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There comes a moment in the literature of Japan's Heian Period (794-1185) when a world so ancient and exotic that we can scarcely be more than bemused tourists in it glows with a new, almost modern, life. We cross a border. Suddenly there is solid ground beneath our feet. The literary techniques are familiar; the characters psychologically recognizable, the impulses that animate them akin to the ones that animate us. We must of course make allowances for a radically different setting, but, allowances duly made, we are, more or less, at home.
The moment of transition is clear. It occurs in the opening paragraph of a work called the Kagero Nikki-translated into English as The Gossamer Years-the diary of a mid-lOth-century noblewoman known only as "mother of (Fujiwara no) Michitsuna," whose literary mission is to bemoan her wretched fate. Before her, the typical prose literature of Japan, as in Taketori Monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter), is sheer romance, its characters "types" rather than living, breathing, suffering human beings. The Kagero diarist contemptuously brushes them aside, and (referring to herself in the third person) takes her great leap into the literary future:
As the days went by in monotonous succession, she had occasion to look at the old romances, and found them masses of the rankest fabrication. Perhaps, she said to herself, even the story of her own dreary life, set down in a journal, might be of interest....
(The Gossamer Years. Translated by Edward Seidensticker. Tokyo and Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1973, 33)
Why should dreariness be of interest? Because it is not "rank fabrication. Only reality, she seems to be saying, is worthy of a writer's attention-and only pain is real. Not pain in general, for she unashamedly closes her eyes and ears to suffering other than her own. The neglected and lonely concubine of Fujiwara no Kaneie, one of the great political figures of the day, she is too deeply sunk in her own misery to spare a thought for the outside world. Her world is her mind, and her mind is the world she bids us enter. Think of her as a hostess showing a guest through a house with nothing swept under the carpet. The extreme narrowness of...