in the time she wasted on them.
“Over the years and months as I lay down and got up in meaningless activity, why had I not devoted myself to religious practices or pilgrimages? Ah, but the things I had hoped for, the things I had wished for, could they ever really happen in this world? […] Oh, how crazy I was and how foolish I came to feel. Such were the thoughts that had sunk in, and had I then carried on with my feet on the ground, maybe things would have been all right, but that just was not possible.”
In her last days — in the last pages of her diary — she recounted the poems she has recently recited to a nun.
Mugwort growing
ever ticker, sodden
with dew;
a voice sought by no one
cries out all alone.
In the mugwort of a
dwelling in the everyday world,
please imagine
the dense grasses in the garden
of final renouncement.
Such were the last words she left to us, her readers.
•••
•••
•••
Then, darkness. She feels something, though she cannot understand what — or how. She feels.
Her diary had been passed down, copied, studied, analyzed, and appreciated. Her poems were added to imperial collections. They had been recited, criticized, hated, loved, and respected. Her name — or part of it — was engraved in history.
But it didn’t stop. Eras went by and yet her writings survived. Her name was repeated again and again. Her writings, read again and again. People praised her poetry and sympathized with her pains. She heard people saying she was on par with some of her favorite writers.
Has she really heard that?!
Wait— Had she… heard?
She did. She heard and felt and saw. An infinite void of white spread over and under and around her. It seemed to go forever, yet she felt like she could touch the horizon if she just tried.
The voices and feelings continued to surprise her, where did they come from?
Gradually, she understood where she was — and what she was.
The expanse of white becomes an infinite sky, its horizon extending way beyond her reach.
It’s obvious that such a clear surface would be reflective, but what could it possibly be reflecting to show such a beautiful expanse. Had she ever seen such a blue sky? Ever looked at it?
Only then she realized. Thinking back on it, it’s almost as if she was fleeing from the daylight. Happy, sad or otherwise, it’s always the light of the moon or the darkness of the night that seemed appropriate to color her writings. Never is the vast sky or the warmth of the sun mentioned.
Even when she went in secret to pray to Amaterasu by the sacred mirror, she did so during the night, not bathed in the light of the goddess.
Now, seeing the infinity beyond anything she could’ve imagined, she understands. If the surface she saw before became this sky by reflecting something, then there’s only one thing it could be reflecting.
She sees infinite possibilities in the azure expanse. Fantasy and magic. It is extraordinary.
And it is reflecting the only thing there: herself.
Her laughter is so loud as to almost crack her voice, but she can’t contain herself. The thoughts and feeling of those who read her work continue to echo in the distance, but only one thought fills her mind.
With a laugh and a hop, she dives into the water. Beyond the infinite reaches of this Throne reserved for the truly extraordinary ones, a light is calling for her.
“They deserve to see this too.”
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Originally Posted by pinetree
