The Diary of Lady Murasaki - Style and Genre

Style and Genre

The genre of diary writing popular at the time, Nikki Bungaku, is more of an autobiographical memoir than a diary in the modern sense, according to Japanese scholar Helen McCullough. The format was a genre that typically included poetry in the form of waka, was meant to convey information to the readers, such as Murasaki's descriptions of court ceremonies. The author of a Heian-era nikki selected what to include, expand, or exclude. Time was treated in a similar manner: a nikki might present long entries for a single event while other events were omitted. The nikki was considered a form of literature, often not written by the subject, almost always written in third-person, and sometimes included elements of fiction or history. The diary is a repository of knowledge regarding the Heian Imperial court which is considered highly important in Japanese literature, although it may not have survived in a complete state.

Few if any dates are included in the work, and little is written about Murasaki's working habits, causing Donald Keene to say about the diary that it is not a "writer's notebook". The diary is important because in it Murasaki recounts events from her point-of-view with her self-reflections, bringing to the events a human aspect lacking in official accounts and official accounts of the period written by historians,. Keene thinks the diary reflects the author as a woman with great perception and self-awareness, yet also greatly withdrawn with few friends. She is unflinching in her criticism of the other ladies-in-waiting, seeing through the superficial facades to their inner core, a quality he believes is beneficial for a novelist, but perhaps not helpful in a closed society such as the one she inhabited.

The diary shows three distinct styles, according to Bowring. The first is a chronicles of events, which would normally have been written in Chinese during this period. The second is a self-reflective analysis, which he believes is the best example of self-analytic reflection from the period and her mastery of this type of style, still rare in Japanese, is evidence of her adding to the development of written Japanese by overcoming the limits of an inflexible language and writing system. The third is the epistolary style, a newly developed trend, which he considers the weakest portion of the work because she seemed to have been unable to break free of the rhythms of spoken language. He explains that a spoken language maintains a specific rhythm that relies on the presence of another person. Spoken language can be ungrammatical, relies on "eye contact, shared experiences and particular relationships provide a background which allows speech to be at times fragmentary and even allusive". On the other hand written language must assume an absence of audience and compensate for "the gap between the producer and receiver of the message".