The Diary of Lady Murasaki - Background

Background

Murasaki's diary was written as the Heian period peaked culturally in the late 10th to early 11th centuries. The development in the 9th century of kana, a Japanese writing script and syllabary, opened the written word and the vernacular. At first kana was used for writing court poetry, waka, but by the 10th century works of prose became more common. Chinese continued as the language of government, but women who were uneducated in Chinese were encouraged to read and write in Japanese. They began to take advantage of the new script, as literary forms such as monogatari and diaries (nikki) became more popular, and imperial ladies-in-waiting began to write diaries. As a result, written Japanese was in many respects developed by women who used the language as a form of self-expression and, according to Japanese literature scholar Richard Bowring, it was women who undertook the process of building "a flexible written style out of a language that has only previously existed in a spoken form", although he mentions that the diaries of the period were unsuccessful in fully making the transition from a spoken to a written form of the language.

Murasaki's diary covers a discrete period, most likely from 1008 and 1010. Only short and fragmentary pieces have survived, and it remains vital to the understanding of the author given that otherwise, so little is known about her. Most of her biographical facts are derived from the diary (Murasaki Shikibu nikki) and her c. 1014 short poetry collection, the Murasaki Shikibu shū Poetic Memoirs.

Born into a minor branch of the Fujiwara clan, her father, a scholar of Chinese literature, educated her and her brother in classical Chinese. From about 998 to 1001 she was married to Fujiwara no Nobonori—who died of an outbreak of plague 1001—during which time she bore a daughter. A few years later, probably in 1006, at the request of Fujiwara no Michinaga, she entered imperial service to his daughter Empress Shōshi. Her given name is unknown; as was customary for women of the period, who were identified by their rank or that of a husband or another close male relative, she is known as Shikibu for her father's rank at the Ministry of Ceremonials (Shikibu-shō) and her court nickname Murasaki, from a character in her romantic monagatari Tale of the Genji. The diary was probably written after she entered imperial service.