Japanese and Western Literature. Armando Martins Janeira

the important moments of life before they vanish. In the first part, Murasaki finishes chapter fourteen saying that she narrated all the detailed matter which Genji wanted to conceal, because she feared that her novel might be accused of being "no history but a mere made-up tale designed to influence the judgement of posterity."⁷

      Therefore, while telling the story Murasaki tries to give it the firmness and density of reality, pretending that the story has really happened. By this stratagem she elicits credibility and evokes the reader's imagination and sensibility. This texture of reality grows from the author's knowledge of men and things. Books of history narrate only facts and supply information on social events, without entering into the personal life of the individual; the novel, says Genji, penetrates into men's souls, discovers the universal and inner nature of man.

      The Tale of Genji is built around a few main ideas: the idea of love, illustrated by a certain number of amorous characters, Prince Genji being the centre of them; the idea of power, which determines the behaviour and fixes the destiny of several of the characters; the idea of time, which imbues the whole action of the novel.

      The secret of masterpieces, writes Robert Lidell in A Treatise on the Novel, lies in the concordance between the subject and the temperament of the author. It is obvious that the personality of Murasaki, as we know it from her novel and from her diary, is very sympathetic to her social environment. Maybe she was not completely identified with it, and that was why she kept the necessary distance to observe and describe it with such deep, realistic analysis. But she loved the elegance and grace of court life. She probably dreamed of some charming young prince of her own, and that is why she over-idealized Genji.

      For tightening the structure of her novel, Murasaki used certain patterns of action which, as Ivan Morris has observed, occur with variations at widely separated points in the narrative, like the motifs of a musical composition. This deliberate repetition of situations, settings, and relationships between characters appeals to the aesthetic sense of the reader and gives unity to the novel. This is a device used also by Proust, as noted by Edmund Wilson when he labeled A La Recherche du Temps Perdu a symphonic structure rather than a narrative in the ordinary sense. Pattern, according to E. M. Forster, is something which springs mainly out of the plot, and to which the characters and any other element present also contribute."⁸ Both Murasaki and Proust used pattern and rhythm to give cohesion and harmony to their long novels.

      Another device for which Murasaki has been compared to Proust is the use of the introduction of a character not yet mentioned as if the reader knew him before and were already familiar with him. Thus Princess Asagao is introduced in the second chapter of The Tale of Genji. This process, as critics have noted for both writers, can produce a suggestive realistic effect. Still another device frequently used by both authors consists of hinting at the existence of a character before he or she enters into the action, or of making a vague allusion to events which will happen many years later, Ivan Morris quotes examples of all these devices in his interesting book The World of the Shining Prince,⁹ and his points are easy to see when reading Murasaki's novel. But if it is true that some literary devices are similar in Murasaki and in Proust, there is no similarity whatsoever between the recurring leitmotif patterns employed by each.

      Edward Seidensticker in a recent article points out a peculiar Japanese characteristic of Murasaki's pattern which consists of associating the full moon with tragedy. Three of the women important in Genji's life die on or very near the night of the full moon. In each case the circumstances are horrifying: the three are possessed by the spirit of a fourth woman who is insane with jealousy. In each case, again, the most beautiful moon of the year, the full moon of the lunar month, is associated with disaster. Each time the image recurs, Seidensticker concludes, it brings a mixture of grief and terror.¹⁰

      By building the character through a succession of multiple states, and conceiving human relations as a series of failures by one person to meet and to understand another, both Murasaki and Proust achieve rich and surprising effects,¹¹ A complete comparative study between the two masterpieces should reveal many more common points, since they are two extraordinarily rich and extensive works. Murasaki had not only the genius to discover by herself the technique necessary to give life to a very long narration, but also the power to capture the interest and imagination of the reader through her highly artistic skill.

      All this shows the surprisingly modern aspects of this first novel of love in world literature. Later we deal with another point in which Murasaki has been compared to Proust—the use of the element of Time.

      The Tale of Genji, in its large panorama of the passing of human lives, reminds one of Tolstoi's War and Peace: the master-motif that underlies the former is the same one that Percy Lubbock observed in the latter—the story of youth. Man is at the mercy of time: Genji, still young and handsome, talks with his young friends a whole rainy night about different types of women. Genji, already old, holds in his arms the little child of his young wife, Princess Nyosan, with dark thoughts that the father of the child must be his own son. That son, Kashiwagi, did to Genji what Genji himself had done to his father the emperor when he seduced his new wife, Lady Fujitsubo. Time sees repetition of life with its eternal patterns; man fulfils his destiny and vanishes.

      But what gives The Tale of Genji an air of modernity is really its theme: love. It is only after Honoré d'Urfé, who lived about three hundred fifty years ago, that European fiction began to occupy itself with the sentimental story, built up coherently around a certain number of episodes. Before d'Urfé, duty, family, city-policy, or adventure were the themes of poems, plays, and stones in Greece and in Rome. When love inspired a writer, it was rather to create songs exalting the beauty of its physical aspects, as with Ovid.

      The Tate of Genji is the first novel to deal with the sentimental aspects of love and to analyse the intimate feelings of the heart. For this also it has a particular place and meaning in world literature.

      THE CONCEPT OF LIFE

      Perhaps the most striking feature of aristocratic Heian life, writes Edward Seidensticker, is its emphasis on good taste. In action it gave rise to vast and minute cultivation of taste and form. Infinite care was dedicated to the selection of an ensemble, to the composition of a letter, to the concocting of a perfume. The days were spent in ceremonies, in elegant pastimes viewing the cherry blossoms, burning incense, or seeing the moon in the melancholy of night; the main occupation was to read and write poems, to court, and to embark on gallant adventures. As has been written, the real religion of Heian was the cult of calligraphy. Religion became an art and art a religion.

      Buddhist rites were a spectacle; Chinese poetry was an intellectual game. George Sansom writes:

      Heian courtiers were great connoisseurs in emotion and judges of ceremonies and etiquette; sentimentally aware of the sadness of this dew-like fleeting world, but intellectually unconcerned with all its problems; prone to a gentle melancholy but apt to enjoy each transitory moment, and quite without interest in any outlook but their own.¹²

      Japanese Heian writers were not much troubled by the problem of evil. We see, though, Genji preoccupied with sin, and even preoccupied with the fate of his father's soul after he sees him in a dream burdened "by a load of earthly sin." The Japanese, notes Sansom, have cared little for abstract ideas of good and evil, but have always been concerned with problems of behaviour towards society. They were very superstitious; natural disasters and disease, for which they had no explanations, made them resort to religion and magic practices.

      There is in the Japanese soul a light and pleasurable side lit by the sunshine of Shintoism, which rejoices at the pleasures and virginal forces of the earth. There is also the sombre side in which Buddhism brings its deep concern of the suffering of life. The nucleus of Murasaki's art lies in the combination of the two.

      The Buddhist concept of life deeply imbued Murasaki's novel. "The purpose of The Tale of Genji may be likened to the man who, loving the lotus flower, must collect and store muddy and foul water in order to plant and cultivate the flower, writes Norinaga Motoori, one of the greatest Japanese literary theorists and Murasaki's fervent admirer,"The impure mud of illicit love affairs described in the Tale is there not for the purpose of being admired but for the purpose of nurturing the flower of the awareness of the sorrow