Murasaki Shikibu: A Novelist Reading Faces

Almost nothing about Murasaki Shikibu's life is secure. Arthur Waley, introducing his translation in 1925, allowed only that she was born in the last quarter of the tenth century, that she lost her husband in 1001, and that a few years later she became lady-in-waiting to the young Empress Akiko.^[1] Even her name is a sobriquet.

What she left is the longest single witness to how the Heian court looked at a face, and it is a novel. That is both its value and its limit.

A passage in her diary that seems to refer to 1008 has part of the novel being read aloud to the Emperor, and by 1022 the complete work was already a classic, one a girl arriving from the provinces could receive from her aunt as fifty-odd chapters in a box.^[2]

Its first readers were the people it describes. Its details of dress and grooming were written for an audience that knew the conventions from the inside, and would have noticed if a scene got them wrong.

Two moments in the sixth chapter are quoted constantly. In one, Genji's young ward has teeth that, in Waley's translation, were not blackened, in accordance with the wishes of her old-fashioned grandmother, while her eyebrows were delicately touched with stain.^[3] The remark only makes sense if blackened teeth were expected of a girl of her age and rank, so that a mouth left natural needed a reason.

In the other, Genji at last sees in daylight a princess he has been courting. Her complexion is of a whiteness that would have put snow to shame, and the drooping tip of her nose is tinged with pink.^[3] The name she carries through the rest of the book is the chapter's title, and it is a joke about that nose: the chapter takes its name from a nose Genji likens to a safflower, the plant that gave the court its red, with a play on hana, which means both flower and nose.^[4] Later, playing with his ward, Genji dabs red on the nose of a lady in a drawing, then on his own, and pretends it will not come off.^[3]

The practices in these scenes are attested outside the novel. Japan's national library, in its history of make-up in Japan, sets out the three-colour palette of white, red and black, and the status meanings attached to blackened teeth and to shaved and redrawn brows.^[5] Murasaki's scenes are early literary witnesses to the same conventions. They do not replace the record.

Fiction is good evidence for what an audience found normal, comic or shaming, because a writer who gets those wrong loses the reader. It is poor evidence for how often anything was done, what a preparation contained, or whether a particular woman followed the rule. The novel shows the rules being noticed. It counts no one.