of a high degree of promiscuity frequently gives a flippant, rather heartless air to the relations between the men and women of Murasaki's world. One has the impression that, for all the elegant sentiments expressed in the poems, the love affairs of the time, especially at court, were rarely imbued with any ideal feeling, and that often they were mere exercises in seduction.14
The cult of beauty and the pursuit of pleasure were predominant in Heian court life. The moral customs were such that any girl who remained virgin for long was considered to be possessed by an evil spirit, and no self-respecting family would welcome such a reputation. The ancient Chinese also believed that the abstention from sexual intercourse broke the equilibrium of yin and yang and put the person to the risk of succumbing to incubi and other evil forces.15
There is a poem by Princess Uchiko Naishinno, second daughter of Emperor Saga, in which the concept of love is as natural and as liberal as we can imagine by these lines:
I cannot bear to sleep alone.
I cannot tear from my heart
The sweet thoughts of love.
The Manyoshu contains a poem by Princess Tajima "composed," it says, "when her clandestine relations with Prince Hozumi during her residence in the Palace of Prince Takechi became known."
A vestal virgin of the great Ise Shrine was said to have sent this poem to Narihira (who lived around one century before Murasaki) after having paid a visit to his sleeping quarters:
Did you come here?
Did I go to visit you,
Or is it only my thought?
Was our night a dream or reality?
Was I sleeping or awake?
In The Tale of Lady Ochikubo, one of the first of the monogatari mentioned previously, we find a curious scene of a gallant who visits a noble lady. She is the daughter of an Imperial Princess, but her stepmother treats her cruelly, giving her only shabby clothes worn already by her half-sisters. Though it was the first time they had seen each other, the young man stayed for the night; he took her in his arms and the inexperienced young lady "wept and trembled in fear and misery." The next day, he inquired from her chambermaid if she found him disagreeable. By no means, she replied, "it is merely the painful memory of the shame she felt that night at the shabbiness of her clothes that now distresses her."
In spite of a certain flippancy and promiscuity in refined court society, we cannot conclude that amorous adventures were only casual and superficial. This is proven by the concentrated analysis made of jealousy in several books of the time. In The Tale of Genji jealousy is the reverse of amorous pleasure in every relationship between a man and a woman, and the full analysis of jealousy is made with insight and careful detail. The diary of a jealous lady, the Kagero Nikki (The Gossamer Years), we will see, is dedicated to expressing the bitterness, the solitary pain and humiliation of a jealous woman abandoned by her husband. Everywhere jealousy is the sombre side of love, inseparably linked with passion. The ardent yearning for the absolute and the eternal which burns in love comes together with the instinctive certitude that love cannot last, cannot escape the laws of change and death engraved in human nature.
It is not surprising that women express their jealousy bitterly, because Heian society was a world of men, where a man could have many wives and concubines; the initiative for an adventure was always his. The men of aristocracy had a life of leisure and gallantry. We can read how the boss of a noble functionary of the palace used to send his subordinate poems to invite him to come to his job, but even with the courteous poems he did not succeed in wakening the subordinate's sense of duty. Marriage took place very early, the match being made by the families; and this, too, explains the liberty of morals and why multiple adventures increased a man's prestige.
This concept in which physical love was accompanied by a ritual of elegance and grace and a refined cult of beauty is very far from the concept that arose in Europe about two centuries later. The ideal of European courteous love was purely spiritual, for the knight was content with receiving from his lady as little as a coloured ribbon: with it over his heart, he would fight anyone who would deny that she was the fairest in the world. By contrast, in mediaeval times a European lived a primitive life, crude and without art—except for the troubadour, who would send poems to his lady, without hope for an answer. His lady, unlike her Japanese sister, would seldom be able to poetize. In sum, the ideals of elegance and refinement were unknown in. Europe, just as the ideals of chivalry were ignored in Japan.
The contemporary ideal of man's beauty, in the time of Genji," writes Ivan Morris, was a plump white face with a minute mouth, the narrowest slits for eyes and a little tuft of beard on the point of the chin. This—apart from the beard—was the same as the ideal of feminine beauty, and often in Murasaki's novel we are told that a handsome gentleman like Kaoru is as beautiful as a woman."16 Murasaki's men have "the gentleness and grace of her girl friend Saisho," writes Waley. Men powdered their faces and perfumed themselves heavily; they had soft manners and were far from displaying the impassible courage of their samurai descendants. Women were always enveloped in beautiful silk robes—the average number was twelve—in exquisite colours combined with the most refined taste under strict rules prescribed by etiquette. These are the images that we find in the literature and in the painting of this epoch.
THE CONCEPT OF TIME
We referred before to the striking similarities of technique between The Tale of Genji and Prousts's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Another point in which they have been compared is the importance both attribute to the idea of time. The purpose of exploring the arcana of time is expressed in the title of Proust's novel. Donald Keene has pointed out that Murasaki's novel betrays an obsession with the idea of time.
But although in both novels time is so poignantly dominant, there is an enormous difference in the development of the concept. In these different ways of developing the same idea, we encounter one of those areas in which East and West evolved along completely different lines.
In the Western concept, time is divided and fragmented, and the content of each fragment is explored till it is exhausted: the individual existence has therefore a concrete value. In the Oriental concept, time is undivided, is part of die immutable rhythm of the cosmos, and belongs to an absolute sequence which embraces man and the universe in its cyclical repetition. The seasons of the year are an aspect of this principle of eternal cyclical renovation, and the renewing of the generations is only a part of the cyclical renovation of the universe: the individual here has no concrete value, passes unnoticed in the great cosmic process.
Thus, it is easy to understand why Oriental novelists did not experiment in the field of time. On the other hand, in the complex time perspectives of some modern Western novels, we can see the critical spirit, the intense analytical attitude which is a unique characteristic of the West.
It is fair to say that the concept of time, as it is expressed in the Tale, has not been modified in the Japanese novel and is still essentially the same in most novels of today. In fact, there has been no evolution. It seems that Japanese writers, under the influence of the idea of time which has obsessed their literary and religious heritage, have not yet completely realized the revolution in this field which appeared in the Western novel after Proust.
Both Murasaki and Proust show time linked to the form of the novel; the action of the novel is a struggle against time. In both, time is the "unifying principle of homogeneity which polishes all the heterogeneous fragments and links them by an irrational and inexpressible relation," to use a phrase of Gerögy Lukacs; in both, it is time that "puts order into the imbroglio of the characters and gives them the appearance of an organic reality evolving by its own forces: without a visible meaning, the characters come and
