SOURCE: "The Izumi Shikibu nikki as a work of Courtly Literature," The Literary Review, Vol. 23, No. 4, 1980, pp. 463-80.

[In the following essay, Walker provides an overview of the Izumi Shikibu nikki and discusses its emphasis on illicit love.]

The culture of tenth- and eleventh-century Japan, the apogee of the Heian period (795-1185), was in every respect a culture of the court.¹ It was also an urban culture which saw itself as superior in every way to the rural rice culture that made its existence possible. As in the medieval West, courtlyculture in Japan was the property of a few individuals of noble origin—in Japan, not much more than one-tenth of one per cent of the population. For the yoki hito(good people), the courtly ideal of behavior was miyabi (elegance); the culture hero of the age was he or she who understood the pathos of things (mono no aware), "things" meaning both natural phenomena and human relationships. Life at the Heian imperial court, similarly to life at the medieval European court, revolved not around work but around aesthetic rituals that were created and maintained to educate the nobles in virtue and elegance. Though the Western chivalric tournament was absent, the Heian court being devoted to the pursuit of peace and tranquility (as the name Heian indicates), courtly enthusiasm in equal measure was poured into poetry and painting contests, excursions to view the cherry blossoms or the autumn leaves, and the more private pastimes of love.² The specifically Japanese contribution to worldwide courtly literature can best be described by examining a work that is both typical of literature of the Heian court and one of its acclaimed masterpieces, the Izumi Shikibu nikki (The Diary of Izumi Shikibu).³

"Beautiful in appearance and of a sensitive nature, Izumi Shikibu lived a life characterized throughout by extravagant romantic attachments." Thus writes the modern Japanese scholar Ikeda Kikan in regard to Izumi Shikibu, the heroine of this literary work and possibly also its author. Born around 977, the daughter of middle-ranking nobility, Izumi was brought up at the court of Grand Empress Dowager Masako. She distinguished herself already in her teens as a poet; but what brought her fame in the early part of her adult life was rather her liaisons with two young men who were far above her in rank: the imperial princes Tametaka (977-1002) and Atsumichi (980-1007). When Tametaka died prematurely in an epidemic in 1002, court gossips laid the blame on Izumi, and it was as a passionate femme fatale that Tametaka's younger brother, Atsumichi, saw, and probably admired Izumi, when he initiated a liaison with her in 1003, not quite a year after his brother's death. It appears that Atsumichi was the great love of Izumi's life; after he died, in 1007, she wrote over one hundred poems mourning him. Some time after Atsumichi's death—probably in 1009—Izumi entered the service of Empress Akiko as a lady-in-waiting; she lived to marry a second time, and to bury her daughter by her first husband. After her death her fame as a poet increased: in 1086 sixty-seven of her poems were included in an imperial poetic anthology.⁴ But the important event in her life was clearly the affair with Prince Atsumichi. It is this liaison that, according to tradition, the poetess commemorated in 1008 under the title Izumi Shikibu nikki

The story begins some time after the tenth day of the fourth month—late May, or early summer, by the Japanese lunar calendar—as the poetess Izumi Shikibu sits on her verandah reminiscing sadly over her deceased lover, Prince Tametaka. Suddenly the messenger of the deceased Prince appears at the fence to the side of her dwelling with a letter from his younger brother, Prince Atsumichi, and the poetess is roused from her reverie to answer it. Soon the Prince is actively courting her, and after the two exchange poems for an undefined length of time, he visits her suddenly one night. The "next morning letters" (kinuginu no fumi) they send to one another after the Prince's departure at dawn leave no doubt in the reader's mind that their hearts have been stirred by their brief meeting. Yet their love develops anything but smoothly. At first the Prince holds back, perhaps from awe of the poetess, or from feelings of guilt toward his dead brother, whose place with the poetess he had too quickly usurped. At one point in the story he lets himself be deterred from visiting the poetess by the warnings of his former wet nurse, who takes an over-zealous interest in his welfare. On another occasion, he visits the poetess one night only to find another carriage parked in front of herdwelling—a carriage whose occupant, he quickly assumes, had come to visit the poetess. During this time the poetess is very sensitive to the Prince's feelings of ambivalence toward her, and she reproaches him for his neglect in several poems. Yet her poetic sensitivity continues to attract him to her side, and on a visit that takes place on the night of the tenth of the tenth month (the climactic scene of the work), the Prince sees the poetess in a sublime state of poetic receptivity and soulful melancholy, and is finally convinced of her essential innocence. Soon after, he invites her to come to live with him permanently. The Prince's visits increase as the poetess tries to decide whether it will really be to her advantage to move to the Prince's f palace, where he already has a consort. She has virtually decided to go, in spite of her doubts, when, on the eighteenth of the twelfth month, the Prince suddenly arrives to take her to his palace. There the lovers' idyllic life together is increasingly marred by the gossip of the Prince's servants and the complaints of his consort. Finally, some time after the New Year, the Prince's consort leaves the palace in anger and humiliation. The narrative then breaks off abruptly.

The Western reader of the Diary is immediately struck by the importance of nature in the work. While the lai of Marie de France entitled Laustic contents itself with noting that the love of the lady and her neighbor, the baron, changes one year "… when the summer grows/Green in all the woods and meadows, / When birds to show their pleasure cling/To flower tops and sweetly sing,"⁵ references to nature in the Diary, as in other Heian fictional works, are always to specific seasonal phenomena. In fact, the structure of the work within which the story of the love affair unfolds is the passing of the seasons from early summer to early spring of the following year. The lives of the two lovers are oriented around their daily, habitual awareness of natural phenomena: the orange blossoms and hototogisu (Japanese cuckoo) of summer; the wild geese, chrysanthemums, and leaves of autumn; and the frost, winter rain, and snow of winter. An important visit by the Prince and the beginning of a new stage in the development of the love affair are almost always announced by the narrator's indication of the date or the season; for example: "It was past the twentieth of the ninth month when the Prince, awakened late one night by the dawn moon, thought, 'What a long time it has been since I last visited her …" 'And the narrator mentions the natural transformations that accompany their meetings: "While they passed the time sending messages back and forth, snow was falling heavily."⁶

Japanese genre definitions in the Heian period were vague—thus, the word nikki (diary) in the title of the work did not necessarily indicate that it was a record of events set down on particular days by a single individual, but rather that it was arranged in a pattern which followed the flow of seasons and the yearly social events at the court.⁷ Yet the Diary is also an artistically structured work of fiction that shapes the flow of time according to the "plot" of the love affair between the poetess and the Prince. The story of this love affair is marked by three peaks of tension: the night when the Prince first visits the poetess, the night when he first recognizes the poetess's innocence, and the night when he carries the poetess off to his palace to live. An unusual feature of the Diary among contemporary fictional works is its use of a natural phenomenon both as a structural pattern and as a personalized metaphor for the love of the poetess and the Prince. This is the moon, which appears at every important meeting of the lovers and which, because of its association with the mysterious, dark, feminine, yin aspects of life, becomes a symbol of love and also of the mysterious and mistrusted poetess.⁸ For the purpose of the Diary is to portray the poetess, to delineate the minute fluctuations of her sensibility and will. Consequently, the ironic tone which is proper to an interpreterand commentator on the matière of a courtly love affair—that, for example, of Chrétien de Troyes in his romance, Cligés—yields in the Diary to a point of view that is sympathetically close to the consciousness of the heroine.

The Izumi Shikibu nikki, like the fictional creations of the medieval European courts, demonstrates some of the characteristics of romance as it is defined by Northrop Frye.⁹ The poetess and the Prince are truly "characters in vacuo idealized by revery," to use Frye's expression.¹⁰ And as the characters in the romances of Chrétien and the lais of Marie de France live in a universe suspended above mundane, historical existence, in a world where only love and adventure are important, the poetess seems to live only for love and the experiencing of the beauty and sadness of nature. Similarly, the Prince, who nominally holds the office of governor-general of a distant military post, does not let his duties keep him from what Heian literature, if not Heian society, considered the most important occupation: love. Each of the lovers finds in the other the qualities deemed ideal by the court. During the Prince's first visit, the poetess is awed, even to the point of constraint, by his elegant and refined (namamekashi) appearance. Later, one morning when he is taking his leave, she notes how splendid he looks by the light of dawn. On other occasions she is charmed by the softness of the informal robe he is wearing, or by the beauty of his underrobe. And at another time she expresses her pleasure at the Prince's ability to find just the proper seasonal sentiment for a poem. The Prince does not comment on the poetess's appearance at all—for he only actually sees her over three months after he has begun courting her, due to the Heian custom of visiting at night and parting at dawn. He is stirred, then, not by her physical beauty but by her ready wit and the intensity of her feelings; at one point, after a lengthy sequence of poetic exchanges with her, he resolves to try to find a way to keep her near him always, so intensely has he enjoyed her wit.

Frye writes that the plot of European romance unfolds in a pattern similar to or linked with ritual, and he singles out the quest as the dominant ritual pattern.¹¹ But courtship is also a ritual that provides the pattern for European romance, and the plot of Chretién's Cligés, for example, consists of two separate courtships. The Izumi Shikibu nikki is a Japanese example of a romance that follows the courtship pattern; its ending depicts the typical, according to Frye, romance movement from a phase of "active adventure" (the courtship itself) to a new phase of "contemplative adventure," in which the lovers settle down into a period of comfortable and regular companionship with one another.¹² In Western medieval romances, not only ritual as narrative pattern but ritual as content—in the form of frequent tournaments and adventures—plays an important structural role. Japanese male courtiers of the Heian period occupied themselves with rough games such as kemari (a kind of football) and, in an earlier period, with hunting; but by the late tenth and early eleventh centuries activities were prized that could be enjoyed by both men and women: poetry and painting contests, music, and dancing.¹³

In the Izumi Shikibu nikki such public rituals as the poetry contest and dancing are lacking, and the private ritual of poetry exchanging dominates. The exchange of poems was a practice, of everyday life as well as of courtship, in which one person wrote or spoke a poem expressing his or her feelings in the brief, thirty-one-syllable tanka form, and the other responded on the spot with a poem that repeated an image or phrase. Though poetry exchanges occurred as a natural part of every Heian fictional narrative, in conversations, letters, and even in interior monologues, in the Diary the proportion of poems to narrative exceeds the normal proportion. The presence of these poeticexchanges, in which no action contributing to the plot of the courtship occurs, has the effect of creating an atmosphere of leisurely and ritualistic courtliness which aptly suggests the rhythm and tone of a society devoted to poetry and the celebration of beauty.

Frye notes further that romance is a form in which poetry or the characteristics of poetry are prominent.¹⁴ In a Western medieval romance such as Cligés, which is written in verse, there is no poetry as distinguished from prose, but there are poetic characteristics. For example, in the sections of the narrative that describe the effects of love on the two pairs of lovers, Alixandre and Soredamors and Cligés and Fenice, the author follows a pattern of cataloguing the effects of love and a rhetorical method of analyzing the sufferings caused by love that he learned from love poems of Ovid, so that those sections read like love poems rather than like a narrative.¹⁵ In the Izumi Shikibu nikki the presence of poetry is overwhelming: there are 144½ poems to the 46 pages of the Japanese text. And poetry dominates the Diary in a subtle way. Beginning with the imperial poetic anthology entitled Kokinwakashu (Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern, complied 905), the Japanese poetic tradition had organized courtly experience under headings such as "Spring," "Autumn," "Love," and "Parting."¹⁶ The influence of the traditional poetic anthology on the Diary can be seen in the fact that the poems in it use many of the poetic topoi to be found in the books on summer, autumn, and winter of the Kokinwakashu. Though the Diary does not follow the poetic anthology pattern of love, which is one of growth, flourishing, and decline, nevertheless topoi from the poetic anthology love books such as "sleeves wet with tears," "waiting in vain for the lover," "parting at dawn," and "yearning for a meeting" are found in abundance in this romance of courtship. Furthermore, the lovers are so familiar with poems from this poetic anthology and others that they quote phrases from them in their poetry, in their conversations, and in their thoughts.¹⁷

Japanese literature of the Heian court lacks any work which defines love, even if ironically—such as that of Andreas Capellanus. It is equally lacking in a work which presents an allegorical system of love—such as the Roman de la rose. It does, however, have a manual of love that, like the Arab treatise (risala) of love which is accompanied by poems and anecdotes on various circumstances (ahwal) of lovers, focuses on the richness and variety of the experience of love by actual people.¹⁸ This is the tenth-century Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise), which in 125 brief episodes and poetic exchanges presents the range of ideal sentiments and behavior in a love affair. The compiler of the Tales used about sixty poems by the famous poet-lover of the ninth century, Ariwara no Narihira, and built many of his episodes around anecdotes and legends about that figure.¹⁹ It is obvious, then, that in the Japanese tradition, the way of the courtly lover was to be learned not primarily from fictitious stories, or from theories of love, but from the experience of those who had proved their sensitivity in matters of love both in their lives and in their poetry. Like the Tales of Ise, then, the Izumi Shikibu nikki can be taken as a collection of anecdotes, more artistically unified and historically rooted than the earlier work, about a person sensitive in the arts of love. Seen from this point of view, the value of the work lies in its presentation of numerous experiences of fine courtly feeling.

The question of ideal lovers leads naturally into that of love in Heian literature. Buddhism, the official religion of the Heian nobility, looked down on love as an attachment, a darkness of the heart (kokoro no yami) that kept man chained to the world of the senses.²⁰ Yet while religion frowned on passion, Heian attitudes toward love, as reflected in marriage customs, were quite tolerant: polygynywas fairly common, though not the norm, and relations of a semi-permanent nature which were based on mutual attraction were tolerated alongside the permanent, official ones which were arranged to suit the interests of the family—provided they were conducted according to the elaborate Heian code of behavior in a love affair. Western-style courtly love, in which the male lover disciplines his passion in humble service to a lady beyond his reach, did not exist in Japan, for the feudal pattern of the vassal's service to his lord on which Western courtly love was based, as well as the dichotomy between love of God and carnal passion which influenced the Western relationship between the lover and his lady, were lacking in this pre-feudal, atheistic culture. There did exist, however, a uniquely Japanese version of "courtly love," in which man and woman alike strove to experience the fleeting, dreamlike happiness of an idealized love.²¹ But where European courtly love focused more on the male's sufferings in love, Japanese courtly love concentrated more on those of the woman.²²

Heian literature was preoccupied with love relationships, which the courtiers called yo no naka—literally, "the world," or, seen in Buddhist terms, the world of the senses. Given the nature of marriage customs, jealousy was inevitably a favorite topic in fiction; but conjugal love of both the monogamous and polygamous variety was also celebrated—the latter in the masterpiece of Heian fiction, Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji, ca. 1010).²³ But the Izumi Shikibu nikki demonstrates still another important facet of Heian love: the romantic, illicit love which challenges the opinions and even the institutions of the court. As befits its romantic nature, the drama of the Prince and the poetess unfolds in a dreamlike and unreal world secluded from society. Its location is the Heian equivalent of the romantic fortified castle of the European alba: the low-lying Heian mansion which, with its rusty gates and its flimsy partitions between dark, shadowy rooms, allowed easy entry to the persistent lover. Secrecy and the parting at dawn—conventions derived from poetry—are the conventions which operate in this love, more than in any other love in Heian fiction.

Courtship in Heian literature is almost always based on a sensual attraction of the lovers toward one another, but since the heroine of the Diary was a woman known for her passionate temperament, the courtship depicted in the Diary is charged with an unusually intense atmosphere of passion. The Prince pursues the poetess, after all, on the basis of her reputation as a femme fatale; and the poetess responds favorably to his advances even before the one-year mourning period for her former lover is past—though she does chide herself for her behavior. The poetess is a rare heroine in Heian literature: a woman who is truly in a position to be accused of faithlessness. Finally, possibly because the poetess is such a strong character, the power-play aspect of the courtship comes to the foreground in the Diary much more than in other Heian fictional works. Often the sparring lovers' exchanges, which in a poetic anthology are merely a conventional poetry of argumentation, become in the Diary battles of wits in which victory or defeat has real consequences for the lovers.

The Izumi Shikibu nikki is unique among Heian works of fiction, then, in that it depicts, and immortalizes, the love affair of a woman who was sought after by many men, much as the fictional Prince Genji was sought after by many women. The work gains at least some of its attraction, however, from the fascinating figure that underlies it: that of Izumi Shikibu, a woman who was both a great poetess and a great lover. One aspect of the real-life Izumi that is not depicted in the Diary, but which in real life added to the complexity and mystery of her personality, is her spirituality, for even during her lifetime Izumi had the reputation of one who was aware of the existence of a truth beyond sense experience and longed to attain it. It was probably while she was in service at the courtof Grand Empress Dowager Masako, some time before the latter's death in 1000, that Izumi addressed several poems expressing deeply felt religious concern to a noted Buddhist cleric of the day.²⁴

Izumi Shikibu demonstrated the moral ambiguity that is inherent in a life devoted to passion: her contemporaries would have been unable to deny, for example, that she and the Prince, by moving into the Prince's palace, had in effect destroyed the Prince's marriage with his official consort.²⁵ In a sense, then, the anti-social passion that is typified by the love affair of Izumi and the Prince is the Heian equivalent to the adulterous love that breaks the feudal code of honor which is represented by the Western Tristan myth. But only on the surface. For the rebellious love of Tristan and Isolde would have been out of place in a culture that accepted the reality of passionate, intense love—even adulterous love which, like that of the poetess and the Prince, transgressed barriers of rank.

After her death some time after 1027, Izumi Shikibu joined the pantheon of 'passionate women poets,"²⁶ those heroines of the Japanese poetic tradition who loved with abandon and later, according to legend, longed to break their ties with the world of the senses. As the famous ninth-century passionate poetess, Ono no Komachi, was depicted by later ages as cruel and demanding in her love,²⁷ so Izumi's intense passion was likewise viewed with a mixture of fascination and horror. A tale from the Muromachi period (1336-1568), for example, portrays her abandoning her baby son to die; later she unwittingly falls in love with this son, now grown up, and when she discovers who he is—that is, where her wantonness had led her—she renounces the world. But this representation of the passionate poetess as little better than a repentant whore dates from a period when cultural ideals were no longer determined by aristocrats who were devoted to the pleasures of love and poetry, but rather by a military class whose lives were dedicated to the god of power. The tolerant attitude of Izumi Shikibu's own time toward passionate love is seen in the fact that the same Izumi Shikibu who had supposedly caused the death of her first imperial lover and the breakup of the marriage of the second, was accepted into the service of the reigning Empress Akiko (988-1074), a year or so after Prince Atsumichi's death. The figure of Izumi Shikibu—lover, great poetess, and seeker of salvation—reflects the tensions and contradictions experienced by the Heian courtiers as they attempted to chart a course between the demands of passion and the demands of religion. Considering Japanese courtly culture for a moment in comparison with the cultures of the medieval Arab and European courts, the aristocratic culture of Heian Japan was the only one which not only tolerated the nature of a complex and gifted woman, but even considered her a valid and instructive illustration of what it meant to be human.

Notes

¹ This essay is an expanded and revised version of a paper presented at the Second Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, Athens, Georgia, March 31-April 2, 1977.

² Ivan Morris's The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (New York: Knopf, 1969) is an excellent source of information on the Heian court. See pp. 65-66 and 196-98 for a discussion of the terms yoki hito and mono no aware, respectively, and chaps, vi-viii for a detailed description of Heian courtly rituals, including courtship.

³ There are three English translations of the Izumi Shikibu nikki. That by Annie Shepley Omori and Kochi Doi in Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920; reissued Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1961) is antiquated in tone and contains numerous inaccuracies. Two recent translations have much more to recommend them: that by Earl Miner in Japanese Poetic Diaries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), and that by Edwin A. Cranston, The Izumi Shikibu Diary: A Romance of the Heian Court (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969).

⁴ This biographical sketch of Izumi Shikibu is based on Cranston, The Izumi Shikibu Diary, pp. 3-17.

⁵Lays of Courtly Love in Verse Translation, trans. Patricia Terry, introd. Charles W. Dunn (Garden City: Doubleday, 1963), p. 5.

⁶Izumi Shikibu nikki, ed. Endo Yoshimoto, Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Vol. XX (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1962), pp. 418, 440.

⁷ For discussions of the Heian idea of a diary, see Cranston, The Izumi Shikibu Diary, pp. 90-92 and 99-116; and Miner, Japanese Poetic Diaries, pp. 3-20.

⁸ See my article "Poetic Ideal and Fictional Reality in the Izumi Shikibu nikki," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 37 (June, 1977), 161-69, for a discussion of the image of the moon and its relation to the poetess.

⁹ Edwin Cranston sub-titled his translation of the Diary "a romance of the Heian court," apparently seeing in the work resemblances to the lengthy fictional creations of the aristocratic courts of medieval and Renaissance Europe; yet he discusses the work only in terms of Heian literary genres. As far as I know, I am the first person writing in English to consider any Heian fictional work in terms of the Western genre or mode of romance.

¹⁰ Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 305.

¹¹Ibid., pp. 107, 187.

¹²Ibid., p. 202.

¹³ Ivan Morris relates the fact that women were taught to play musical instruments, to write beautifully, and to compose poetry—the cultural achievements prized above all others for both men and women—to the relatively strong position of women in Heian cultural life (The World of the Shining Prince, p. 209).

¹⁴ Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 324. Frye even mentions The Tale of Genji as an example of this trait of romance, along with the Elizabethan romance, the old Irish epic, and the Arabian Nights.

¹⁵ See Cligés, ed. Alexandre Micha (Paris: Champion, 1970), for example, 11. 450-521, 610-864, 889-1038.

¹⁶ For a translation see Kokin Waka-shu: the 10th Century Anthology Edited by The Imperial Edict, trans. H. H. Honda (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1970).

¹⁷ The memorization of large quantities of poetry was demanded of all men and women who belonged to the ranked nobility in the Heian period. A paragon in terms of her knowledge of poetry was an imperial concubine of the ninth century who, on being tested by the emperor, was able to quote phrases from each one of the some one thousand poems in the Kokinwakashu. The incident is described in The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, trans. Ivan Morris (Baltimore: Penguin, 1971), pp. 34-39.

¹⁸ For a discussion of Arab treatises of love from the ninth to the seventeenth century, see Lois Anita Giffen, Theory of Profane Love Among the Arabs: The Development of the Genre (New York: New York University Press, 1971). See A. R. Nykl's translation of what Giffen considers to be the most attractive treatise of love to nonspecialist readers: Ibn Hazm, A Book Containing the Risala Known as the Dove's Neck Ring About Love and Lovers (Paris: Geuthner, 1931).

¹⁹ Whereas in the Tauq al-Hamama (Dove's Neck Ring), poems and anecdotes are subordinate to the author's exposition of his theories on love, in the Tales of Ise the exchanges of poems are the main focus, the prose merely amplifying and clarifying the truth about love that is illustrated in the particular situation of the lover(s). For a translation see Helen McCullough, Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968).

²⁰ Cranston discusses the Heian idea of love as kokoro no yami in "The Dark Path: Images of Longing in Japanese Love Poetry," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 35 (1975), 61, 76.

²¹ The term "courtly love" was first discussed in reference to the Heian idea of love by Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner in Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961); and in an article entitled "Japanese and Western Images of Courtly Love," Miner singled out the dream, with its connotations of both "ideal" and "fleeting," as the primary image of Heian courtly love. Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 15 (1966), 174-179.

²² Miner, "Japanese and Western Images of Courtly Love," p. 177. Women's feelings were important in Heian literature because women wrote most of the literature. Morris notes that in literature as a whole from about 950 to about 1050, "almost every noteworthy author who wrote in Japanese was a woman" (The World of the Shining Prince, p. 199).

²³ The most realistic piece of Heian fiction, the Tale of Genji presents marriage from the viewpoint of the several women who are Prince Genji's wives. See Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji: A Novel in Six Parts, trans. Arthur Waley, [Modern Library] (New York: Random House, 1960) or Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, trans. Edward Seidensticker (New York: Knopf, 1976).

²⁴ The best known of these, and one of the most beautiful and limpid poems in Heian literature, is the poem that reads "Kuraki yori/Kuraki michi ni zo/Irinubeki/Haruka ni terase/Yama no ha no tsuki." ("I must set out 'From darkness/Into darkness'—/ 0 moon above the mountain ridge,/ Shine on my path from afar.") The poem is addressed to Izumi's teacher, Shoku Shonin (910-1007), andthe phrase "From darkness into darkness" is from the important Buddhist scripture, The Lotus Sutra, where it refers to the nature of man's existence before the coming of Buddha. In her poem Izumi is saying something to the effect that "Since it is my fate to be enmeshed in the world of the senses, I beg of you who know the truth to guide me on my way." For translations of other poems of Izumi Shikibu that are not in The Diary of Izumi Shikibu, see Edwin A. Cranston, "The Poetry of Izumi Shikibu," Monumenta Nipponica, 25 (1970), 1-11.

²⁵ Historical writings covering this period portray Izumi Shikibu as an upstart from the middle nobility who disrupted the lives of members of the imperial family through her shameless behavior. Yet the narrator of the Diary, who places the poetess at the center of events, treats the dissolution of the Prince's marriage comically. That this attitude was possible shows that the court culture was generally tolerant of such affairs.

²⁶ See Brower and Miner, Japanese Court Poetry, pp. 221-23, 226-28, for a discussion of the "passionate women poets" and their poetry.

²⁷ Ono no Komachi is portrayed in this manner in the No play by Kan'ami (1333-1384) entitled "Komachi and the Hundred Nights (Kayoi Komachi), trans. Eileen Kato, in Twenty Plays of the No Theatre, ed. Donald Keene, with the assistance of Royall Tyler (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 51-63.