"It is my destiny to be solitary."
"I felt depressed and confused."
"Sei Shōnagon was dreadfully conceited. She thought herself so clever and littered her writing with Chinese characters; but if you examined them closely, they left a great deal to be desired. Those who think of themselves as being superior to everyone else in this way will inevitably suffer and come to a bad end."
"Yes, but it’s precisely those kinds of letters—written freely—that I’d like to see," To-no-tyūjō objected with a frown. "I get plenty of ordinary, run-of-the-mill letters even in the correspondence of someone as unworthy as myself. No, I’m interested in letters of a completely different kind—either those written in a fit of vexation and full of reproaches, or those composed at twilight and conveying the melancholy of anticipation…"
"You that in far-off countries of the sky can dwell secure, look back upon me here; for I am weary of this frail world's decay."
Typing a figure whose biographical record is this thin — Murasaki Shikibu (c. 978 – c. 1014 or later) left us a short fragmentary diary, a small collection of poems, and no reliable first name — would be an exercise in speculation for most subjects. In her case, however, her novel, the Tale of Genji, is quite self-revealing, and the diary, even at its tiny surviving length, is unusually candid about its author's inner life. Taken together, the two texts describe a very specific cognitive and emotional architecture. The core is IEI. The accent, to the extent there is one, is a light EII, one that accounts for Murasaki's specific register of humility, social deference, and late-life Buddhist withdrawal.
What first establishes the IEI core is the aesthetic that dominates the Tale of Genji, especially in later chapters. Mono no aware — the pathos of things, the beautiful melancholy of transience — is the novel's whole organizing principle. Autumn leaves, cherry blossoms, the moon sinking over the hills, the cries of insects in the grass are not objects in the landscape but emotional correlates of inner states, and the states themselves are almost entirely melancholic: loss, longing, nostalgia, the awareness that the present moment is already fading. The phrase the type description uses almost as a diagnostic marker — "my beautiful melancholy" — could be the epigraph to the whole book.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, regarding Mono no aware: "The acceptance and celebration of impermanence goes beyond all morbidity, and enables full enjoyment of life... The well known literary theorist Motoori Norinaga brought the idea of mono no aware to the forefront of literary theory with a study of The Tale of Genji that showed this phenomenon to be its central theme. He argues for a broader understanding of it as concerning a profound sensitivity to the emotional and affective dimensions of existence in general. The greatness of Lady Murasaki’s achievement consists in her ability to portray characters with a profound sense of mono no aware in her writing, such that the reader is able to empathize with them in this feeling".
The second strong IEI marker is what the Tale of Genji actually does with its large collection of characters. Murasaki enters the interior of every person in it. While to someone who has read the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, it isn't that remarkable (at least, in translation), for its time, it's quite notable how each character is a pattern of longings that Murasaki has imagined from the inside. This is the type's insight into the feelings and thoughts of other people. Genji himself, the Emperor's good-looking son protagonist, is characterized by what one scholar calls being "more than usually prone to image transference, attempting to replace one lost or failed relationship with another" (anticipating some later takes on the Don Juan archetype of the very sympathetic sort) — the projection of an interior ideal onto successive external objects — which is one of the most characteristic psychological patterns of the type, and it is fitting that Murasaki gave her central character a version of her own mode of attention.
The diary sharpens the picture. Murasaki describes herself after her husband's death as "depressed and confused"; declares that "it is my destiny to be solitary". The literary criticism she records in the diary is worth lingering on because it is the most distinctive and somewhat atypical feature of her self-presentation. Murasaki is sharp and specific about her peers. Sei Shōnagon is "dreadfully conceited," her Chinese pretentious and flawed, and destined for a bad end. Izumi Shikibu is "an amusing letter-writer" with a gift for informal compositions but "not really a poet at all" because she needs either an interesting subject or a classical model to imitate. Murasaki's sharpness is directed at specific peers within her aesthetic domain, and the criticisms are of craft and bearing, not of world-order. This is the educated IEI exercising her aesthetic discrimination against rivals.
The EII accent, which I want to flag without overstating, shows up in several places. Murasaki was brought to court specifically as a tutor — she taught the Empress Chinese in secret, hiding the fact from the wider court because the open display of Chinese learning was regarded as pretentious for a woman. The sustained, dutiful service to Empress Shōshi over five or six years, in an environment she openly found uncongenial, has the same flavor. So does the eventual retreat into a Buddhist nunnery for contemplation of impermanence, which is the ethically serious and duty-bound version of the IEI's melancholic withdrawal. Finally, the novelistic insight into people's nature also has an Fi component.
One last detail, which confirms the core without needing any additional argument. The Tale of Genji has almost no plot in the conventional sense. It is, in the description that is most often used to characterize it, a sequence of moods, situations, seasonal changes, and interior states, held together not by narrative drive but by the accumulating emotional weight of repeated patterns. The misty nostalgia of the early chapters gives way, as one scholar notes, to "unrelenting clarity, each theme repeated until the psychology of each character is as clear to us as our own." A thousand pages of emotional weather, character interiority, and aesthetic contemplation, sustained over perhaps a decade of writing, with quite a limited action as its organizing principle — this is the shape of the mind that produced it.
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