KJ
Selections
Imagining
Lady Murasaki
An interview with Liza Dalby by Sally
McLaren (from KJ#48)
Photograph by Albie Sharpe
"I'm
not the geisha expert," says Liza Dalby, politely but firmly,
making it clear immediately that she doesn't want to hold court on the
subject.
"I don't want people
to feel that they are treading on my turf. It should be open for
everyone."
An American anthropologist
and writer, Dalby is the only non-Japanese woman ever to have become
a geisha, which she did as part of her research for a doctorate in anthropology,
during the 1970s. Dalby's 1983 book, Geisha, is regarded
as the definitive study on the subject and certainly, she is seen as
"the geisha expert" in the West. Arthur Golden, relied on her extensively
for many of the details about geisha for his novel, Memoirs of a
Geisha, and Dalby is also consultant to Steven Spielberg for the
forthcoming movie adaption of the best seller.
Now living with
her husband and children in Berkeley, California, Dalby mostly writes.
She often does book forewords and enclopaedia entries on anything connected
to Japanese culture. She is elegant and self-assured, making the
carefully considered statements of an academic and refusing to generalise.
Rather than offend or be incorrect she will say "I don't know." It sounds
like the tactful response expected of someone who was once a geisha.
When relating her
experiences and anecdotes she never starts with, "When I was a geisha."
She seems an observer, than someone who experienced putting on the makeup,
wig and elaborate kimono to become "Ichigiku of Pontocho." She
reiterates the fact that she never actually trained as a geisha, she
just became one for a year. In her mid-20s at the time, she was too
old to be a maiko (apprentice geisha) and she could already speak
Japanese and play the shamisen (traditional Japanese banjo-like
instrument), so the idea was suggested to her. "I was invited in.They
really trusted me and I was always honest about why I was there." Dalby
doesn't feel that her book Geisha has done much to dispel the
myths in the West, "however, it's there as a reference."
Whether Dalby is
heartily sick of the geisha questions it's hard to say. But what she
really wants to talk about her "obsession" of the last 10 years — Murasaki
Shikibu, the Japanese woman who wrote the world's first novel, The
Tale of Genji (in Japanese, Genji Monogatari) in the 11th
century. Over 1000 years later Dalby has just written her first novel.
The Tale of Murasaki is her recreation of the life of Murasaki
Shikibu and the writing of The Tale of Genji.
Murasaki's story
is about a dashing prince called Genji, ("the Shining Prince"), the
beautiful son of an emperor and his concubine. Set in Miyako,
the old name for Kyoto, The Tale of Genji is an epic saga with an abundance
of love affairs, political machinations and court intrigues.
Prince Genji's romantic
adventures of life and those who live "above the clouds" (Heian term
for the imperial palace) really captured the imagination of people at
the time and this fascination for the philandering hero continues even
now. There have been many translations of The Tale of Genji,
which is in classical Japanese, to modern Japanese and English.There
are various abridged and even manga (comic) versions. The names Murasaki
and Genji are synonymous with classical Japanese literature and indeed,
Japanese culture. The Tale of Genji is studied, referenced and
revered in Japan to the extent that Shakespeare's plays are in the West.
Dalby first read
The Tale of Genji as a teenager in the 1960s. She was intrigued
and her life long interest and attachment to Japan began. Soon after
she lived and studied in Japan for a year as an exchange student. "I've
been a Genji fan for a long time but I'm not a Heian literature expert.
Writing The Tale of Murasaki was hard, " says Dalby. "It took
10 years and I had to learn a lot."
Undoubtedly Dalby
feels a connection with Murasaki, which has fuelled her obsession, and
the burning desire to know why and how she wrote The Tale of Genji.
Imagining the kind of woman Murasaki was has been crucial to Dalby and
her development as a novelist. The Tale of Murasaki is an historical
novel and Dalby has written the story in the form of a memoir. After
many false starts and experiments with the form, Dalby eventually started
writing in the 1st person and it was then that she felt that the characters
began to speak to her. "It was terrifying and intimidating writing
in Murasaki's voice, but it was gratifying to find a voice that finally
felt right." The Tale of Genji's missing last chapter is
a controversial topic amongst Genji scholars and Dalby bravely took
to writing her version of it. Her quest to bring Murasaki to life
for her novel led Dalby to blacken her teeth, in the Heian style and
retrace the steps of the woman who single-handedly invented the genre
of the novel.Where Dalby's obsession took her and what she had to learn
are part of her experience as anthropologist turned historical novelist,
or as Dalby puts it "literary archaeologist."
What is known of
Murasaki and what Dalby was able to piece together for The Tale of
Murasaki, comes mainly from her diary and a few historically recorded
events. Murasaki was probably born in 973. Her father was a government
official but better known as a Chinese scholar. Dalby says that Murasaki's
family were at the edge of the aristocracy and in many ways, outsiders.
Her mother died when she was a teenager and her father remarried.
Significantly, Murasaki studied the Chinese classics, which was an unusual
skill (even scandalous, says Dalby) for a woman at that time.
In 996 the whole
family went to Echizen province, now Fukui prefecture, where her father
took up the post of governor. Leaving Miyako, with all its aesthetic
refinements, and being taken to the Heian equivalent of the wild
west must have had a huge impact on Murasaki. "The ragged cliffs and
craggy mountains of Echizen were so different to the elegant landscapes
of Miyako," says Dalby. In 998 Murasaki returned to Miyako and
married, at quite a late age by Heian standards. Her only child,
a daughter was born in 999. Murasaki's husband died when her daughter
was very young and soon after she entered court service as a lady in
waiting to Empress Shoshi. Dalby has Murasaki spending the end of her
life as a Buddhist nun living in a simple dwelling near Kiyomizu temple,
having escaped the attention and pressure that Genji had placed on her.
Most
of Murasaki's diary is about court life. Heian court ladies wrote prolific
diaries at that time and it was a literary genre in it's own right.
Rather than focusing on day to day events the diaries were also full
of poems, in those days waka, the origin of haiku. Heian women wrote
in kana, the phonetic alphabet and the men wrote in Chinese characters.
"The poems were like signposts, the historical chronology was the scaffolding
and I filled in the gaps with my imagination," says Dalby.
The existence of
Murasaki's love poems to women led Dalby to explore the possibility
in her novel of Murasaki having lesbian affairs. Dalby says that
many Heian scholars whilst acknowledging the passionate poetry between
women of the time insist it is all metaphorical. She argues that
since there don't seem to have been any religious or social taboos against
same sex relationships, and there is mention in The Tale of Genji
of Prince Genji's affair with a young man, Dalby has simply taken the
liberty of assuming that it could have occurred.
Murasaki was part
of a literary elite of people who communicated in poems and women were
prominent on the literary scene. Murasaki was well-known in her
lifetime as were Sei Shonagon, the author of the Pillow Book
and the woman who wrote the earlier Gossamer Diary (believed
to be a relative of Murasaki). "But," says Dalby, "The big question
is - what drove Murasaki to write The Tale of Genji?" Dalby
thinks that the answer to this can be explained by her circumstances,
her birth and social status and the fact her father allowed her to study
the Chinese classics. "She obviously had intellectual capability and
her personality seemed reserved. She was also an observer."
Her time in Echizen, her late marriage, the shock of early widowhood
and the ups and downs of court life, "an important part of her development
and she used these experiences to write The Tale of Genji."
Dalby says earlier
parts of The Tale of Genji were an unrealistic version of life
at court. "At first she probably idealised life at court, from the stories
she heard from her father, but when she finally got there she
became critical and disillusioned. She never really felt at home
and became quite paranoid." Murasaki's stories had a strong following
at court and she attracted the attention of even the regent of the time,
who appointed her tutor to the Empress. Murasaki's readers were
thrilled by the adventures of Prince Genji and Dalby's novel reflects
this and the pressure that her audience put on her. "By the end,
and Genji's death, we can hear the voice of experience," says
Dalby. "I suppose you could say that the theme of my story is
you don't always get what you want and things don't always turn out
how you thought they would. In the end, you have to learn how
to deal with it."
One of the criticisms
of The Tale of Murasaki is that Dalby depicts Murasaki as a 20th
century-style independent woman. She counters this type of criticism
with "It's a novel and Murasaki was no ordinary woman. She was an intellectual,
she married late. She lived in a time where the literary aspirations
of women were highly respected." Others criticisms are that there
are too many details of Heian life which gives the novel an academic,
even anthropological tone and leave us with an impression of Murasaki
as a distant observer. Again Dalby insists that to understand the uniqueness
and genius of Murasaki we have to consider the material culture.
"Why do we care about the Heian period? It was a fragile period of history,
a time of peace and prosperity. Murasaki painted a vivid picture of
court life in Heian times in The Tale of Genji but she never
wrote about things like food or architecture. She took it for
granted that her readership knew all this."
Dalby feels that
the western concept of the novel has historical details "sprinkled on
like seasonings." She says that including the details of everyday life
are important so modern readers can understand what was valued and appreciated
in Heian society. Having already researched 11th century court
clothing for her 1993 book on kimono (Kimono-Fashioning Culture)
Dalby already knew about the Heian fashion obsession with layering robes
in different colour combinations and giving them poetic names, something
that would surely have been important to Murasaki.
"I'm not an historian
so I had to use my experience as an anthropologist to approach this.
It was like doing field work in the 11th century." Last time Dalby
undertook fieldwork she unintentionally became a geisha. This time she
immersed herself in the Heian custom of Ohaguro teeth-blackening.
"I use stage makeup. The traditional fermente mixtur of oxidised
iron filings seeped in something acidic like vinegar wouls be very smelly!"
she says. At first she applied it at home while she was writing
the novel, "I realised I had to try this so I could be in the frame
of mind that would consider it beautiful." More recently, she has been
turning up to book readings of The Tale of Murasaki in the United
States with black teeth. "People are surprised at first but you
do get used to it. Anyway you can't imagine how these women were if
you don't imagine them with black teeth."
Dalby says it also
makes complete sense. Geisha, like Heian women, also powder their
faces white. The okasan (geisha mother) of the okiya
geisha house) where Dalby lived told her not to show her teeth when
she smiled. "Super-white makeup makes white teeth look yellow," she
explains, "and so you can see with black teeth this removes the distraction."
Another effect of the black teeth, says Dalby, is the emphasis on the
kurokami — black hair. "In Heian Japan hair was important. The
black teeth set off the black hair." Dalby didn't try the other custom
of Murasaki's day which was shaving off your eyebrows and painting them
on the middle of the forehead. "They completely rearranged the proportions
of the face."
The device that
Dalby used in The Tale of Murasaki to explain many of these details
is the character called Ming-gwok. "Ming-gwok is fictional and it's
a stretch, but not impossible." In Dalby’s novel, Murasaki has a love
affair with this Japanese speaking son of a Chinese emissary.
Dalby says it's recorded that Murasaki's father, Tametoki, as governor
of Echizen, had contact with a Chinese delegation who had come to escort
a group of shipwrecked sailors back to China and exchanged poetry with
an official. "Without Ming-gwok there is no reason for Murasaki
to talk about things like the seasons, poetry and the Heian fascination
and admiration for Chinese culture. Through him we learn more about
Heian Japan."
As Dalby talks of
her search for traces of Murasaki's Miyako she reveals her unfamiliarity
with Kyoto geography. In 1998 when she spent 3 months in Japan researching
for The Tale of Murasaki it was the first time that she had ridden
a bicycle around Kyoto. "Geisha don't ride bicycles," she says as she
enthuses about all the Murasaki-related sites she visited, such as the
Kamogamo shrine, where she commissioned a purification ceremony, to
ward off bicycle accidents. "I had been thinking about these places
for the past decade and seeing them made them more real." Later she
followed Murasaki's route from Kyoto to Echizen, now Takefu city, and
took a boat across Lake Biwa, all the way clutching the poems Murasaki
had written on her original 8 day journey.
"Someone asked me
if I was lonely travelling by myself. It hadn't even occurred
to me. Reading about it for so long. It was a touching moment to imagine
her, for example, as she saw the Shiozu mountains. I felt like
Murasaki was with me on my journey."
In Echizen Murasaki
had felt isolated, thought the place rather primitive and worried that
she was turning into a "rustic clod." Although the trip back to
Kyoto by train only took 1 and a half hours Dalby says that she realised
how it would have been for Murasaki, as she came back to Miyako.
"Miyako was a closed exclusive world, like the geisha world is." Paraphrasing
the well known Japanese proverb, The frog in the well does not know
the ocean, Dalby says, "Geisha are like frogs in a well, as a geisha
the world comes to you."
When Dalby went
in search of the "Genji World" she found it very open. She attended
some meetings of the Murasaki Shikibu Appreciation Society in Kyoto
and came a respectable second their Heian style incense guessing competition.
She found a place where she could dress up like a Heian woman, donning
more than 12 robes, and have her photo taken (very popular, she discovered,
amongst the Genji fans). She attended a talk by Setouchi
Jakucho, the buddhist nun who has published the most recent translation
of The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese. There's even a new
movie on it's way and Dalby's novel has just been translated into Japanese,
"in quite a shockingly modern voice!" In fact, Dalby says, there
is a real Genji boom at the moment, and "I'm on the wave
with my surfboard!"
Dalby is also very
up to date and on the "internet wave" too. Given her grounding in traditional
Japan and academia she seems to have moved with ease to writing and
designing her own website (www.taleofmurasaki.com)
to accompany The Tale of Murasaki. "You have to write differently
for the web. It's been a challenge coming from an academic background
to writing a novel and then introducing Murasaki and Heian culture to
an internet audience, but I've thoroughly enjoyed it," she said. "The
website seemed a natural progression." In fact her next project is to
create a website to accompany the reissue, this year, of her 1993
book Kimono - Fashioning Culture. "I think I'm like Murasaki.
I'd rather be holed up in my study writing manuscripts than in the spotlight
being interviewed with all the attention on me."
Kimono
- Fashioning Culture by Liza Dalby was published September 2002
in paperback from the University of Washington Press.
Sally
McLaren is an Australian journalist living in Kyoto.
Copyright
held by the author
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