The World полностью

When Empress Shoshi, Murasaki’s patroness, became pregnant at the age of twenty-one, Michinaga moved the empress into his own Tsuchimikado mansion where, soothed by readings from the Buddhist Lotus Sutra, she awaited the birth with Murasaki. The chaotic birth was every woman’s nightmare. Shoshi lay on a raised dais in the suffocatingly hot upper gallery surrounded by curtains; courtiers peered into the chamber; rice was thrown to expel evil spirits; Michinaga shouted orders; priests and exorcists competed and jostled to chant ‘loud spells cast to transfer evil influences’. A preceptor ‘was thrown to the ground in spasms by the spirits’. Murasaki notes wryly, ‘You can imagine every Buddha in the universe flying down to respond.’ When the poor empress went into labour, she ‘was in great distress’. Childbirth was dangerous – Shoshi’s rival empress had just died that way – and child mortality high.

Then, suddenly, the baby arrived. ‘Our delight knew no bounds,’ wrote Murasaki, and when the baby was seen to be a boy, they were ‘ecstatic’. It was the triumph of Michinaga’s policy of marrying his daughters to emperors. In 1017, after the birth of another prince, he celebrated his power: ‘No waning in the glory of the full moon – this world is indeed my world.’

Michinaga possibly asked Murasaki to keep her diary to celebrate the birth. Many women were keeping diaries; everyone wrote poetry, men in Chinese, women in Japanese, in this refined and literary world where ‘sensitivity’, notes Murasaki, ‘is a precious gift’.

Murasaki divided her capacious novel The Tale of Genji into chapters that were read around the court like serializations. At its heart is the character of Genji, an emperor’s son (possibly based on Michinaga), and his relationships with women, not just romantic but also familial. While he philanders with younger women, his second wife, Lady Murasaki – Wisteria – provides real friendship. ‘Coming from the presence of younger women,’ she writes, ‘Genji always expected Murasaki would appear a little bit jaded … He had lived with her so long … yet it was just these younger women who failed to provide any element of surprise whereas Murasaki was continually astounding him, her person more radiant this year than last year.’

Murasaki described herself as a melancholic ‘old fossil’. ‘No one liked her,’ she writes about herself. ‘They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty … but when you meet her, she is strangely meek.’ No wonder the other girls were jealous. No one knows when Murasaki died, but in 1019 her patron Michinaga retired to a Buddhist monastery, handing over the regency to his son and arranging the succession of his grandsons as emperors, ensuring Fujiwara rule for two more generations. As Fujiwara power started to wane, the Song emperors were facing a catastrophe that was narrated by the other great writer of the time, who was also a woman.

Born in 1084 in Shandong, Li Qingzhao was the clever daughter of a scholar-official who had studied under the poet Su Shi: at a young age, she started to write poetry of ‘delicate restraint’. At seventeen, she married Zhao Mingcheng, a well-connected connoisseur of epigraphy, literature and antiques with whom she collected books and period pieces, co-wrote essays, ate at restaurants and played board games, living in Shandong – a life of provincial Song refinement.

As parents could afford to pay higher dowries, the status of Song women increased, perhaps aided by the competent rule of Empress Liu. Women could own and inherit property, but now they were so highly educated that they published poetry and often tutored sons. Shen Gua was taught military strategy by his mother, something unimaginable anywhere else for many centuries.^*

Li was enjoying the zenith of Song prosperity: ‘we lived happy together’ – though she could not have children. Instead she worked on her art. ‘Concentration leads to refined skill,’ she writes, which means ‘everything you do can reach a level of real excellence’. But the course of her marriage mirrored the trajectory of the Song. Her husband fell for a concubine with whom he had children. The marriage deteriorated:

A cold window, broken table and no books.

How pitiful to be brought to this …

Writing poetry I turn down all invitations, shutting my door for now.

In my isolation I have found perfect friends:

Mr Nobody and Sir Emptiness.

Then came the invasion.