Japanese and Western Literature. Armando Martins Janeira

existence. Prince Genji's conduct is like the lotus flower which is happy and fragrant but which has its roots in filthy muddy water. But the Tale does not dwell on the impurity of the water; it dwells only on those who are sympathetically kind and who are aware of the sorrow of human existence."¹³

      From Buddhist thought comes the feeling of sorrow, pity, and sympathy for things, mono no aware. It is a connection between beauty and the sadness of the world, because the greatest beauty is the one that lasts the shortest time. Life flows away with its pleasures, all things are evanescent. The aspects and changes of nature respond to changing human emotions and passions. And both men and tilings suffer from this poignant feeling of irreparable loss. As Ivan Morris pointed out, in scene after scene The Tale of Genji reaches its emotional climax in the union of aesthetic enjoyment and sorrow.

      THE CONCEPT OF LOVE: A CULT OF BEAUTY

      Love in Heian aristocracy consisted of an elaborate code of courtship which was very strict in its rules of composing and answering poems, but lenient in allowing a suitor to enjoy his belle's full charms. We see in the novels of the time that it was difficult for a lady (and probably not very polite) to refuse a gentleman of good birth when approached according to the rules of poetical courtship. A man would easily fall in love at the mere glimpse of long, bewitching tresses of hair or a beautiful kimono sleeve. Love was an irresponsible adventure without future, compromise, or any sense of sin.

      Ivan Morris writes:

      The love life of the Heian aristocracy is marked by a curious mixture of depravity and decorum. The absence of any ideal of courtly love involving fealty, protection, romantic anguishing, and the acceptance of a high degree of promiscuity frequently gives a flippant, rather heartless air to the relations between the men and women of Murasaki's world. One has the impression that, for all the elegant sentiments expressed in the poems, the love affairs of the time, especially at court, were rarely imbued with any ideal feeling, and that often they were mere exercises in seduction.¹⁴

      The cult of beauty and the pursuit of pleasure were predominant in Heian court life. The moral customs were such that any girl who remained virgin for long was considered to be possessed by an evil spirit, and no self-respecting family would welcome such a reputation. The ancient Chinese also believed that the abstention from sexual intercourse broke the equilibrium of yin and yang and put the person to the risk of succumbing to incubi and other evil forces.¹⁵

      There is a poem by Princess Uchiko Naishinno, second daughter of Emperor Saga, in which the concept of love is as natural and as liberal as we can imagine by these lines:

      I cannot bear to sleep alone.

       I cannot tear from my heart

       The sweet thoughts of love.

      The Manyoshu contains a poem by Princess Tajima "composed," it says, "when her clandestine relations with Prince Hozumi during her residence in the Palace of Prince Takechi became known."

      A vestal virgin of the great Ise Shrine was said to have sent this poem to Narihira (who lived around one century before Murasaki) after having paid a visit to his sleeping quarters:

      Did you come here?

       Did I go to visit you,

       Or is it only my thought?

       Was our night a dream or reality?

       Was I sleeping or awake?

      In The Tale of Lady Ochikubo, one of the first of the monogatari mentioned previously, we find a curious scene of a gallant who visits a noble lady. She is the daughter of an Imperial Princess, but her stepmother treats her cruelly, giving her only shabby clothes worn already by her half-sisters. Though it was the first time they had seen each other, the young man stayed for the night; he took her in his arms and the inexperienced young lady "wept and trembled in fear and misery." The next day, he inquired from her chambermaid if she found him disagreeable. By no means, she replied, "it is merely the painful memory of the shame she felt that night at the shabbiness of her clothes that now distresses her."

      In spite of a certain flippancy and promiscuity in refined court society, we cannot conclude that amorous adventures were only casual and superficial. This is proven by the concentrated analysis made of jealousy in several books of the time. In The Tale of Genji jealousy is the reverse of amorous pleasure in every relationship between a man and a woman, and the full analysis of jealousy is made with insight and careful detail. The diary of a jealous lady, the Kagero Nikki (The Gossamer Years), we will see, is dedicated to expressing the bitterness, the solitary pain and humiliation of a jealous woman abandoned by her husband. Everywhere jealousy is the sombre side of love, inseparably linked with passion. The ardent yearning for the absolute and the eternal which burns in love comes together with the instinctive certitude that love cannot last, cannot escape the laws of change and death engraved in human nature.

      It is not surprising that women express their jealousy bitterly, because Heian society was a world of men, where a man could have many wives and concubines; the initiative for an adventure was always his. The men of aristocracy had a life of leisure and gallantry. We can read how the boss of a noble functionary of the palace used to send his subordinate poems to invite him to come to his job, but even with the courteous poems he did not succeed in wakening the subordinate's sense of duty. Marriage took place very early, the match being made by the families; and this, too, explains the liberty of morals and why multiple adventures increased a man's prestige.

      This concept in which physical love was accompanied by a ritual of elegance and grace and a refined cult of beauty is very far from the concept that arose in Europe about two centuries later. The ideal of European courteous love was purely spiritual, for the knight was content with receiving from his lady as little as a coloured ribbon: with it over his heart, he would fight anyone who would deny that she was the fairest in the world. By contrast, in mediaeval times a European lived a primitive life, crude and without art—except for the troubadour, who would send poems to his lady, without hope for an answer. His lady, unlike her Japanese sister, would seldom be able to poetize. In sum, the ideals of elegance and refinement were unknown in. Europe, just as the ideals of chivalry were ignored in Japan.

      The contemporary ideal of man's beauty, in the time of Genji," writes Ivan Morris, was a plump white face with a minute mouth, the narrowest slits for eyes and a little tuft of beard on the point of the chin. This—apart from the beard—was the same as the ideal of feminine beauty, and often in Murasaki's novel we are told that a handsome gentleman like Kaoru is as beautiful as a woman."¹⁶ Murasaki's men have "the gentleness and grace of her girl friend Saisho," writes Waley. Men powdered their faces and perfumed themselves heavily; they had soft manners and were far from displaying the impassible courage of their samurai descendants. Women were always enveloped in beautiful silk robes—the average number was twelve—in exquisite colours combined with the most refined taste under strict rules prescribed by etiquette. These are the images that we find in the literature and in the painting of this epoch.

      THE CONCEPT OF TIME

      We referred before to the striking similarities of technique between The Tale of Genji and Prousts's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Another point in which they have been compared is the importance both attribute to the idea of time. The purpose of exploring the arcana of time is expressed in the title of Proust's novel. Donald Keene has pointed out that Murasaki's novel betrays an obsession with the idea of time.

      But although in both novels time is so poignantly dominant, there is an enormous difference in the development of the concept. In these different ways of developing the same idea, we encounter one of those areas in which East and West evolved along completely different lines.

      In the Western concept, time is divided and fragmented, and the content of each fragment is explored till it is exhausted: the individual existence has therefore a concrete value. In the Oriental concept, time is undivided, is part of die immutable rhythm of the cosmos, and belongs to an absolute sequence which embraces man and the universe in its cyclical repetition. The seasons of the year are an aspect of this principle of eternal cyclical renovation, and the renewing of the generations is only a part of the cyclical renovation of the universe: the individual here has no concrete value, passes unnoticed in the