Were They Having Sex? A Historian Weighs In(to bed), 2

Was the famous novelist, Murasaki Shikibu, having sex with the most powerful man in eleventh-century Japan?

In our previous installment, we learned the first explicit mention of Murasaki Shikibu and Michinaga having sex appears in High and Low Lineages, where the genealogy’s author stated that our novelist was a consort of Michinaga’s. Tōin Kinsada was probably getting the idea from earlier scholarship considering events in Murasaki Shikibu’s diary. 

In today’s entry, we will look at the last bits of evidence provided by the woman herself and consider possible interpretations. We will heat up the oven, combine our sources, and let the historical baking commence. 

When considering the question of whether there was a sexual relationship between Murasaki Shikibu and Michinaga, the question becomes whether Michinaga visited her in her own room or not. I think there is some clarity if we read Murasaki’s other writing alongside her diary. The Tale of Genji, Murasaki’s own novel, contains instances of Genji sneaking into women’s quarters for sex–sometimes consented, sometimes very much not, and this might help us understand her outlook on the matter.

Men and women kept separate quarters in aristocratic residences. Within the palaces and mansions, women would be further obscured by curtains, screens, and blinds. A key part of Heian eroticism was glimpsing a beautiful woman before she was hidden again, and then the pursuit. Sometimes, if a couple was just having sex, a man would sneak into a woman’s quarters. Sometimes they would fumble about, but find their goal. 

The shining prince, Genji, engages in such behavior in the novel. In “The Broom Tree” 箒木 chapter of The Tale, Genji breaks into a woman named Utsusemi’s room after glimpsing her. He carries her off to his room, picking her up “since she was very small.” Genji is interrupted by one of Utsusemi’s ladies, who heard her crying out for help.

The lady gropes her way to Utsusemi’s side. But then she smells Genji’s fragrance “and understands.” To modern readers, this is a weird line, but what it means is that even in the dark, she understands that a wealthy and powerful man has crept in. Think, the difference between Axe Body Spray and a subtle, expensive cologne. In the small world of elite Heian society, the fragrant woods and scents pressed into Genji’s robes were not just displays of wealth. They showed his refined taste. “Although shocked and appalled… if he had been anyone ordinary, she would have wrested her mistress bodily from him, but even that would have been a risk, since everyone else would have known what was going on.” ¹ The lady is frozen, unable to act against Genji and unwilling to humiliate Utsusemi with a fuss.

“Come for your mistress at dawn,” Genji says, and he closes the door on the lady-in-waiting. 

But when Genji and Utsusemi are alone, she does not quietly submit to his amorous intentions. He insists that he is not just a rake. His feelings are real, he insists, and he works “to draw from some hidden source a flood of tender eloquence to win her over.”

But, Utsusemi is having none of his game. She fires back.

“This is not to be believed!” She was indignant. “I may be insignificant, but I could never mistake your contemptuous conduct toward me for anything more than a passing whim. You have your place in the world and I have mine, and we have nothing in common.”²

Her refusal, her revulsion at his behavior shocks Genji. He completely fails to seduce her. Whether or not they have sex is ambiguous; the scene cuts to the cock crowing in the morning, and Genji has to leave, else everyone will know about his time with Utsusemi. He reflects that he does not have an excuse to return to this governor’s mansion, nor correspond with this governor’s daughter who is much lower status than himself. They are from different worlds.

But, Genji cannot quite let her go. 

After the failed seduction, Genji manages to spy on Utsusemi and her friend. Because it’s a hot summer day, the women have opened the blinds, and Genji can see them inside playing the board game go. When the game is over, Genji sneaks into the women’s quarters, and as Utsusemi escapes him again, he snatches a wafer-thin robe off of her. In pursuit of Utsusemi, he accidentally stumbles into her friend’s sleeping area instead where they have sex. 

Even though the friend is better-looking, Genji finds her superficial and the encounter hollow. Sulking, he then writes to Utsusemi, who rejects him again. She simply wishes that Genji would leave her alone. 

Like Utsusemi, Murasaki Shikibu too was a governor’s daughter. She had risen to serve in a princess’s salon through her own talents and Michinaga’s patronage. As we touched on last week, Michinaga provided the papers, brushes, and all the aspects of material life that mattered for her. But Murasaki would have clearly known, as Utsusemi did, at the ocean of power and status between them. 

It is hard for modern readers to grasp how massive that ocean between Michinaga and Murasaki was. In 999, Princess Shōshi, Michinaga’s daughter, had entered the royal wives’ quarters when she was twelve years old. This was a young age for Shōshi to be expected to have children, even in the Heian period. The nineteenth-year-old Ichijō had recently ascended the throne, and Michinaga no doubt felt he had to compete with other families vying for power who would send daughters to his Back Palace to serve as Ichijō’s wives. A wife’s family raised a royal heir, which gave them enormous influence over the throne. 

In 1008, Princess Shōshi gave birth to a baby boy who would be named crown prince, essentially cementing Michinaga’s control over the court. Unlike the monarch on the throne, Ichijō, who was in his early twenties, Michinaga knew the bureaucracy and provinces from experience. He had built his family’s wealth and prestige over decades of challenge. It was a great maternal lineage, an asset for a royal heir. Often families like the Northern Fujiwara, which was Michinaga’s lineage, are viewed as being in opposition to the royal family’s own power. In this period, that could not be further from the truth. The royal and Northern Fujiwara were mutually empowering lineages, like a vine growing up a tree.

I say all this to emphasize that he was the most powerful man of his era. From Murasaki’s perspective, her view of Michinaga must have been similar to Utsusemi’s view of Genji: “You have your place in the world and I have mine, and we have nothing in common.”³

The power imbalance between the two is so obvious that I feel even ridiculous writing “power imbalance.” The only thing that Murasaki held over him must have been her art. He clearly liked her writing. He provided for it. He crafted poems based around it. He snuck into her rooms and took drafts to give to his daughters–and perhaps to read himself. He flirted with her. I think Michinaga was a bit of a fanboy, and Murasaki knew it. 
Let’s return to her diary to see what happened next. After the flirtatious plum poem exchange we read between Michinaga and Murasaki Shikibu, the diary has a hard break, and a new scene begins:

One night as I lay asleep in a room in the corridor, there came the sound of someone tapping at the door. I was so frightened that I kept quiet for the rest of the night. 

Frustratingly, we do not know who exactly this man was who came to Murasaki Shikibu’s door. Whoever it was–understandbly–freaked her out. 

As if to follow-up, our creepy visitor sends a poem:

Crying crying all night long
More constant than the water rail
In vain did I tap at your door. 

She replies: 

The water rail was indeed insistent;
But had I opened up, come dawn,
I may well have had bitter regrets.⁴

A water rail is a small brown bird that lives in the marshes. Its call was thought to resemble tapping on wood, like a lover tapping on a door, making it a common motif in Heian poems. This might be Michinaga; it certainly feels like Michinaga. Murasaki Shikibu does not name the man she trades poems with.  

There seems to be a chronological break in the diary, and the two next cross paths at a banquet. Murasaki, I sense, has been avoiding Michinaga. She watches him hold and play with his royal grandchildren. Foreseeing trouble–what exactly, she does not say–she makes herself inconspicuous, but to no avail as Michinaga walks over. He teases her about her father’s absence from the banquet, and he insists that she give him a poem to make up for it. She refuses because it would have been improper to do so. Banquets were spaces for men to serve each other food, play music, and present poetry. Women were present in informal capacities. Even at a more relaxed banquet with children present, it would not have been appropriate for Murasaki Shikibu to give him a poem. 

In the face of her refusal, Michinaga offers a line of his own, and Murasaki is impressed. And, perhaps she looks more warmly on him. She writes that “He did not seem to be very drunk; in fact, he looked rather handsome and attractive, standing there in the light of the torches.”⁵

Later in the month, Murasaki moves to the Biwa Palace, which belongs to Michinaga and is being used as the royal residence for Ichijō and Shōshi. As usual, she shares a room with a fellow lady she knows well, and they push the dividing curtains aside to make one big room for themselves instead of a divided space between them. When Michinaga sees this, he’s amused. 

“What happens when you entertain someone the other one does not know?” he asked. The implication here is, they are roommates in a single room, and how will they manage when someone has a lover over? 

“A tasteless remark,” writes Murasaki. “In any case, we are both very close to each other, so there would be no problem.”⁶

The diary ends soon after. There is no answer in Michinaga’s journal, nor in other journals from the era. These details, or clues if one wants to read them that way, in Murasaki’s diary and poetry led later men, like Tōin Kinsada to believe that they were in a sexual relationship. But, while the diary walks up to the line of sex, it does not cross over; she turns him away from the line, if Michinaga was in fact the man who tapped on her door late at night. There is flirtation and suggestiveness between them. Of that, there is no doubt. But, I think the lines that Murasaki draws are significant. She repeatedly tells him no. She does not encourage his flirtation. She turns him away from her room. She refuses to give him poetry to present in a public setting. She presents the line and stands her ground. It is almost Utsusemi-like, the woman who appears in the early chapters of her Tale. 

I think that Murasaki is not so simple. There are rumors and gossip abound here, not just in the accounts, but in the very pages of the diary. Her own documents–her collections of poetry and her diary–were not private affairs. She kept them so that they would be records for her family and descendants to know how to conduct themselves at court. And, of course, she kept them entertaining. She was a storyteller. It is very possible that the sexual relationship never happened, but it was to her benefit that the rumors swirled. How page-turning it would be for her readers to wonder did they? Didn’t they? It added to the mystique of a relatively lowly woman to have Michinaga pursuing her. Despite Michinaga’s power, she turns him down. It is another facet to her own great legacy.

Utsusemi is often translated as “cicada shell.” The chapter refers to the thin robe that Genji snatches off Utsusemi. She leaves him with the robe and with a poem written along the edge of his letter to her, composed after she has refused him. 

Just as drops of dew settle on cicada wings, concealed in this tree,
Secretly, O secretly, these sleeves are wet with my tears.⁷

After this chapter follows “The Evening Faces” 夕顔, a romance that Genji has with another woman of similarly lower status. Only this relationship ends with disaster and death. Whatever Utsusemi feared from Genji, she evaded it by avoiding him.

Like with Utsusemi’s letter with its bittersweet equivocation, Murasaki leaves us with only traces to intrigue us about her own relationship with Michinaga. It is the mystique, an ambiguity of their not-quite romance that enthralls us even almost a thousand years later. It is almost like she knew we would obsess over her words, like Michinaga did, and centuries of people have, trying to glimpse the truth of the woman. I think of the cicada latching onto a tree and leaving its intricate exoskeleton behind as it molts, as it becomes a larger form of itself. We reach out to grab it. The insect vanishes into the summer night, and try as we might, we cannot quite see it in the darkness.