Calendar

This year’s calendar takes us to seven temples and shrines in Kyoto associated with women in the cultural history of Japan. By knowing something about the heroines of this calendar and imagining their situations in life, our casual visit to these temples or shrines assumes the nature of a historical novel and brings alive the subtle colors of the fabric which makes up the cultural allure of Kyoto.

We are taken to the ancient days of the Heian period (794–1186), when Kyoto flourished as the “Capital of Peace.” The Kyoto world revolved around the affairs surrounding the imperial court, and thanks largely to our heroines, we have insight into the consciousness of those who were right there. Their poems, diaries, and stories, fueling the image of this period characterized by aesthetic aspirations toward refined beauty and courtliness coupled with a deep sensitivity to the melancholic reality of life, bring to light their often agonizing circumstances in their world dominated by men, politics, poetry, love, and whim.

The heroine of the cover page is Murasaki Shikibu (fl. 996–1010), author of The Tale of Genji, considered to be among the world’s finest and earliest novels. Famed though she is, details of her life are obscure, and the name we know her by derives from the heroine of the first two parts her famous novel and her father’s position at the Shikibu, the imperial Bureau of Rites. When she was a child, her father apparently allowed her to study with her brother and even learn some Chinese classics, which was considered improper for females. An account says that her father lamented that he would have been so happy if only she were a boy. Widowed after a brief arranged marriage, she spent the main part of her life as a lady-in-waiting to an imperial consort whose court was a center of literary culture.

The Tale of Genji follows the episodes through life of the novel’s fictitious hero, the “Radiant Genji,” and ultimately tells of the reality that the glories that people idealize and enjoy are but temporary. To quote from the Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature, the author shows “…suffering to be the lot of the most sensitive and powerful of human creatures…, and dreadful misunderstanding of what is important to be the fate of lesser characters.…” The last part of the novel, appropriately, is entitled “The Floating Bridge of Dreams.” According to the modern noh play, “Memorial to Genji,” written by one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century, Mishima Yukio (1925–70), Murasaki Shikibui was an incarnation of a certain Goddess of Mercy to teach people the truth that the world is but a dream.

The heroine for the January-February page is Sei Shonagon (ca. 966–1017), a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu. Shonagon is famed for her witty The Pillow Book, a collection of prose that she jotted in her bedside notebook of her observations of the things around her. She is known to us as Sei Shonagon because of her father’s position as Shonagon, “lesser counselor,” and the term “Sei,” or “Pure,” to distinguish her out of the many people associated with someone of that position. Like so many people of ancient times, it was rank that gave one a name. And like many girl children born into the ranks of the nobility, she became a lady-in-waiting at the court of a consort of the time’s emperor. Her well-known classic, The Pillow Book, moves across a wide range of themes including nature, society, and her own flirtations, and it is through these writings that we form an image of her life and character. To quote from Edwin A. Cranston in the Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, “Opinionated and abrasive she certainly was, but at the same time possessed of a rare sensitivity to the colors of the passing scene.... She tosses off in passing a few lines on the sheer beauty of icicles gleaming in the moonlight, or the innocent charm of a child eating strawberries, and the images stick in the mind.… She was an original, an author whose unquenchable verve created its own unstructured expression and who shines with unapologetic cheerfulness in a dominantly sad and wistful tradition.”

Predating our previous two heroines is the Heian period beauty and poet, Ono no Komachi (ca. 825―900), for the March-April page. The largely legendary Komachi has left some of the most intense and accessible waka (Japanese poetry), and has been described as perhaps the earliest and best example of a passionate woman poet in the Japanese canon. That she was recognized in her own time as a consummate craftsman of poetry is proven by the fact that she was ranked among the Six Poetic Sages by the compiler of Japan’s first official anthology of poetry. Numerous poems attributed to her are included in various official anthologies. Nearly all are about unhappy love. For example, “Did you come to me because I dropped off to sleep, tormented by love? If I had known I dreamed, I would not have awakened.” (Tr., Steven D. Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology) Komachi is surrounded by the legend that she had many lovers; stories which inspired many literary works in later ages, including an 11th c. Buddhist treatise, “Book of the Grandeur and Decadence of Tamatsukuri Komachi,” on the impermanence of worldly things, and several classical and still today popular noh plays.

We have for our May-June heroine the court gentlewoman Izumi Shikibu (fl. ca 970―1030), considered not only the most gifted poet of her day but also among the outstanding masters of waka of all time. In addition to her legacy of over 1,500 waka poems, there is her Diary of Izumi Shikibu, a fictionalized version of the love story between her and the great love of her life, Imperial Prince Atsumichi. Brought up at court, she was married twice, and between those marriages was the mistress of two imperial princes. Like Ono no Komachi in an earlier era, she is famous for her intense love poetry. Her poetry shows her to have been possessed of an amorous tendency, and also of a prayerful urge which sought release from the toils of passion through Buddhist en- lightenment and renunciation.

The July-August page focuses on Hokongoin temple and Taikenmon’in (Fujiwara no Shoshi, 1101―1145), daughter of the courtier Fujiwara no Kanezane. As a young child she was adopted by Emperor Shirakawa, and she became the consort of Shirakawa’s grandson, Emperor Toba, with whom she bore seven children. The eldest boy ascended the throne as Emperor Sutoku at age five. Through her short life she was empress consort, empress dowager, grand empress dowager, and in the end, when the retired Emperor Toba took another wife and her life thus took a tragic turn, a nun. This was an era of extreme political maneuvering for power, and the Fujiwara family into which she was born maintained its power over the throne by, for one, its extensive intermarriage with the imperial house. Fated to spend her life as a pawn in this scheme of politics, Taikenmon’in, though she has not come down as a major figure known by most people today, surely left an indelible mark in the cultural history of Kyoto.

Oharano shrine, on the September-October page, is linked to Fujiwara no Takaiko (842–910), who was the official wife of Emperor Seiwa (r. 858–876), mother of Seiwa’s successor, Emperor Yozei, and known after Seiwa’s abdication as the Nijo empress. On the dark side, famous is the affair which she had with a priest named Zenyu, which caused her demotion. More fairytale-like is the story of her romance with the well-known figure in Japan’s literary history, the legendary lover, Ariwara no Narihira. A poem by this woman of dramatic circumstances, the Nijo empress, goes thus: “Spring begins in the midst of snow: perhaps now, at last, the bush warbler’s frozen tears will melt.” (Tr., Frank Watson)

The November-December page, with its imaginative picture of Kuramadera temple, brings us to our last heroine, the beautiful noblewoman Tokiwa Gozen (1138–ca. 1180), mother of three sons by her beloved husband, the warrior Minamoto no Yoshitomo. The story of Tokiwa Gozen is one of great tragedy. She is primarily associated, in literature and art, with how, during the Heiji Disturbance of 1160, in which her husband was betrayed and killed by his supposed ally, she fled through the snow, protecting her three young sons with her robes. She was eventually captured by that enemy, Taira no Kiyomori, a political figure of renown as the central figure in Japan’s greatest war chronicle, the Heike Monogatari. According to the ruthless rules of war, she and her sons should simply have been put to death, but Kiyomori offered to spare her children if she became his mistress. And so, while she suffered the excruciating indignity of being his mistress, her sons survived to eventually take down the ancestors of their arch enemy, Kiyomori. Among those sons was Minamoto no Yoritomo, founder of Japan’s first warrior government, the Kamakura Shogunate. Her youngest son, Minamoto no Yoshitsune, whose childhood name was Ushiwakamaru, was raised at Kuramadera temple after being torn away from his mother, and has been immortalized in legend and history as Japan’s foremost tragic hero.

Thus ends that absorbing chapter in the history of Kyoto and Japan, the Heian period.

Gretchen Mittwer