Liza Dalby: The Tale of Murasaki

By MARGIE THOMSON deputy books editor

Liza Dalby, the only westerner to have become a geisha (she wrote about it in her 1983 book Geisha) has published a beautiful, fictional account of the life of the great 11th-century Japanese writer Murasaki Shikibu.

Murasaki's "Tale of Genji" remains the most famous tale in Japanese literature. It comprises stories of courtly intrigue, of the political and sexual games between men and women, and follows the rather rollicking fortunes of the handsome Prince Genji.

Murasaki, the highly educated daughter of a socially well-connected scholar, began writing the stories for her own entertainment but the stories leaked out and became popular long before Murasaki would have wished. They won her notoriety, admiration, and a position at court.

Dalby explains at the outset that she has indulged in a kind of "literary archaeology," piecing the historical fragments of Murasaki's diary into an "imagined reminiscence," bringing her own expertise in 11th-century Japanese sensibilities and preoccupations to texture the landscape.

The result is an extremely beautiful narrative in which a dreamlike flatness transports one into the courtly world of long ago, and mimics the formality of even the most intense human dramas that occurred there. All is restraint and nothing symbolises this quality better than the poetry of the day. This was in the form of waka, precursor to the haiku, a common mode of communication at court.

These formal, five-line poems would fly between lovers and friends, and could even be used as weapons between enemies. Murasaki's waka have been used by Dalby. Here is one she wrote to a friend who seemed captivated by another woman, a waka which finds its answer in the fact that Murasaki's name endures almost 900 years after she died:

Think of me in the forgotten sadness of autumn, even though your heart be captured by the moon.

Vintage

$24.95