Moist Sleeves: Love and Eros in Heian Japan
(This first appeared in The East, Nov.-Dec. 2000)
Once upon a handsome prince fell in love with a country girl of respectable but undistinguished lineage. Captivated by her quiet, self-effacing beauty, Prince Niou (such was his name) gave her all his attention, neglecting the lady his parents had chosen for him. His mother, the empress, took him to task. "When you have made yourself a good, solid marriage," said Her Majesty, "then you can bring in anyone who strikes your fancy and set her up wherever it suits your convenience. But you must build yourself a strong base." Later, returning to the subject: "Ordinary people are expected to be satisfied with only one wife..." But "the good people" are different. "Just let things work themselves out as we hope they will and you can have any number you like."
What a grim maternal scolding! The empress, incidentally, has an interesting history. Incredibly for someone of her rank, she herself was born in the country – in the very wilds, one would suppose from descriptions of the place, though a glance at the map shows it to be no more than 100 kilometers from the capital, to which she was hastily removed as an infant. (Her discovery of her remote birth years later brought on tears of mortification.) And this, briefly, is how Her Majesty's rustic mother found herself in bed with Her Majesty's father, the Shining Genji, then in rural exile after having imprudently seduced the daughter of a political rival:
There were, to begin with, dreams – Genji's telling him to "leave this shore behind," and that of a certain monk, the lady's father, exhorting him to "ready a boat." The boat duly readied, its mission became clear. It was to bring Genji and the monk's daughter together. There followed a shy exchange of 31-syllable poems. This is the lady's: "You speak to one for whom the night has no end. How can she tell the dreaming from the waking?" It was irresistible. A barred door was breached, and Genji's life, complicated enough already, became enmeshed in one more entanglement.
The problem was Murasaki, the woman beside whom all others paled. Her beauty was peerless, her gentleness unfailing, her quiet depths unsoundable. Genji often gave her grounds for unhappiness – such was fate! such was the nature of this flawed, evanescent world! – but never without repenting of it, as he did now. Murasaki had been the merest child when Genji kidnapped her. "Kidnapped" may be too strong a word, as "rape" might be to describe her initiation into womanhood. The sexual conventions of distant times, places and cultures are apt to seem bizarre when viewed from outside, those of 10th-century Japan perhaps especially so. Here, in any case, is the story:
Genji, under the weather, has journeyed into the mountains to benefit from the healing powers of a sage who lives there. Feeling better as a result of the sage's spells and incantations, he goes for a stroll and glimpses, through a raised blind in a nun's hut, a little girl of ten. He is enchanted – not least by the child's uncanny likeness to his stepmother, whose own rumored resemblance to his late mother has kindled in him an adoration that is very much more than filial. Might he, he asks the nun in verse, take charge of the child? "I have my reasons. You must believe me." The nun is surprised, though rather less so than you or I would be. Genji's invoking of an apparent bond in a previous life as justification for his ardor strikes all concerned as plausible. Eventually he has his way, carrying the girl off with the somewhat hesitant connivance of her serving woman, whose objections that her father will soon be coming for her are glibly dismissed. "I really do believe," says Genji, "that... my feelings for her are stronger than his." Hiding her in his palace, he keeps her as a kind of playmate until at last one day "he could not restrain himself. It would be a shock, of course."
That it was. Hours later Genji came in upon her as she lay in bed numb with horror, and the man known as perhaps the most sensitive hero anywhere in world literature said to her with what to a modern reader must seem like breathtaking callousness, "What can be the trouble? I was hoping for a game of Go."
***
Heian Japan (794-1185) "has disappeared from the face of the earth far more completely than ancient Rome," the historian Ivan Morris has written. Of its houses and gardens, palaces and temples, narrow streets and almost inconceivably wide avenues (Suzaku Oji, the main avenue leading south from the Imperial palace, was nearly 300 feet across), not even ruins remain. Less tangible aspects of the culture – moral principles, aesthetic standards, unspoken assumptions as to what life is or should be about – have left no stamp on the world's thinking and, aesthetics aside, very little ore of one on Japan's. Heian was an aberration, a beautiful, abortive aberration.
And yet it is ours to wander in at will, thanks to a voluminous literature which is its sole survival. Diaries, jottings, poems, and one very long, endlessly profound novel, The Tale of Genji by court lady Murasaki Shikibu (not to be confused with Genji's Murasaki) give us the keys to the kingdom – a kingdom as tiny as it is strange, for, humanity having been defined in such a way as to practically exclude the lower orders, its population is about 10,000. These are "the good people," the cultivated, pampered aristocracy whose blithe indifference to anyone else's existence is one of its most conspicuous features.
Modern moralists have felt uncomfortable here. "Truth to say," wrote British scholar W.G. Aston in 1899, "the laxity of morals which [The Tale of Genji] depicts is deplorable." Fortunately, though, "The language is almost invariably decent, and even refined, and we hardly ever meet with a phrase calculated to bring a blush to the cheek of a young person."
Refined language be damned, snapped Scottish historian James Murdoch, who in 1949 excoriated the Heian aristocracy as "an ever-pullulating brood of greedy, needy, frivolous dilettanti – as often as not foully licentious, utterly effeminate, incapable of any worthy achievement, but withal the polished exponents of high breeding and correct 'form'..."
True enough, there is an almost wild incongruity between the gross things they sometimes did and the beautiful way they invariably did them. "There hardly seems to be a taboo which Genji will not question," writes Richard Bowring in a 1988 study of the Tale, provoked to disgust at last by the Shining One's attempted seduction of a girl under his protection and thought by the world to be his daughter. And Ivan Morris shakes his head over "the contrast between [the] formality which can prevent a brother from ever seeing his sister or a father his stepdaughter, and the remarkable informality that makes it normal for Prince Niou to go to bed with Naka no Kimi on their very first meeting..."
***
There is a strangely nebulous quality to Heian. At times you feel you can almost reach out and touch it, it seems so close---as when Sei Shonagon grumbles in her Pillow Book at the unruly behavior of overindulged four-year-olds, or when the anonymous author of The Gossamer Years, passing on a pilgrimage through a temple grove where speaking is forbidden, smiles (as this gloomy , tormented lady rarely does) at "my people, as such people will, gestur[ing] and mouth[ing] elaborately at one another to be quiet. They looked for all the world like gulping fish. It was irresistibly funny."
But Heian teases you with surface familiarity only to withdraw deeper and deeper into the shadows. So like us in their seemingly exclusive preoccupation with the peaceful and frivolous adornments of life, the Heian nobility nevertheless partook of the world very differently than we do. We may even say they partook of a different world altogether, for theirs---and this is perhaps the central fact of their attitude to life and love---is understood to be an illusion.
"How can she tell the dreaming from the waking?" we heard Genji's rustic lover whispering. It was more, very much more, than the cliché it might sound to us. All Heian literature, all Heian moral training, all Heian "philosophy," if such a word may be applied to so fundamentally incurious a civilization, shared the underlying theme of the unreality of the physical world. To understand that things were so was to be civilized; to see beauty in the fact was to be a potential artist; to have developed one's indifference to this illusory world to the point of willingness to cast it aside altogether was to be enlightened.
The Tale of Genji is considered a love story and its hero the age's greatest lover, but Genji's ultimate quest, what he most yearns for, is not love; it is sufficient detachment to "leave the world"---to take the tonsure and become a monk. Exorbitantly handsome and gifted, Genji must, despite his brilliant outward success, be counted (as he counted himself) a failure, for the world, so delectably full of ladies, blossoms and moonlight, retains its hold on him to the bitter end.
A shadowy world begets a shadowy setting, and the settings in which the daily and nightly lives of Genji and his contemporaries unfold is sunk in perpetual twilight. Consider, first of all, that the women, objects of so much desperate male striving, are most of the time invisible. They are thrice hidden: in darkness, behind curtains, and in clothing so voluminous that Edward Seidensticker, translator of both the Genji and The Gossamer Years, was moved to describe a typical Heian lady as "a shapeless and almost inert bundle of clothes surmounted by a spectral white face and masses of streaming hair." To add that she blackened her teeth and plucked her eyebrows, inking in a fresh pair just below the hairline, is to complete the portrait as we know it. Couples fall in love, and often consummate their love, never having seen one another. Prince Niou's affection for Naka no Kimi is kindled not by her charming face, figure or manner, but by her situation (can the daughter of a princely recluse concealed in lonely rural seclusion fail to interest a man chafing under the constraints of imperial rank?) and her handwriting (in shy replies to his deluge of passionate poem-messages). When at last, smuggled in with the help of serving women, Niou beds Naka no Kimi, he still has not seen her, and she at first has no notion who it is who has crept under the quilt beside her. Sexual intercourse is not the ultimate intimacy but a prelude to it. Only after a man and woman have properly seen each other can their union be considered complete. When the order is reversed, when a man sees a woman before he has earned the right to, catastrophe generally follows.
We are in a dream-world. Life is a dream---insubstantial, evanescent. Death is always near, today's vigor no proof against tomorrow's wasting away. Without ever risking their lives in war, with no car accidents and plane crashes and terrorist attacks to worry about, the Heian nobles nonetheless felt themselves perpetually at death's door. Partly this is affectation, the cultivated pessimism of the age. But only partly. The constant references to life's fleeting nature are not mere cant. Epidemics were frequent and medical care was in the hands of priests and exorcists. "I fear I have not long to live" is a recurring line of dialogue. The fear was not entirely unreasonable.
Yes, Heian aristocrats feared death, and were not ashamed of their fear. On the contrary, so completely do they break the heroic mold that they display it almost eagerly, as a badge of the quality they prized as highly as our Western forebears prized their courage: sensitivity. Still, fear is not the only emotion to be considered in this context. Disease, feebleness and emaciation, we find, had peculiar charms of their own. Genji's Murasaki, fatally ill, was "as fragile as the shell of a locust" and the more beautiful for it: "Her skin was lovely, so white that it almost seemed iridescent, as if a light were shining through." Fujitsubo, Genji's stepmother and, in spite of herself, his mistress (it was the child Murasaki's startling resemblance to her that first drew Genji's attention) was in physical pain and mental anguish, both brought on by Genji's persistent and abhorrent attentions. "'Might it be the end?' she was asking herself. Her profile was lovely beyond description."
Lovely pain, lovely innocence. What, finally, does loveliness mean? Heian courtiers never asked. They knew. They pursued beauty incessantly, insatiably, but without a moment's doubt as to what it they were pursuing. We, however, visitors to Heian, find the question constantly coming to mind. Fujitsubo, mother of a son only she and Genji know is Genji's, "leaves the world," becoming a nun. Immediately prior to having her copious hair cut to shoulder length---the symbolic excision of sexuality---she pays a last visit to the little boy. His resemblance to the Shining Genji partly explains his beauty, as does a more thought-provoking attraction: "Because his teeth were slightly decayed, his mouth was charmingly dark when he smiled. One almost wished he had been born a girl."
***
"Few cultured societies in history," Ivan Morris remarks in The World of the Shining Prince, "can have been as tolerant about sexual relations as was the world of The Tale of Genji." From the Genji itself and from other literature of the period, we get the idea of a society sedentary to the point of motionlessness, venting its pent-up energy in the only arena available for physical activity: the bedroom. One needn't be a prude to be astonished at Heian promiscuity. Even our own day, promiscuous enough, pales beside it, if only because of the myriad other distractions available to us.
An unreal world presents little scope for action. Fighting there was none; governing, little more. The wheels of government did turn, after a fashion, which means someone must have been turning them, but whoever it was drew scant notice from the great writers of the day---partly because they were women and thus excluded from such work, and partly because the offices of government, though important for the emoluments and the social status they conferred, were themselves unreal. Early eighth-century Japan, scarcely emerged from barbarism, had borrowed wholesale the complex administrative forms of what was then the most highly civilized society on earth. The Chinese forms remained intact long after the substance, irrelevant to local conditions, had drained out of them. Chinese-style offices and titles were sought and bestowed with great ceremony, but real power had long since shifted from them to the private offices of the supreme Fujiwara clan, whose de facto rule was extralegal but unchallengeable. No wonder, then, that Genji and his friends, high government officials all, had so much time on their hands, and no wonder also that on the rare occasions Sei Shonagon mentions government in the Pillow Book, it is in connection with some such thing as the granting of noble rank to a palace cat.
Cats were another Chinese import, which fact alone gave them an honored place among beasts. Murasaki Shikibu has no notice to spare for dogs, but she gives a cat a major role in a particularly dramatic Genji love story, one marking the onset of the hero's decline. His elder brother, the retired Emperor Suzaku, is preparing to leave the world, restrained only by concern for his youngest and favorite daughter, the 13-year-old Third Princess. Would Genji not oblige him by taking charge of the child? It would mean marrying her, and causing his beloved Murasaki heartache, but Murasaki has been so understanding over the years, so little given to the dread vice of jealousy; surely she will take this imposition too in stride, especially since Genji can assure her with perfect sincerity that he cares nothing for this latest and final addition to his ménage.
Indeed she is a hopeless little thing---her calligraphy is a scandal, and that, said of a Heian lady, is as damning a denunciation as the gentle vocabulary of the times allowed. Calligraphy, even more than poetry, was the indispensable artistic accomplishment. Handwriting, not eyes, was the window of the soul. The girl's childish scrawl chills what little ardor Genji had mustered for his brother's sake. But a young man named Kashiwagi comes on the scene. He is the son of To no Chujo, Genji's best friend, and a friend of Genji's own son Yugiri. And one day while the young men are playing a kind of football on the grounds of Genji's sprawling estate---it is one of the very few scenes in all Heian literature involving physical exercise---the princess' cat breaks loose, disarranging the screens behind which the women are concealed and momentarily exposing the princess to Kashiwagi's awestruck gaze.
That moment seals Kashiwagi's doom. He is in love. Why? How? The conventional Buddhist explanation is invoked: it must be owing to a bond in another life. We come from other lives on our way to other lives---one more reason to hold this world at naught. Unable for now to get the girl, an increasingly disoriented Kashiwagi settles for the cat, managing to procure it and take it home with him. Here," writes Richard Bowring, "attachment is taken to the extreme of fetishism, and the order of events suggest that the cat is actually to be preferred to the woman. The night Kashiwagi finally sleeps with the Princess he wakes up dreaming of the cat rather than the girl..."
Consumed by guilt at having cuckolded Genji (a distant echo of Genji's cuckolding his own father with Fujitsubo), Kashiwagi wastes away and dies without ever seeing the son he has sired. The son, Kaoru, will grow up to play a major role in the final phase of the novel, as boon companion to Prince Niou and embodiment of a rare and "reprehensible" amorous idiosyncrasy---the inability to either force himself on a woman who will not have him or transfer his affection at will to one who may.
Kashiwagi's illicit glimpse of the Third Princess is not to be interpreted as a glimpse of her naked. Far from it---the lady was swathed in layers of kimono. For all Aston's talk of moral laxity, Murasaki Shikibu never so much as hints that beneath all the clothes are bodies. Her diary contains one curt reference to nudity: "Unforgettably horrible is the naked body. It really does not have the slightest charm." Only once in the Tale do we encounter a disrobing, and it is a most tentative one. Niou is with Ukifune, Naka no Kimi's half-sister. Ukifune is the girl who at the very end of the novel unwittingly turns Niou and Kaoru into rivals, her consequent anguish driving her to throw herself into a raging river. "A fragile little figure [Ukifune] sat huddled before him [Niou], for he had slipped off her outer robe. And so here she was, she said to herself, not even properly dressed, before a royal prince. There was nothing, nothing at all, to protect her from his gaze. She was wearing five or six white singlets..."
It is evident from what has been said so far that love, like beauty, meant something very different to the Heian nobility than it does to us today. Love in classical Western literature evolved inseparably from two related themes: heroism and worship. Among its earliest exponents was Plato, who in the Symposium has the sophist Phaedrus call for warriors to fight in the presence of their beloved: "The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; love would inspire him." (The fact that what is being praised here is the homosexual love of mature men for younger men "whose reason is beginning to be developed, much about the time at which their beards begin to grow" is interesting but incidental.)
Medieval Christianity and chivalry raised woman to heights of esteem she had scarcely ever known before. Man worshipped woman. He was strong and she was weak; he laid his strength at her feet. King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table swore an oath, renewed each Pentecost, to "fight only in just causes, at all times to be merciful, and at all times to put the service of ladies foremost."
Justice and love both require a tempering of male strength. But in Heian there is no male strength. Two exceptions in the Genji come to mind. One is Higekuro, whose name means Black Beard, and though he wins a highly desirable young lady for a second wife, his manifest masculinity is held in contempt, not least by the lady herself, who cares nothing for him. The second exception is To no Chujo, Genji's lifelong friend and rival. In all the pursuits that matter in that little world---music, dance, poetry, perfume blending, and so on---he is second only to Genji himself. In what lay his inferiority? In a certain masculine strength one senses underlying his sensitivity. It dooms him to playing second fiddle to Genji, who has none.
Genji is not Heian's first idealized lover. That honor belongs to the poet Ariwa no Narihira, who lie a century before Genji's time and is the hero of a collection of poetic love adventures known as The Tales of Ise. Each of 125 chapters is a brief poem-studded episode that begins with the expression "In former times." "In former times a certain lascivious woman thought: 'I wish I could somehow meet a man who would show me affection!'" The only trouble is, she is "a year short of a centenarian, hair disheveled and white." Never mind. Narihira will rise to the occasion. "It is a general rule in this world that men love some women but not others. Narihira did not make such distinctions."
Neither did Genji, and we catch a faint echo of Narihira in his uproarious romance with the aged Naishi. Hardly more than a boy at the time, and somewhat embarrassed at this unlikely coupling, Genji proceeds furtively. To no Chujo gets wind of it nevertheless, and in the spirit of fun insinuates himself as a rival. One night a disguised To no Chujo catches Genji and Naishi in flagrante delicto. "Silently and wrathfully, To no Chujo [brandished] a long sword." The adventure ends in hysterical laughter. It is one of only two scenes in the whole long tale in which a sword is drawn. (Genji, momentarily, is the other swordsman, his adversary an evil spirit.)
The Heian male is a soft, gentle creature. When Kaoru discovers Niou's affair with Ukifune, whom he has every right to regard as his own, he sulks and broods, but the notion of challenging his friend to a duel or cutting his throat does not even fleetingly cross his mind.
Sensitivity, not action, is what the Heian courtier was bred for. Men were moved to tears, not violence. The tears flow and flow. The sleeves that brush them away are never dry. Moist sleeves recur endlessly in the poems the lovers and friends exchange ("my sleeves are assaulted by wave upon wave"). Tears indicate anything from anger to delight. Delight itself is sorrowful, for does not beauty fade? Do not the cherries bloom only to fall? Beauty was beautiful, of course, but also hauntingly impermanent, and if impermanence deepened beauty's poignancy, it also represents the central problem of Heian existence. It is to them what original sin, what evil, is to us. How is one to cope with this impermanent, insubstantial world?
***
The historian Murdoch, in his uncompromising disdain for the licentious mores of the time, seems to have missed a certain selfless, generous element in Genji's promiscuity. Born of a love almost preternatural in its intensity---his royal father was obsessed with a low-ranking court lady who shortly after Genji's birth was hounded to death by jealous rivals---Genji bestows his favors indiscriminately, and there is good as well as bad to be said for that. Donald Keene makes the point by suggesting a comparison to Don Juan, the classical Western embodiment of the indefatigable, irresistible lover. "My heart belongs to all beautiful women," says Moliere's Don, but he cares nothing for them and thinks nothing of abandoning them once he has sated his lust. He is a conqueror of hearts who compares himself to Alexander. Genji surely never heard of Alexander---the Heian world stretched no farther than the Japanese and a select few Chinese classics could stretch it---and wouldn't have thought much of him if he had. Some of his ladies were far from beautiful and brought him little credit; he cherished them nonetheless. Even the pitifully thin, unfashionably dressed, red-nosed Safflower Lady, having once by accident drawn his attention, could count on his protection for life.
***
The Heian lady waited... and waited. The depths of her inactivity, in semi-darkness, hidden behind curtains, oppressively clothed, invisible even to her immediate family, are scarcely imaginable. What was she waiting for? For love. What else was there? Only love could free the maiden from her tower and break the spell that held her in suspended animation. But how was love to penetrate her solitude? Rumor helped; it was never still. There were matchmakers. Servants were suborned, and lent their aid and encouragement as eagerly as though they themselves were the love objects. Messengers scurried back and forth with 31-syllable poems written by their masters and mistresses in excruciatingly nuanced calligraphy on carefully chosen colored paper attached, perhaps, to a sprig of blossom appropriate to the season.
"Woman is the passive center...," writes Bowring, "[responding] to passion in the male but unable to initiate it. Fantasies center on being seen and spied upon; screens are there to be penetrated, and a move by the male through a curtain signifies total capitulation by the woman." Erotic scenes in the Genji and elsewhere climax in the penetration of the woman's surrounding curtains. What happens beyond that is left to the imagination. One has the impression that the actual physical coupling is perfunctory and of slight importance, sparrow-like rather than dove-like.
Sei Shonagon, her unbridled wit, irony and curiosity on full display in her Pillow Book, never says a word about sexual intercourse. She dwells lovingly on other facets of love-making---on the lover's leave-taking, for instance, which must be beautiful if it is not to ruin everything. "A good lover... drags himself out of bed with a look of dismay on his face. The lady urges him on: 'Come, my friend, it's getting light. You don't want anyone to find you here.' He gives a deep sigh, as if to say that the night has not been nearly long enough and that it is agony to leave. Once up, he does not instantly pull on his trousers..."---for there are yet endearments to be whispered, and the coming separation to be poetically dreaded (in 31 syllables again; the most intense emotions seem effortlessly to arrange themselves in this pattern). "Indeed," Sei concludes, "one's attachment to a man depends largely on the leave-taking."
Sei is an inexhaustible source of Heian color background, but she was no typical Heian woman. As a court lady, she was free to seek her pleasure as few of her sisters were. She was a kind of female Genji. Murasaki Shikibu strongly disapproved of her.
Sei's polar opposite is the Gossamer diarist. Her thwarted, dammed-up passion fairly strangles her. She waits not for a lover but for her husband. She was the second wife of Fujiwara no Kaneie, who flourished a generation before Genji's time and had, in addition to high civic responsibilities, nine wives. (This sounds like a lot, and in fact was by Heian standards, but Ivan Morris reminds us that, measured against Chinese harems or against King Solomon's 700 wives and 300 concubines, Heian polygamy is more remarkable for restraint than for excess.)
No such reflections temper Lady Gossamer's rancor. She wants, she says, a husband "thirty days and thirty nights a month." She knows it's too much to ask, but her resentment feeds on itself, waxes into spite, poisons her character. Her gloating over the death of a rival's child is repulsive---but then we recall that we only see her in that light because she lets us, and are awed by her honesty. It represents a giant step in the maturation of Heian literature.
***
Central to the Tale of Genji is the hero's love for Murasaki. It is one of the few Heian loves that, its origins aside, seem, in its enduring power and its snug domesticity, comprehensible, almost normal to us---and yet, says Bowring, to contemporaries "it would have undoubtedly seemed the most unrealistic, fictional aspect of the whole story." It is above all the romantic element in it that rings true to us, and rang false to them. "Romantic love can never become an ideal in a Buddhist world, because of the initial tagging of desire as original sin; such love is anathema to a Buddhist understanding of what constitutes reality." Love was not something one sought as the path to happiness; it was a pitfall one coped with while acquiring the inner discipline to leave the world.
Treacherous world! It would not consent to being left so easily. Is it any wonder that its snares were resented, and that love, the tightest snare of all, sometimes seems a veiled form of hate? A saintly recluse (Naka no Kimi's and Ukifune's father; his callous abandonment of Ukifune and her low-born mother seems no stain on his sainthood) pronounces the truth that Genji appreciates only imperfectly: "Women are the problem, good for a moment of pleasure, offering nothing of substance. They are the seeds of turmoil..." And among the very few women in the Tale who steadfastly refuse to yield to the men who court them, one is regarded by her ubiquitous (and remarkably unservile) serving women as hexed, while another's resistance so puzzles her swain that he is driven in his frustration to muse that so impassioned a wooing as his would have caused any other lady to capitulate "however much she disliked a man." It was woman's place, in short, to submit regardless of her feelings (as long as his were suitably intense) and then be blamed for cheating man of his enlightenment.
We can only guess how women felt about this, for though almost all the great Heian authors were female, they were curiously reticent on the subject. Our most significant clue is what they leave unsaid, and almost none of them---not the ebullient Sei nor the pining Gossamer diarist nor the shy Murasaki Shikibu---so much as hints at sexual pleasure. Sei loves love's rituals, seasoned with exchanges of poetry and wit; Lady Gossamer yearns for a man whose company gives her little pleasure when he does show up. Murasaki Shikibu, of course, offers the world her Genji, the ideal lover, every woman's dream. He can indite a verse more beautifully, and intone it more feelingly, than anyone; he is handsome beyond description, and when he plucks a strain on the koto it achingly reverberates with the beauty and the evanescence of the world. Yes, Genji is irresistible---but is he sexually irresistible? Does women's admiration of his good looks and artistic accomplishments amount to a desire to get into bed with him? Isn't sex rather the price women must pay for the pleasure of basking in his radiant presence? Isn't sex, in short, the price women must pay for love?
***
A younger member of Genji's inner circle broods, in the course of a personal crisis, over a world "altogether too wide and varied," bringing a smile to the lips of his 21st-century auditors because to us a narrower, less varied world than Heian is scarcely to be imagined. But his lament reminds us that, whatever the time and place, life is always just a little bit too much for the people living it. That thought brings us closer to the nobles of Heian, men and women who on first acquaintance tend as much to repel as to fascinate with their strangeness.
Perhaps no civilization in history ever invested so much of its psychological capital in love, was more alive to love's nuances, sought to tame and enjoy love's passions in ways more likely to strike us as bizarre. Bizarre and yet, after all, who is to say what's bizarre and what's normal? Won't people a thousand years from now, reading such evidence as remains of our love lives---of our lives in general---shake their heads over us as we shake ours over Heian?
Shake their heads they will, our future judges, and as they do they are unlikely to say of us what we can scarcely help saying of the Heian courtiers---that, bizarre or not, amoral or not, frivolous or not, at a time when most of the rest of the world was sunk in decline or barbarism, here were people imbued with a deep appreciation for, and gentle love of, beauty. It redeems many of their failings.