By turns waspish, gentle, witty, melancholy, flirtatious, retiring, bookish and always, always diverted by seasons, scents, gardens and clothes, she is like an 11th-century Japanese composite of Jane Austen and Martha Stewart. But what a delightful chronicler she makes. This is Dalby's Murasaki to a T: a lady with a "reputation for erudition, not charm," as she wryly puts it. But when they get to know me, they find to their extreme surprise that. The most important thing Dalby has got right is Murasaki's voice, as we know it from her diary (in Waley's translation): "That I am very vain, reserved, unsociable, wanting always to keep people at a distance-that I am wrapped up in the study of ancient stories, conceited, living all the time in a poetical world of my own and scarcely realizing the existence of other people, save occasionally to make spiteful and depreciatory comments upon them-such is the opinion that most strangers hold. The result is undeniably a version of the truth, and a captivating one to boot. Furthermore, the poems composed by Murasaki and other "characters" in the story-poems were to the Heian court what e-mail is to us-are all authentic. This "autobiographical" novel is rooted in Murasaki's scrappy diary (in fact contains "large chunks" of it), in the latest scholarship of the period, in The Tale of Genji itself and in writings by Murasaki's contemporaries. Not that she has eschewed scholarship she has merely taken Seidensticker's definition and modified it, getting lost in the pursuit of buried possibilities, like an archaeologist who must extrapolate a whole world from a few muddy shards. "Creative" is the key word here because, interestingly for an anthropologist, Dalby has cast her recreation of the Heian court, and of Murasaki's life, as fiction. The Tale of Murasaki is her creative response to that old obsession. But Genji the Shining Prince and the mysterious Murasaki Shikibu who created him kept plucking at her imagination. She went on to live and study in Japan, was the first foreigner ever to become a geisha and is the author of two authoritative studies of aspects of Japanese culture, Geisha and Kimono. As she tells it, she first discovered Waley's translation when she was 16: "I read it slowly over the course of a summer, and each time I opened the book I was transported from a humid backyard gazebo in Indiana to the Japanese imperial court of a thousand years ago." Dalby never quite got over her enthrallment. Liza Dalby got lost in Genji, too, with the same result. They may tell you, they who do it, that it is the pursuit of truth but the real point is getting utterly lost, and forgetting all about such illusory matters as the passage of time." "That is what scholarship is about," he wrote, "getting utterly lost in the pursuit of buried facts. Edward Seidensticker, whose luminous version of that immense work rivals Waley's, kept a diary throughout the 16 years he labored on it. These treasures have been available to English-language readers only within the last century, since Arthur Waley's monumental translation of The Tale of Genji in the 1920s first sparked the West's passion for them. Even their most casual jottings and fragments-and they made an art form of the fragment, as the Japanese still do-have survived a thousand years. How ironic, then, is the rocklike longevity of their writing. Nobody has ever quite matched their evocation of human existence as a gossamer affair shot through in equal measure with beauty and sorrow. The poets and diarists of the Heian court, most of them women, perfected the cultivation of luxurious sadness. Like the melancholy poet of Ecclesiastes, the ancient Greeks or the languid aesthetes of fin-de-siecle Europe, the courtiers of 10th- and 11th-century Japan were exquisitely, painfully aware of life's transience. "Why do we suffer so in the world? Just regard life as the short bloom of the mountain cherry," wrote Lady Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji. Reviewed by Elizabeth Ward, who is an editor with the Japan Times in Tokyo.
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