Morris, Ivan: As I Crossed the Bridge of Dreams (Penguin: London, 1975)

"One thousand years ago a woman in Japan with no name wrote a book without a title." (p. 1)

The woman called "Lady Sarashina" is named, like Murasaki Shikibu, after her own work; in Japan this book is called Sarashina Nikki or Sarashina Diary after not a poem in the book itself, but an allusion by a poem in the book to another poem which does not appear and which uses the name of Mount Obasute in the Sarashina District as a double-entendre for the poet's desolate and lonely state. This seems an extraordinary amount of obfuscation even for the Heian court.

Surviving contemporary records call her "Takasue no Musume" (Takasue's Daughter); her father was a member of the Fifth Class, the lower echelons of the Heian court who were sent off to the provinces to do all the work, assignments that were lucrative but despised. Her mother was a member of a minor branch of the Fujiwara clan; her mother's sister was the author of the Kagerô Nikki (trans. Gossamer Years by Seidensticker), an autobiographical account of frustrated love and jealousy that is believed to have been a great influence on The Tale of Genji.

Sarashina was born in Heian Kyô; taken to the provinces at nine when her father was made the Assistant Governor of Hitachi; returned to the capital at twelve; suffered the deaths of a sister and a nursemaid and the loss of a beloved stepmother to divorce; went to Court late; had one love affair we know about; married; bore several children; made many pilgrimages to the countryside around the capital; and wrote a memoir. It is less than one hundred pages long and it covers Sarashina's entire life.

The memoir contains nearly a hundred poems. In his introduction, Morris describes the origin of Japanese prose narratives as explanatory context for poetry exchanges; even in long narratives like Genji, the climax of scenes will be marked by poetry.

Textual history
For quite some time, Sarashina Nikki was held in great disrepute, due to a collation error when a seventeenth-century copy's binding was resewn with the pages in the wrong order. Morris describes the discovery of the error by Professor Tamai in detail; their shared geeky excitement over the rearrangement of the text is adorable.

There was a previous English translation so awful that Morris is driven to quote from it in great indignation:

It was a smile-presenting sight. It give a feeling of loneliness to see the dark shadow of the mountain close before me.

The text
This is harder to describe than Murasaki's Diary because it is so much better. It is more a collection of vignettes than a narrative; Sarashina describes her isolated childhood, her journey back to the capital, and various pilgrimmages she made later. She discusses childhood sorrows and briefly alludes to her discomfort at court; she describes a love affair in more detail than her marriage, which is, according to the Heian custom, not much detail at all. It's clear that the distant past of her childhood and the near past of her widowhood are what she remembers best.

Sarashina was born about thirty years after Murasaki; by the time she had learned to read, Murasaki's tale was already famous:

I was brought up in a part of the country so remote that it lies beyond the end of the Great East Road. What an uncouth creature I must have been in those days! Yet even shut away in the provinces I somehow came to hear that the world contained things known as Tales, and from that moment my greatest desire was to read them for myself. To while away the time, my sister, my stepmother, and others in the household would tell me stories from the Tales, including episodes about Genji, the Shining Prince; but since they had to depend on their memories, they could not possibly tell me all I wanted to know and their stories only made me more curious than ever. In my impatience I got a statue of the Healing Buddha built in my own size. When no one was watching, I would perform my ablutions and, stealing into the altar room, would prostrate myself and pray fervently, "Oh, please arrange things so that we may soon go to the Capital, where there are so many Tales, and please let me read them all."

She returned to the capital; she read many tales. Her description of Genji as containing "fifty-odd chapters" is the oldest extant reference to its length. Genji was published in multiple volumes, so it's amazing, Morris says, it's come down in as clear a textual variant as it has. Sarashina was shy and dreamy; she didn't wish to be Murasaki but fantasized about being one of Genji's lesser loves, Yugao maybe, or a woman in a later chapter than any of us have read. Sarashina describes other tales and religious dreams whose advice she largely ignored. "If only I had not given myself over to Tales and poems since my young days but had spent my time in religious devotions," she says near the book's end, "I should have been spared this misery [after the death of her husband].

After my first pilgrimage to Hase, when I had dreamt that someone threw an object before me and said that it was a branch of sugi* bestowed from Inari as a special token, I should have gone directly on a pilgrimage to the Inari Shrines. Then things would not have turned out like this. The interpreter had explained that all those dreams about praying to the Heavenly Goddess meant that I would become an Imperial nurse, serve in the Imperial Palace, and receive the special favour of Their Majesties; but none of this had come true. Alas, the only thing that had turned out exactly as predicted was the sad image in the mirror. So I had wandered through life without realizing any of my hopes or accumulating any merit.

These regrets, however intense they may have been during Sarashina's later sorrows, are belied by the delight with which she recalls and relates her favorite tales.

* Cryptomeria. Pilgrims would pluck branches near the Inari Shrines and the longer the branches remained unwithered, the more efficacious the pilgrimage was supposed to have been.