Aesthetic Beauty, Delight, and Cultural Tradition Theme Analysis

Her Majesty provided us with the inkstone. ‘Come on, come on,’ she scolded, ‘don’t waste time racking your brains. Just quickly jot down any ancient poem that comes to you on the spur of the moment. Even something hackneyed will do.’ I’ve no idea why we should have felt so daunted by the task, but we all found ourselves blushing deeply, and our minds went quite blank. Despite their protestations, some of the senior gentlewomen managed to produce two or three poems on spring themes such as blossoms and so forth, and then my turn came. I wrote down the poem:

With the passing years
My years grow old upon me
yet when I see
this lovely flower of spring
I forget age and time.

but I changed ‘flower of spring’ to ‘your face, my lady’.

Her Majesty ran her eye over the poems, remarking, ‘I just wanted to discover what was in your hearts.’

There are also those times when you send someone a poem you’re rather pleased with, and fail to receive one in reply. Of course there’s no more to be done about it if it’s to a man you care for. Even so, you do lose respect for someone who doesn’t produce any response to your tasteful seasonal references. It also dampens the spirit when you’re leading a heady life in the swim of things and you receive some boring little old-fashioned poem that reeks of the longueurs of the writer, whose time hangs heavy on her hands.

Things that make your heart beat fast—A sparrow with nestlings. Going past a place where tiny children are playing. Lighting some fine incense and then lying down alone to sleep. Looking into a Chinese mirror that’s a little clouded. A fine gentleman pulls up in his carriage and sends in some request.

The uguisu is made out to be a wonderful bird in Chinese poetry, and both its voice and its appearance are really so enchanting that it’s very unseemly of it not to sing inside the grounds of our ‘nine-fold palace’. People did tell me this was so but I couldn’t believe it, yet during my ten years in the palace I did indeed never once hear it. This despite the fact that the palace is near bamboo groves and there are red plums, which would make it a fine place for an uguisu to come and go. Yet if you go out, you’ll hear one singing fit to burst in a nondescript plum tree in some lowly garden. […] In summer and right through to the end of autumn it maunders on and on in a wavery old voice, and lower sorts of people change its name to ‘flycatcher’, which I find quite unfortunate and ludicrous.

Unsuitable things—Snow falling on the houses of the common people. Moonlight shining into such houses is also a great shame. So is meeting with a plain roofless ox cart on a moonlit night, or seeing a cart of this sort being drawn by an auburn-coloured ox.

This is the final dance, and no doubt that’s why you feel particularly bereft when it draws to a close. As the nobles and others all get up and file out after the dancers, you’re filled with a frustrated longing for more, but this is assuaged in the case of the Provisional Kamo Festival by the Returning Dance. There’s a most moving and marvellous atmosphere then, with the slender ribbons of smoke rising from the courtyard watchfires and the wonderful wavering pure notes of the kagura flute lifting high, and the voices of the singers. It’s piercingly cold, the glossed silk of your robes is icy against the skin and your hand as it clutches the fan is chilled, but you notice none of this. I like the way the head dancer takes a terrific pleasure in performing the long-drawn-out call that summons the comic entertainers for the interlude.

Once, during the reign of the former Emperor Murakami, there was a great fall of snow. The moon was bright. His Majesty heaped snow in a bowl, stood a spray of flowering plum in it and gave it to the Lady Chamberlain, Hyoe, saying, ‘See what poem you can compose on this.’ Her response was to recite the words of the Chinese poem, ‘At times of snow, moonlight and blossom’, for which he praised her very highly. ‘There’s nothing unusual in producing a poem,’ he said, ‘but it’s far more difficult to say something that is so precisely apt for the occasion.’

‘You see me as some upstart then?’ I inquired, to which another lady responded, ‘More on the level of a stable boy.’ Nevertheless, it was a glorious moment, to have the honour of being permitted to watch from above. No doubt it’s unseemly for me to be boasting like this, and it may well redound unforgivably on Her Majesty’s reputation, by giving an opportunity to those who would set themselves up as shallow judges of worldly matters to wag their heads sagely and declare, ‘To think that Her Majesty should favour such a creature!’ - yet I can only write the facts as they stand, after all. I freely admit that I was of a quite unworthy station to be the recipient of Her Majesty’s special attentions in this manner. […] But these events, which seemed to us so splendid and auspicious at the time, all look very different when compared with the present, and this is why I’ve set it all down in detail, with heavy heart.

I set to work with this boundless pile of paper to fill it to the last sheet with all manner of odd things, so no doubt there’s much in these pages that makes no sense.

Overall, I have chosen to write about the things that delight, or that people find impressive, including poems as well as things such as trees, plants, birds, insects and so forth, and for this reason people may criticize it for not living up to expectations and only going to prove the limits of my own sensibility. But after all, I merely wrote for my personal amusement things that I myself have thought and felt, and I never intended that it should be placed alongside other books and judged on a par with them. […] Anyway, it does upset me that people have seen these pages.