THE TALE OF MURASAKI
By LIZA DALBY
New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2000. 480 pages, $24.95

Robert Omar Khan

The Tale of Murasaki is a novel that recounts, in memoir form and in meticulous detail, the life of an aristocratic woman at the Japanese court in the early eleventh century, Murasaki Shikibu, author of the great classic, the Tale of Genji. Given its distance from the present, life at the Japanese court in the early eleventh century is remarkably well documented through literary fiction and poetry, diaries, court records, and formal and informal histories, as well as plastic and graphic arts. Liza Dalby weaves a brilliant synthesis of such materials to provide and extraordinarily rich glimpse into the way of life of the Heian-era aristocracy, in a form thoroughly accessible to the general reader.
A novel based on the life of a woman who embodies an archetype of traditional Japanese culture is immediately reminiscent of the recent and phenomenally successful Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. There are, indeed, fascinating parallels and links between the two books and authors, who have transmuted years of scholarly research (Golden in art history, Dalby in anthropology) and deep personal interest in their objects of study into the popular novel form.
Their books use the lives of their heroines as frameworks for depicting vivid material details and intriguing, recondite and elaborate social practices. In both, a clever framing device casts the narrative as an attempt to explain this special kind of life to an outsider-Murasaki writes for her granddaughter, geisha Sayuri for a Western professor friend-thereby justifying the wealth of cultural description and commentary, and both narrators are deeply preoccupied with matters of style, taste, and complex relationships with men, and with other women of their class. The links are even more noteworthy than these parallels. Golden could probably never have written Memoirs of a Geisha without Dalby's research and assistance, for Dalby wrote a widely admired monograph on the life of geishas, Geisha, based on her Ph.D. research, for which she personally underwent training as a geisha in Japan, apparently the only Western woman ever to do so. Her previous book is thus a highly authoritative compendium of details and lore on the geisha's clothing, makeup, comportment, manners, training, life trajectory, and socialization. Golden fully acknowledges how essential a resource this was for him, together with direct consultation with Dalby. Mindful of the astonishing success of Memoirs of a Geisha, Dalby has, in turn, gratefully acknowledged Golden's advice on how to transform a passion for an aspect of women's life in traditional Japanese culture into a novel that will grip the contemporary reader, hoping, no doubt, for a comparable bestseller.
So, has Dalby been able to recreate the Memoirs of a Geisha magic? If you loved (or hated) Golden's book, is that a reasonable predictor for Tale of Murasaki? Well, that depends on which of the two primary characteristics of Memoirs of a Geisha appeals to you most. My impression is that its success is due to its careful balancing of the unfamiliar and the familiar-the unfamiliar, "exotic" practices of the geisha world to which the reader is made privy, and the familiar plot trajectory of the Cinderella story. This archetypal narrative is found all over the world, which may account in part for the incredible success of this book in dozens of countries. Golden's book has the added appeal that it is largely the resourcefulness of the heroine, rather than any handsome prince's intervention, that brings about her success.

The Tale of Murasaki initiates the reader into another secret world of a highly competitive female aesthetic elite. Descriptions of color combinations of robes enliven most of the court functions and accord with contemporary records:

Koshosho wore a red Chinese jacket over robes of white and lavender figured silk, and the usual stencilled train. My jacket was white with chartreuse-green linings, and my robes were crimson lined with purple, the pale green lined with dark green.

The competitiveness is also rarely far away: Of course everyone was dressed in her finest, but there were two serving women who showed a lack of taste in their colour combinations. Unfortunately for them they had to pass in full view of all the nobles as they brought in the food, and they were subject to stares and whispers. Saisho was uncharacteristically critical later, but I felt it wasn't such a terrible gaffe. It was just that their robes were all wintry reds and purples lacking a touch of pastel or green. They should have asked someone's advice since they knew that they would be in such a public position.

Much of such detail comes from Murasaki's extant diary, but Dalby imaginatively supplements this and draws on recent research providing even more "secret glimpses" into aristocratic lives, including same-sex passions between court women, and alcoholism among court men. Readers who enjoyed the Cinderella plot of Memoirs of a Geisha, however, will not find it here. As in many real lives, life is lived as a succession of episodes, with little in the way of an overarching goal or structure, in contrast to the revenge, career, and love ambitions of Golden's Sayuri. Spoiled aristocrats would make very unconvincing Cinderellas anyway. What Dalby does offer, though, is a convincing account of the creative trials and tribulations of a woman writer at a special point in history. Premodern Japan was utterly unique in enjoying a veritable golden age of women's writing, when aristocratic women were major producers and consumers of prose narrative. Their achievement is simply stunning, and The Tale of Genji is regarded as its pinnacle, so Dalby's insights into Murasaki's creative process are intriguing. I, myself, suspect that Murasaki drew more inspiration from other writers than Dalby suggests (she prefers to see Murasaki basing more scenes and characters in The Tale of Genji on her own experiences at court). Still, I am deeply impressed by Dalby's painstaking use of sources such as Murasaki's poetry collection to construct a minutely detailed and nuanced life. On the other hand, if you are insufficiently charmed by the aesthetics and writer's vicissitudes, this will be a long four hundred-odd pages, a criticism rarely leveled at Golden's book of comparable length.

There are also some infelicities of tone. Granted, since most modern readers live lives thankfully remote from the class-consciousness of an aristocracy, it is hard to come up with a courtly idiom that is both plausible and comprehensible without sounding fustily British. So one can accept a fair number of "fellows," "indeeds", and terms like "nonplussed." But it is jarring and altogether unlikely that Murasaki would use a word like "fuck," even when reporting the speech of noble boys in their cups, though perhaps Dalby has a source in mind that would justify this. Still, at the risk of sounding fusty myself, I would suggest that words such as the following struck me as odd in the vocabulary of an eleventh-century Japanese court lady: "partying," musical "numbers," "a pain," "creepy," and "convoy" (for "retinue"). And even if the English term for a specific Japanese plant is "Solomon's seal," the term sits ill in the mouth of the Buddhism-inclined Murasaki Shikibu.
Such quibbles aside, the book proved a good companion during several thousand miles of air travel in the last couple of weeks. I was grateful to escape from cramped cabins and crowded departure areas into a world of hushed conversations behind incensed curtains and the radiant elegance of imperial ceremonies. It will be for the female reader to decide whether Murasaki's life in her highly idiosyncratic society shares timeless aspects of the female experience, but I suspect that many women readers will find that it does.

Robert Omar Khan teaches classical Japanese language and literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He has recently translated into English the twelfth-century Japanese tale Ariake no Wakare (Partings at Dawn).