saying, “
Hai, hai!
” until she told me that the Japanese, as a rule, were not very fond of him: the raccoon was the rival to the fox, the other malefic trickster said to disguise itself as a beautiful woman to bring down innocent priests. Undeterred, I recounted how the Germans called them
Waschbär
and explained how they were famous in California for making raids on carp ponds.
And that night, when I got home, I was so caught up in the spirit of the day that I sat down on my futon, imagining Yuki by my side, and wrote out a story for the children about a princess trapped in a castle by a jealous father, and the two raccoons, gallant, resourceful, and speaking in couplets, who spirit her away to a new life of freedom.
6
A S I BEGAN to settle down in my new home, I began, very slowly, to make my way, in translation, through some of the great works of Japanese literature. And as I did so, I was struck again and again by how much Japanese writing was touched with a decidedly feminine lilt and fragrance, a kind of delicacy and a lyricism that I associated, however unfairly, with the female principle. This softness was apparent not just in the watercolor wistfulness of Japanese poems, but also in the very themes and moods that enveloped them — loneliness, abandonment, romance. This was, perhaps, as much a reflection of my own tastes as of anything, and in men like Mishima, or the modern-minded Abe and Ōe, there were, of course, some towering exceptions. Yet still it seemed to me that much of Japanese writing, right down to such near contemporaries as Tanizaki and Kawabata, was devoted to the private world, a Jane Austen stage of domestic passions. The world of state, the striving of the office and the marketplace, the realm of public affairs — all these were scarcely glimpsed amidst the quiet, unworldly dramas of the soul. Even gangsters, at their deaths, wrote poems to the seasons.
Historically, of course, there were good reasons for this. For one thing, the Japanese syllabary, though invented by a Buddhist priest, had originally been used almost exclusively by women — to such an extent that it had become known as “woman’s hand”; and while men had been confined to the public, official script of Chinese, women had all but invented Japanese poetry. As a result, perhaps, early Japanese poetry was all love poetry (whereits model in China dealt more often with friendship). And by the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the great cultural flowering of the Heian period, the Japanese alphabet was so much a woman’s domain that men actually pretended to be women if they wanted to use the native script, and even fit themselves into the conventions and emotions of women.
By and by I’ll come
he said and so I waited
patiently but I
saw only the moon of the longest month
in the dawn sky
.
That plaintive love poem was written by a Buddhist priest.
Many of these verses, clearly, were as ritualized as thank-you notes, especially in a culture where writing poems was as
de rigueur
as dancing might be in other courts; clearly, too, in a society whose public life was close to formal pageant, it was only in private, behind closed doors, that people began to seem interesting to themselves. Yet whatever the reasons — or the qualifications — poetry and femininity seemed almost interchangeable in Japan, as they would never be in the literature of Chaucer, Milton, and Johnson, say; and every modern scholar seemed to agree with Kenneth Rexroth in saying that the Heian period was “certainly the greatest period of women’s writing in the history of any literature.”
Certainly, too, as I began reading
The Pillow Book of Sei
Shōnagon, one of the two great testaments of the Heian court, I felt that much of its charm, as with Lady Murasaki’s
Genji
, lay in its girlishness, its womanly refinement, its sensitivity to nature, and to the lights and shades of relationships. Here was the poetry of the paper screen — of delicate
Hai, hai!
” until she told me that the Japanese, as a rule, were not very fond of him: the raccoon was the rival to the fox, the other malefic trickster said to disguise itself as a beautiful woman to bring down innocent priests. Undeterred, I recounted how the Germans called them
Waschbär
and explained how they were famous in California for making raids on carp ponds.
And that night, when I got home, I was so caught up in the spirit of the day that I sat down on my futon, imagining Yuki by my side, and wrote out a story for the children about a princess trapped in a castle by a jealous father, and the two raccoons, gallant, resourceful, and speaking in couplets, who spirit her away to a new life of freedom.
6
A S I BEGAN to settle down in my new home, I began, very slowly, to make my way, in translation, through some of the great works of Japanese literature. And as I did so, I was struck again and again by how much Japanese writing was touched with a decidedly feminine lilt and fragrance, a kind of delicacy and a lyricism that I associated, however unfairly, with the female principle. This softness was apparent not just in the watercolor wistfulness of Japanese poems, but also in the very themes and moods that enveloped them — loneliness, abandonment, romance. This was, perhaps, as much a reflection of my own tastes as of anything, and in men like Mishima, or the modern-minded Abe and Ōe, there were, of course, some towering exceptions. Yet still it seemed to me that much of Japanese writing, right down to such near contemporaries as Tanizaki and Kawabata, was devoted to the private world, a Jane Austen stage of domestic passions. The world of state, the striving of the office and the marketplace, the realm of public affairs — all these were scarcely glimpsed amidst the quiet, unworldly dramas of the soul. Even gangsters, at their deaths, wrote poems to the seasons.
Historically, of course, there were good reasons for this. For one thing, the Japanese syllabary, though invented by a Buddhist priest, had originally been used almost exclusively by women — to such an extent that it had become known as “woman’s hand”; and while men had been confined to the public, official script of Chinese, women had all but invented Japanese poetry. As a result, perhaps, early Japanese poetry was all love poetry (whereits model in China dealt more often with friendship). And by the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the great cultural flowering of the Heian period, the Japanese alphabet was so much a woman’s domain that men actually pretended to be women if they wanted to use the native script, and even fit themselves into the conventions and emotions of women.
By and by I’ll come
he said and so I waited
patiently but I
saw only the moon of the longest month
in the dawn sky
.
That plaintive love poem was written by a Buddhist priest.
Many of these verses, clearly, were as ritualized as thank-you notes, especially in a culture where writing poems was as
de rigueur
as dancing might be in other courts; clearly, too, in a society whose public life was close to formal pageant, it was only in private, behind closed doors, that people began to seem interesting to themselves. Yet whatever the reasons — or the qualifications — poetry and femininity seemed almost interchangeable in Japan, as they would never be in the literature of Chaucer, Milton, and Johnson, say; and every modern scholar seemed to agree with Kenneth Rexroth in saying that the Heian period was “certainly the greatest period of women’s writing in the history of any literature.”
Certainly, too, as I began reading
The Pillow Book of Sei
Shōnagon, one of the two great testaments of the Heian court, I felt that much of its charm, as with Lady Murasaki’s
Genji
, lay in its girlishness, its womanly refinement, its sensitivity to nature, and to the lights and shades of relationships. Here was the poetry of the paper screen — of delicate
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