A Tale of False Fortunes Read Free Page B

But when I was in the upper level of grammar school and had learned to read the old cursive syllabary at calligraphy lessons, my browsing turned into reading as I carefully followed each line of characters in books written in understandable styles of script.
    The story that I propose to write now is from one of the handwritten books I read in this manner upstairs in my father’s house; however, relying only on the uncertain memory of my childhood, I cannot say whether it was one of the “rare and unusual” books of the Òdò Library. It was possibly one of my father’s own books that just happened to get mixed in with the Òdò Library. At any rate, no matter whom I asked later, no one had heard of it. Judging from that, the story must have been a transcription of an older book from the Kamakura or Muro-machi period, or possibly a fictional work by a not-so-famous literary scholar of the Tokugawa period—perhaps a second-rate work by Takebe Ayatari.
    It was forty years ago, and many details of the book’s appearance now escape me. I am certain, however, that a rectangular strip of thick vellum speckled with gold and silver was mounted on the left side of its cover of navy blue Japanese paper, and that on the vellum, written in somewhat blurred Man’yò script in the style of the Heian-period calligrapher Fujiwara no Yukinari, was this: A Tale of False Fortunes. What were the “false fortunes”? Goaded by the curiosity these strange words aroused, I opened to the title page, where the title appeared again in running cursive followed by the subtitle: Gleanings from “A Tale of Flowering Fortunes.” Only upon seeing the Chinese characters used in the inside title did I realize that the book was about a spirit medium.
    A Tale of False Fortunes tells of the life of a lady-in-waiting in service to the consort of Emperor Ichijò. A young girl reader like myself was naturally interested in the stormy fate of the heroine, and I plowed through the difficult cursive writing, reading it over and over until I understood it. Much later, when out of some necessity I read A Tale of Flowering Fortunes in the anthology of classics edited by Yosano Akiko and others, I Prologue c 11

    noticed that some of the passages I had read long ago in A Tale of False Fortunes had been borrowed intact from the more famous work. By that time my father had already died and his library had passed into another’s possession, and I had no way of determining the whereabouts of the original manuscript of A Tale of False Fortunes. In all probability, however, that one volume was the sole copy. But the reason I took it into my head to compare the two works was not because False Fortunes quotes many passages intact from Flowering Fortunes, but rather because things not found in the latter appear in the former; in other words, because of what is summed up in the subtitle: Gleanings from “A Tale of Flowering Fortunes.” It is well known that the principal part of A Tale of Flowering Fortunes was written by Akazome Emon, who served Shò-
    shi (daughter of Fujiwara no Michinaga), the second consort of Emperor Ichijò. Akazome was the wife of the noted Sinologist and poet Òe no Masahira. Her reputation also as a poet is attested by the comparison, in Murasaki Shikibu’s diary, of Izumi Shikibu’s poems with those of Akazome, where Murasaki judged the latter to be superior. But Akazome’s temperament was unlike the purely literary dispositions of Izumi Shikibu, Sei Shònagon, or Murasaki Shikibu; Akazome must have been more of a commonsensical sort of person who was also endowed with literary talent. From the prosaic nature of the narration in A Tale of Flowering Fortunes and from the fact that Akazome would borrow passages intact from other writers to aid in her own narrative (her description of Michinaga’s residence at the time Shòshi’s first child was born was borrowed from the Murasaki Shikibu Diary ), we may see that she did not possess the