The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 0345803906
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Ivan Morris’s definitive and widely acclaimed portrait of the ceremonious and melancholy world of ancient Japan.
Using The Tale of Genji and other major literary works from Japan’s Heian period as a frame of reference, The World of the Shining Prince recreates an era when women set the cultural tone. Focusing on the world of the emperor’s court—a world deeply admired by Virginia Woolf, among others—renowned scholar of Japanese history and literature Ivan Morris explores the politics, society, religious life, and superstitions of the period.
Offering readers detailed portrayals of the daily lives of courtiers, the cult of beauty they espoused, and the intricate relations between the men and women of the age, The World of the Shining Prince has been a cornerstone text on ancient Japan for half a century.
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that their fastidious blending of patterns and colours might be properly admired, women wore the robes in such a way that each sleeve was longer as it came closer to the skin. Among contemporary fashions, aimed mainly at attracting male observers, were oshidashi, in which the sleeves protruded from beneath the curtain of state: idashiuchigi, in which the bottom of each inner robe extended slightly below the robe above it: and idashiguruma, the custom of letting one’s full array of sleeves hang
taboo that prevented them from giving vent to the emotion may have made them experience it all the more poignantly.76 Among the Heian aristocracy, though women were expected to keep their jealousy to themselves,77 there is every indication that they suffered its pangs in full measure. Their practical dependence on men, their natural desire for the exclusive possession of a husband or lover (a desire no less real for being totally impracticable), their fear of losing him to another woman—all this
Shortly thereafter he arranged for his daughter to enter court as maid-of-honour to Michinaga’s daughter, the nineteen-year-old consort of the young Emperor Ichijō. Murasaki began her diary in 1008 and kept it for about two years. It gives a vivid picture of her life at court, but does not help us to fix any accurate chronology; for the Heian diary was an impressionistic literary form rather than a systematic record of events. Ichijō died in 1011 at the age of thirty-one and was succeeded by his
‘As he looked out at them staggering past in the dawn light with their loads, they appeared like phantoms.’46 Acutely sensitive as the heroes are to their own sufferings and to those of the people in their circle, they would never dream of sympathizing with the plebeians, whose hardships were, to say the least, rather more tangible. This is precisely because members of the lower orders were regarded as being incapable of understanding the heart of things (mono no kokoro shiranu gesu), that is to
place of virtue. The word yoki (‘good’) referred primarily to birth, but it also applied to a person’s beauty or to his aesthetic sensibility; the one implication it lacked was that of ethical rectitude. For all their talk about ‘heart’ and ‘feeling’, this stress on the cult of the beautiful, to the virtual exclusion of any concern with charity, sometimes lends a rather chilling impression to the people of Genji’s world. Sensibility also preceded profundity, aesthetic experience invariably being