SOURCE: An introduction to Japanese Poetic Diaries, University of California Press, 1969, pp. 1-56.

[In the following excerpt, Miner discusses some theories of authorship of The Diary of Izumi Shikibu, its characterizations, shifting narrative point of view, and unsatisfying ending.]

… In 1003 Izumi Shikibu entered into an affair with a prince of the blood, Atsumichi. As the journey had been the subject of the earlier diary, the love affair is that of the later. Instead of a representative tragedy of maternal love, we have a depiction of the psychology and romance of courtly love. So much is clear at once, but for many other features of The Diary of Izumi Shikibu there is more inference and speculation than there is clear evidence. The two chief problems are those of authorship and of the actual life of Izumi Shikibu.

In brief, the history of theories of authorship divides into four stages: before 1233, no known ascription of authorship; 1233 and following, the traditional ascription to Izumi Shikibu with the mention by Fujiwara Teika in his Meigetsuki (1233) of the Diary as Izumi Shikibu; the hypothesis, first advanced in 1934, that the work was not by Izumi Shikibu but by some other, later writer (how much later varying according to different versions of the hypothesis); and the general return, since the Pacific War, to belief in the traditional ascription of authorship to Izumi Shikibu.²⁴ So far has reaction swung from the belief that someone other than Izumi Shikibu composed it that a responsible scholar could write flatly in 1965: "The Izumi Shikibu Diary is a love diary written by Izumi Shikibu from her own experience."²⁵ The only other named person to have been proposed as author has been Fujiwara Shunzei (1114-1204), a distinguished poet and critic who died just two centuries after Izumi Shikibu's affair with Prince Atsumichi. The theory of Shunzei's authorship rests almost entirely upon one somewhat ambiguous piece of evidence and so has few proponents today. Those who hold for some other, unspecified authorship have a much better case. The Diary is not mentioned, at least not unambiguously, until about a century and a half after Prince Atsumichi's death, and none of the poems in it appears in any imperial collection before the Senzaishu (ca. 1188), which was compiled, it must be said, by Shunzei. Numerous other bits of evidence, none conclusive, have been produced. It is most prudent to conclude that there are some good reasons for doubt, and not enough reasons for certainty, that Izumi Shikibu is the author; but that no one else is known who is as likely to be the author. By strict rules of literary evidence, her authorship is unproven, but it seems most convenient to follow Japanese scholars and take it as a working hypothesis that the author is Izumi Shikibu until stronger evidence against the ascription is uncovered.

Unfortunately, the details of her life are themselves obscure. It is not known when she was born or when she died, although from 1033 she is no longer mentioned in records of poetry-matches and similar functions at which she might have been expected to appear. Her parentage has been debated and her "name" is not, properly speaking, a name at all. The "Shikibu" refers to a lesser court office, and the "Izumi" comes from the fact that her first husband, Tachibana Michisada, was governor of Izumi Province in 999, about the time of their marriage. It is thought that the marriage lasted till 1004, but that it had been a purely formal relation for some considerable portion of that time. In fact, it appears that it may have been in the year of her marriage to Michisada that she entered into the first of the two great affairs of her life, that with Prince Tametaka, son of the cloistered Emperor Reizei (r. 967-969). It was not surprising in terms of the mores of his society that as an imperial prince Tametaka should establish relations outside marriage. But he was criticized for his going too far, addicting himself to pleasure, and not only with Izumi Shikibu. He died in his twenty-sixth year in 1002. It is thoughts of the broken dream of love with Tametaka that occupy the Lady's mind at the opening of the Diary.

What one is strongly inclined to call the plot is, however, concerned with the second grand affair of Izumi Shikibu's life, that with Tametaka's younger brother, Atsumichi, who had entered into relations with her by the following spring (1003). It is the vicissitudes of that relation that comprise the basis of the Diary. The historical Atsumichi had a mad first consort,²⁶ who does not enter the Diary, and after her a second, of very high birth, a sister of a wife of the crown prince. Her characterization in the Diary is, not very surprisingly, unfavorable. She is haughty, cold, and self-important. So she may have been in reality. But even to someone not altogether strait-laced, it must have seemed highly questionable for Prince Atsumichi to become infatuated with a social nobody like Izumi Shikibu, who had been mistress of his elder brother while married to Michisada. His taking her into his palace and treating her as the most important person there could only involve neglect of the consort and seem a terrible affront to anyone in her position. The Lady is installed on XII. 18. The Diary closes sometime after the New Year's festivities for the Prince's father. Izumi Shikibu herself (distinguishing her from the Lady of the Diary) led a few years of brilliant if questionable life thereafter, perhaps the most famous and illuminating episode in her affair being her attendance at the Kamo Festival in 1005. Atsumichi took her in his carriage, flaunting her in the public eye by having her gorgeous robes drape out the back, and causing her to be the scandalous cynosure of the festival. When he died in 1007, he was in his twenty-seventy year, Izumi Shikibu perhaps somewhat older.

Subsequent events in her life need be only briefly mentioned. In fact, the information is scanty. The next important thing known of her is her service at the very literary court of Empress Akiko (Shoto Mon'in, 988-1074). Arthur Waley's well-known comparison of Akiko to Queen Victoria²⁷ is quite misleading. Victoria did not gather about her four of the most brilliant women writers of the day—including the woman supposed the country's greatest novelist and the century's finest poet. She did not learn boxing which, Waley so amusingly says, is the Victorian equivalent of Akiko's study of masculine Chinese with Murasaki Shikibu. And certainly only a fervid imagination could picture Victoria admitting to her service a woman with the scandalous reputation of Izumi Shikibu. Victoria benefits too much by the comparison, and Akiko's court was—as far as one can judge—assembled for the brilliance of its ladies. The best description of the group is that of Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 978-ca. 1016) in her Diary. The traditionally ascribed author of The Tale of Genji and a poet of some merit, Murasaki Shikibu was also inclined to be severe upon such weaker sisters as Sei Shonagon and Izumi Shikibu. "How interestingly Izumi Shikibu writes!" she says, adding, "Yet what a disgraceful [keshikaranu] person she is!"²⁸ That is fair enough, but when she adds that Izumi Shikibu "could not practice the true art of poetry," she has gone too far, allowing her moral judgment to become entangled with her poetic rivalry.

While catching the sharp eyes of Murasaki Shikibu, she seems also to have engaged the attention of Fujiwara Yasumasa (958-1036), a man closer to her own rank than the two princes had been. Yasumasa and she were married, and she accompanied him on at least one of his posts as provincial administrator. Whether the second marriage was much more successful than the first is not known, though it may be doubted. At all events, five or six named lovers apart from those mentioned in this account appear in headnotes to her poems, and that there were yet others seems to be implied. From all such connections, she had but one known child, Koshikibu, to whom she devoted a considerable share of her seemingly inexhaustible capacity for love. Koshikibu herself was something of a poet and lover like her mother, but she died in childbirth in 1025. Izumi Shikibu's poems show that shealso had strong affections for her family, which was embarrassed by her reputation. They also show that she felt shame for the scandal she caused and that, for all her worldliness, she was genuinely drawn to religion.

It is just such intensity and complexity in her character that makes the Diary so interesting. It is obvious that she was a passionate woman. At one point the Diary says of the Lady that when she looked on the Prince, "It even felt as if her very eyes grew amorous," and amorous eyes Izumi Shikibu certainly had. It is equally plain that she exercised an irresistible fascination on numerous men. The interest she held for them may be partly explained by her reputation. If Prince Tametaka had devoted himself to her, a lesser man might find some interest. Partly it may have been her appearance. At least the Prince is smitten when he finds the Lady slighter, younger looking than he had expected, and it may well have been the case that she seemed younger than she was or than her clever mind suggested. Even together, however, these two explanations are far from sufficient. She had first to earn the reputation. And the Prince does not get to see what the Lady really looks like until months after he has spent nights with her, and it is in fact an embarrassment to her, as it would have been to any noblewoman, to be seen by daylight, publicly. Apart from a passionate receptivity, what really made her attractive was her expressiveness, her sensitivity, and her mystery. Even Murasaki Shikibu had to allow that she was "interesting" and "beguiling" (okashiki).

The Lady's sensitivity to nature and human moods is most obviously revealed in her poems and in her long pensée written at dawn after the Prince has knocked at her door (pp. 121-122, below). The same evidence shows her expressiveness. It is significant that a poem, an observant remark, or some other cultivated gesture repeatedly brings the Prince round when his attentions have wandered from her. It is not beauty, certainly not anything material to be gained from her, but a depth and force of personality that constitute her appeal. Like all great sirens, she has an inner realm of mystery. It is this that the reader comes imperceptibly to feel, and the differing nature of her mysterious attractions from those of Helen or Cleopatra can be judged by a scene when the Prince is visiting her.

He looked upon her lying there in the bone-chilling cold, rapt in her thoughts. Many people spoke ill of her, but when she lay here before him like this, his heart stirred with love. In such a state of aroused feelings, he watched her relaxed posture, half in thought and half-asleep. Touching her gently, he whispered,

   There is no drizzle,
There is no dew that falls tonight,
   But as we lie here,
A strange wetness glistens softly
Upon the sleeve of the pillowing arm.

She did not reply, as she lay there in the languor of thought. Only, he could see the tears falling from her eyes and sparkling in the moonlight. Looking upon her with the utmost tenderness he said, "Why don't you reply? I know that what I said was unimportant—I must have said something wrong."

"What should I say?" she asked. "My thoughts are lost in a maze of feeling, and your words havescarcely entered my ears. But this much I hope you believe—your poem about 'the sleeve of the pillowing arm' is one I will never forget. You may put me to the test on that." She spoke this with a sudden smile.

Her pensive withdrawal arouses his passion—it is the only time in the Diary that he is said to touch her—and, significantly, also leads him to a poem. She responds at once with tears—and at last with sudden humor.

That complexity, that charm, that inscrutability make the Lady of the Diary a very effective character. However like or unlike Izumi Shikibu the characterization is, whatever the authorship of the work, it is art rather than autobiography. It may well be that some people would wish, with Murasaki Shikibu, to censure the life of Izumi Shikibu, but the Lady of the Diary (she is never referred to by any name) is a fictional creation of great interest. The nature of the interest may be described in a word—romance.²⁹ What that romance means to a Japanese can best be represented by a phrase in the Prince's poem just quoted: "the sleeve of the pillowing arm" (Tamakura no sode). The image evoked is of courtly lovers in a shadowy villa, lying together on or under their robes, pillowing themselves in each other's arms. It is the image of full joy and full communion, the realization of desire—but revealed dimly by the beams of a clouded moon, leaving what is seen to suggest the preciousness of all that is hidden. It moves to tears and it allows humor. It is the Japanese version of Troilus's night with Criseyde or Porphyro's with Madeline.

The aura of romance is accompanied by an equally significant element, the psychological revelation—delineation is too crude—of the Lady and the Prince. Their personalities emerge from ebbs, flows, and halts of action, and they are made up of a tracery of moods and motives. Two things deserve emphasis, however, for their importance in the revelation of the Lady. The first is a major feature of the Diary until that unfortunate break near the end when she moves to the palace; until then her consciousness dominates the Diary by vibrating between her inner world with its own rhythm and the outer world in its passage of time. The beat is like that of Japanese music, always inevitable but often unexpected. The other element is an inner drama poised against the explicit plot of her relationship with the Prince. She is divided in her mind in longing for the security, the opportunity to love, and the triumph that living in the Prince's palace would bring, and in fearing to commit herself to what will be thought scandalous (her family is shown to be against it), and also in fearing a loss of power over her own little world, a loss of freedom to lie, however unhappily, in the shadows of her own room. Set against the problem of the Prince's likelihood of commitment to her is, therefore, the additional problem of whether she will commit herself to him. It is this withholding, like the withdrawal into her own thoughts that night of the sleeve of the pillowing arm, that is so certainly feminine and an important basis for her appeal. There is no ladder-like series of steps to a single destination in this story, because it is the essence of the experience that it ebbs and flows, that it plays off an inner and an outer plot as well as human variability against the steady forward progress of time.

It must be admitted that the ending loses such qualities. Once the story shifts to the palace, we lose any immediacy with the Prince, much less the Lady. Significantly, there are no poems in this section, and instead of either psychological truth or romance, we get a happy ending and, to put the best face on it, a kind of social realism describing what happens when a Prince establishes a favorite in hispalace. The subject has some interest in its own right, but it is not relevant to what precedes it in the Diary. The failure reveals the extent to which the central interest of the work is the consciousness of the Lady and, to a lesser extent, of the Prince. When we move out of that realm, all turns false, as the postscript to the Diary seems to recognize.³⁰

Until that point the Diary very skillfully employs a shifting narrative point of view that is unique in the diaries of the time and very unusual by Western standards.³¹ The method involves entering into the thoughts of the Lady and the Prince alike and also moving out of them to an omniscient narration. The absence of the equivalent of English personal pronouns enables this technique to function without strain or artifice. As often in classical Japanese fiction, it is also often not clear whether a given phrase is spoken, indirectly quoted, or thought. Such handlings create a general authorial omniscience, but one with very little tyranny, very little distance from the characters, and within it an entry into a consciousness dominating a given passage. Usually that is the Lady's, but it may be the Prince's. In one notable instance a very long sentence accommodates four alternating consciousnesses: the Prince's and the Lady's, each of which is expressed once in speech and once in thought. The emphasis upon the Lady is so strong most of the time that it would not be far wrong to use the first person in translation. The emphasis is revealed by the honorifics employed for the Prince and the more level language used for her, as well as by the occasional application to her of words like konata, which may mean "here," "this person," or even 'I." Yet this closeness to her consciousness, which so skillfully allows the revelation of personality in the story, has at the same time an esthetic distance, a separation by what amounts to a basically third-person narration in the shifts away from her viewpoint to that of the Prince or general omniscience. So various and combined a method is not easily rendered, but what has been attempted in this translation is a kind of indirect quotation (as well as direct) or attribution of thought like that used on occasion by English novelists as late as Jane Austen, a more explicit or less involved stream of consciousness.

The faulty ending shows that The Diary of Izumi Shikibu triumphs in the revelation of the world of private experience. The Lady's child and her family are only fleetingly hinted at, and the rest of society or of the public world is ignored. The "world" (yo no naka) which is introduced in the first sentence is that of love, and the operative word is "dream." As the central metaphor for Japanese courtly love, dream helps convey the romantic atmosphere of the story. Yet there is more to it than that. The dream had been reality till Prince Tametaka's death, and the new world of love with Prince Atsumichi is sure equally to evolve into a dream. The experience is dreamlike in the thematic sense of the illusion of temporal matters in Buddhist belief. If the Lady "yields to karma" in deciding finally to go to the Prince's palace, that too is part of the dream, because although one has no power over one's karma, she freely yields to it because she has at last convinced herself that she should go to him. Such complexity of motivation in such an atmosphere is essential to the enduring appeal of the Diary. Whether or not it was written by Izumi Shikibu herself, there is no doubt that it simplifies and in a sense purifies her life by defining it into a single rich episode and by rendering fact into fiction. That very fiction, while transforming a questionable life into unquestionable art, maintains forever alive the human attraction of a woman who died over nine centuries ago.

Notes

…²⁴ The factual background of my account is most indebted to Tamai, Nikki Bungaku noKenkyu, and Endo Yoshimoto, Tosa Nikki, etc. (Tokyo, 1957).

²⁵ Tamai, Nikki Bungaku no Kenkyu, p. 152. Yoshida Koichi is equally positive in his Izumi Shikibu Kenkyu (Tokyo, 1964). In his excellent Zenko Izumi Shikibu Nikki, Suzuki Kazuo argues more quietly for Izumi Shikibu's authorship. See the Bibliographical Note.

²⁶ "Consort" is used to translate "kita no kata." On the extraordinarily complex marriage customs of the time, see William McCullough, "Japanese Marriage Institutions in the Heian Period," Harvard Journal of Asian Studies, XXVII (1967), 103-167.

²⁷ Waley (trans.), The Tale of Genji, p. xvi.

²⁸ Ikeda Kitan, et al. (eds.), Makura no Soshi, Murasaki Shikibu Nikki (Tokyo, 1958; Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei). The passage has been somewhat variously interpreted; a frequent glossing of the first sentence interprets it as a reference to writing letters. As for the second sentence, Tamai in his Murasaki Shikibu Nikki (Tokyo, 1952; Nihon Koten Zensho) glosses my "disgraceful" as "abandoned," "profligate."

²⁹ See Introduction to Classical Japanese Literature, produced by the Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai (Tokyo,1948, 1956), p. 83.

³⁰ See the conclusion of n. 79 to the Diary; other interpretations of the postscript are given there. Suzuki comments on the unsatisfactory character of the ending (Zenko Izumi Shikibu Nikki, pp. 358-362). He thinks the move to the Prince's palace required a shift to omniscient authorship and that the author, finding the new technique ill suited with the old, decided at last to end the work.

³¹ The absence of such a shifting viewpoint in other works of the time is a reason given by those who suggest later authorship. But of course a technique has to be innovated sometime.…