The Exterior Self and Michitsuna's Mother
This essay is an ongoing work. Both in terms of writing and formatting. I have plenty of experience writing at length, not so much on formatting it as a website. I will try to keep track of updates on my main page. My apologies for starting with a lengthy quote, I suppose you can take the academic out of the university...
"Am I to go on, restless and unhappy,
As I am now, and as I long have been,
For all my days?
Your words, that autumn we met, soon changed their color
Like the leaves of the wailing grove where I must dwell.
Then my father was off among the winter clouds,
and my tears boiled up like a sudden winter storm.
He sought your promise never to forsake me.
"What foolish fears!" I thought.
But soon the white clouds came between us too.
Blankly, I watched. You were gone like the morning mists.
The geese come home in their time, I thought, and I waited.
And waited in vain, and am waiting now, the hollow shell of a locust.
My tears are not a flow of but this moment.
For long years now they have surged, a steady river
Whose source you are, and your inconstancy.
My load of sin from other lives is heavy,
Else why should I drag myself on, unstable finally
To forsake this wretched world?
I value life no more than a bubble upon the water.
Still, I must wait for him who is far in the north,
For the grasses that come to the hills, there in the north,
For the Abakuma meeting.
One brief meeting, then forsake the world?
But regret would be too strong, I would weep again.
I was not meant to live a life of tears."
At times and in the right company, when I am searching for the words to describe an experience or sensation that the vocabulary of English cannot efficiently describe, I joke that "There's probably a word for it in German." It is as much a joke about academic vocabulary as anything else, but the truth, for me at least, is that to an outside observer with only a casual familial exposure to the language German seems uniquely suited for the spontaneous creation of unique compound words for describing the very specific. This time the thing I am searching to explain, but am unable to do succinctly, is the sensation of feeling you know someone well, on an intimate and personal level, despite having never so much as met them.
It is a sensation many today are familiar with thanks to social media, reality television, twitch streamers, and personal websites like this one. I remember once reading an interview with Bono, the frontman of the band U2, where he spoke about the way that people engaged with music after the invention of the iPod made him feel like the relationship his listeners had with him had changed. That to be alone with someone, in their bedroom, singing in to their ear just felt fundamentally different than to be a person on stage or television. While I have never been one to watch reality television or feel that I had a personal connection with Bono, I admit that there are people I feel I know intimately despite having never met. One such individual is the author of the poem above.
Of course, she has never been on television, nor on my iPod (or any number of audio bearing devices I have used since whenever I last owned one of those). If the cadence of a clearly translated poem doesn't give it away, she and I do not speak the same langauge, either. In fact, I do not even, and will never, know her name. She, like so many women of her time and place, is known only by proxy though the men in her life. Oh, and she died over a thousand years ago.
Despite all that, the innavigable void of a millennium, linguistic barriers, her near anonimity and cultures that at times seem so alien to one another that it almost beggars belief, I feel like I know the woman known to histoy as Michitsuna's Mother quite well.
Because I read her diary.
Reading someone else's diary is generally seen as a violation. Of a trespass in to a version of their life, their inner self, in which you do not belong. I usually would never read someone's diary. Except Michitsuna's Mother was a Heian noblewoman, and as such she was not writing a personal diary, the kind that I always felt far too self conscious to write myself, rather, she was writing a literary diary. The first book of her work, a mixture of prose, diary, memoir, and poetry referred to as the Kagerō Nikki, begins with a note to the reader:
"These times have passed, and there was one who drifted unvertainly though them, scarcely knowing where she was. It was perhaps natural that such should be her fate. She was less handsome than most, and not remarkably gifted. Yet, 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; and it might also answer a question: Had that life been one befitting a well-born lady?" - (Edward Seidensticker translation)
The story told, in somewhat disjointed leaps by a woman who would take up her brush after gaps of years, by the Kagerō Nikki is, to me, astonishingly beautiful. She is the second wife of an important prince, a match which is seen as quite the success story for a woman her particular noble, but otherwise not noteworthy, birth. The man who is to be her husband fills the first few pages with a flurry of (inept, according to his future wife) poems declaring his infatuation with her, and she gradually acquiescences to his wooing. She puts him off, she has handmaidens write poems in response, she is, she says, "besieged by poems.", but is eventually persuaded by his dedication and her family.
The Prince's attentions wander, however. He comes not only to neglect his second wife, but his first. The diary relates the author, frustrated at his neglect and constant absence, writing to the other wife lamenting his absence. To which the first wife responds, in short, "Wait, I thought he was with you?"
That the two women, both neglected by the same husband, are communicating through poems on letters is made to seem particularly strange to modern readers because the two, in all likelihood, probably lived a few hundred feet from one another on the same estate, in separate buildings connected by covered corridoors. But almost everything about how Michitsuna's Mother lived is strange to us now. Her position as the wife of a prince during the Heian period means that she lead a very particular kind of life. She slept, and would have spent much of her time, in raised bed chamber, surrounded by multiple layers of shutters and curtains, through which she spoke to men but the very closest few in her life. Around this chamber was wrapped a building, full of spaces divided by moveable shutters. Beyond the walls of that building lay a veranda, with yet more shutters. The Heian lady herself, should you chance to see her, would have been quite the sight herself. Her hair to her waist or even as low as her feet, her skin painted white, her teeth stained black with iron-pigmented lacquer, her face looking permanently surprised due to having had her eyebrows plucked out completely and redrawn up higher on her head. Perhaps most surprising however would be her clothes. While the silk robe of a Japanese noblewoman might not be hard to imagine, she would have been wearing as many as 20, possibly with additional jackets, and a train, should the occasion call for it.
At the center of the home of the Heian elite, beyond the walls of the estate, past the formal garden, through the blinds, shutters, and curtains, behind her fan, sat the lady of the house. Educated and raised to love poetry and art, waited on hand and foot, often ignored or neglected by an absent husband, and functionally immobile, she dwelt in a world of formality, taste, and intellectual pursuit. She would from time to time travel, in a covered litter born by servants or ox-drawn wagon, to go on pilgrimages or to festivals. The men in her life were as obsessed with literature and art as she, but "serious" literature was the work of men, written in Chinese, not the work of women writing prose in kana. It is this world that produced Michitsuna's Mother and her Kagerō Nikki, a work translated in the Tuttle edition as "The Gossamer Years". A world of stillness, darkness, formality, and aesthetic obsession. A world where women traded poems, prose narratives, and, of course, their literary diaries.
Michitsuna's Mother clearly intended for others to read her diary. There is a reasonable chance that it was being circulated within her lifetime. She was something of a trendsetter in the genre of the literary diary. Her work is filled with regret, and dark assessments of her own life. She was, as she puts it, "chronically dissatisfied" with her life, particularly with how her famous and respectable husband treated her. The poem quoted at the top of this essay (not in its entirety) is, according to her, from a letter she wrote for her husband. She also included his reply, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is filled with deflection of responsibility for his behaviour.
Aside from a son that went on to become a respected man at court, her legacy as the author of the Kagerō Nikki is really the only thing Michitsuna's Mother left to the world. While it is beautiful, and sad, and filled with tragic and pathetic details that make one inclined to believe in its honesty, the Kagerō Nikki is not merely some objective historical fact, supposing such a thing as that really exists. Nor is it access to the contents of another human's mind the way we today tend to mythologise the diary as. It is a deliberate work. A work made to be read. It is, to quote Umberto Eco, "a Wunderkammer: an ingenious example of narrative art, wax museums, cave of robots.". Kagerō Nikki is a museum of the self; author as both curator and exhibit. Not the thing itself, but the symbol of the thing, a symbol carefully designed by the symbolised. But for the literary diary of a woman who leaves me no other reality, the symbol and the symbolised are impossible to extricate. Such an argument would not be out of place in the mouths of 20th century social theorists, but the issue is not of their century, but of hers. Her diary is not her, it is a product of her. The woman on the pages of Kagerō Nikki is, despite her intelligence and privilege, filled with despair, and possessed of a capacity to depict that despair with an eloquence and resonance that has kept her diary a literary treasure of Japan for a thousand years.
But the woman on the pages of Kagerō Nikki is the woman that Michitsuna's Mother wanted me to see. Not just me, written for posterity, but the people of her time. The woman that she chose to present herself as. And that is all I have to work with. That is the woman I know. But have I really met Michitsuna's Mother? Has anyone? Can anyone?
That I am here, writing a curated self narrative bemoaning the inaccesibility of the true identity of the author of Kagerō Nikki is not some dramatic irony written by the random hand of the cosmos. The inaccessibility of the other is what drove me to put myself out there in this format at all. I have spent my life being things for other people. Every single person I have ever been has been something performed for someone else. A string of personhoods defined by being what other people needed of them, and then being disposed of, their only connecting thread my habit of being reflexively chameoleonic.