Anyone who knows a little about Japanese culture can't ignore a book, "The Tale of Genji," known as the "Dream of the Japanese Red Chamber."
Written in the Heian period of Japan, The Tale of Genji is the world's earliest long-form realistic novel, which not only laid the foundation for the aesthetic tradition of "material mourning" in Japan, but also truly restored the daily life of Japanese aristocrats.
In this book, there are a lot of disguised love desires, such as love triangles, love that breaks through ethics, etc., and the description of the love life in the Japanese harem is even more beyond the imagination of Chinese, as Liang Wendao said:
"Many people wonder, how can such a novel become a literary classic that has been recited for thousands of years in Japan? If we look at it from the perspective of our Chinese, it is simply adulterous and thieving, and it is extremely promiscuous. ”
So, what kind of person is the author who wrote such a strange book?
The author of the Tale of Genji, Zi Shibu, was a female official in the palace. The so-called "female official" is a clever, educated, and learned girl selected from an aristocratic family, and the duty of a female official is to go to the palace to talk about poetry and art with the royal women, and accompany them to relieve their boredom.
Japan's Heian period inherited the Chinese culture absorbed by the Asuka period and the Nara period, and gradually formed its own culture and aesthetic tastes, most of the aristocratic women of this period have good literary attainments, rich hearts, and delicate brushstrokes. It was also under their pen that the court diary literature, which can be called "the indiscriminate pursuit of Japanese women's literature", was born.
Zi Shibu came from an aristocratic literati family, and his father and brother were good at Han poetry and waka. Zi Shibu studied sinology with his father since childhood, was familiar with music and Buddhist texts, and was known as "one of the Thirty-six Song Immortals of the Middle Ages". In addition to the Tale of Genji, the Purple Diary is also his legacy.
Adhering to the tradition of the diary of a court lady, the Diary of a Purple Style Ministry is a statement for the main family, mainly describing the court life, what zishibu saw and heard when he served Akiko Fujiwara of the Middle Palace, an emperor, such as the palace ceremony, the appearance, talent, and character of the female officials in the palace.
For example, on the day of the Chongyang Festival on September 9, the Purple Style Department wrote in his diary that the Lady Soldiers sent Ju Mian, saying: "This is what Madame Zheng specially asked you to send, saying that you should use them to wipe off the aging." So Zi Shibu wrote a Japanese song as a thank you:
Temporarily dip the sleeves with chrysanthemum dew, and leave Qianqiu and the flower owner.
In another diary, Zi Shibu also described in detail the dress of the female officials in the palace, she wrote:
"Young ladies, on top of five-tier chrysanthemum-colored shirts, wear different styles of Tang coats. The color combination of the three-layer shirt is white on the outside, purple in the middle, and cyan on the inside. Underwear inside the shirt, there are also wearing cyan. The five-layer shirt is a purple tone, the outer layer is lilac, one is deeper than the other, and there is also a layer of white sandwiched in the middle. Overall, the color scheme is very interesting. ”
There are many more such descriptions in Zi Shibu's diary, and we can also get a glimpse of the Japanese ladies of the Heian period through her eyes.
Moreover, since childhood, she was familiar with the Chinese language and read the Chinese classics of the Purple Style Department, and she was very respectful of Bai Juyi, and her work in the palace was mainly to explain the "Bai's Collected Works" to the princess, that is, Bai Juyi's poetry collection. Among all of Bai Juyi's poems, Zi Shibu's favorite is "Long Hate Song", and her reference to "Long Hate Song" in her work can be said to be "everywhere and easy to come by".
All in all, Zi Shibu is a writer with deep learning, broad vision, and extraordinary literary imagination and ability to control words. At the same time, she is a delicate and thoughtful sensitive woman. Whether it is the elegance of the pen or the unique ability to express, among the Japanese writers of the same era, there are few who can stand out from the right.
In this "Purple Style Ministry Diary", this talented Japanese woman from time to time appeals to the words of confusion, uneasiness, and worry in her heart, so that after a thousand years, we can also feel her cold gaze of staying awake and examining herself in the prosperity of the world.
In addition to the "Purple Style Ministry Diary", the classic diary of Japanese court women in the Heian period that has been circulated in the world includes many works such as "Dragonfly Diary", "Wazumi Style Department Diary", "Diary of a Higher Grade", "Diary of a Samurai", etc.
The Dragonfly Diary is the pioneering work of women's diary literature of the Heian Dynasty, and its author, Fujiwara Michimu,000, is one of the important features of this work.
The Diary of the Izumi Style Department is a work with a unique style. It records the love between Izumi shibu and Prince Tundo. Among them, the wonderful waka and the beautiful prose narrative complement each other, and the words are filled with the fiery enthusiasm of women indulging in love, portraying the real mentality of women under the influence of emotions, swaying minds, and suffering from gains and losses.
In her later years of loneliness, The author of "The Diary of a Higher Level", Xiao Biaonu reviewed her life years for more than fifty years with words. Its content consists of the author's experiences when he followed his father from the local area to Kyoto when he was a teenager, his family's home life in Kyoto, his feelings during his entry into the palace, the temple rituals and Buddhist prayers, and the records of his later years. It can be said that this is an ordinary happiness work written by an ordinary housewife a thousand years ago.
Fujiwara Nagako, the author of the Diary of a Samurai Shoshu, was both a female court official and the lover of Emperor Horikawa. In her diary, she recorded in detail the scene of Emperor Horikawa's serious illness and death, as well as the longing for her lover after Emperor Horikawa's death. It can be said that Fujiwara Nagako used his own writing to present a haunting requiem for the late Emperor Horikawa.
In the diaries of these Japanese court women, there are a large number of beautifully rhythmic and brightly paced was waka, which are full of the beauty of "material mourning", such as:
The cuckoo cries out, and there is no beauty to break the intestines.
Helplessly, there is no news of the flowing water, and I don't know when to meet.
The swaying east wind follows my heart, and the sound of the king is better than others.
The water birds seemed to be difficult for me to sleep, and they shook the frost on the feathers all night.
In these beautiful and elegant diary works, woven with the aristocratic female officials' review of the past years, the reliving of emotional trajectories, and the examination of their own hearts, through the fragments of life and the imprints of the years recorded in them, we can glimpse the spiritual world of Japanese aristocratic women more than a thousand years ago.
How to face love, how to put themselves, the spiritual difficulties that aristocratic women of the Peaceful Dynasty once faced were no different from today's modern women, and reading their diaries and texts is an experience of encountering "her" more than a thousand years ago.
Why is the "she" of the Heian Dynasty written? How can "she" be written? Perhaps, through these ancient diaries that have traveled through thousands of years of time, we can approach "her", carefully examine her fragrant mouth, and slowly taste its beautiful brushstrokes.