ary distinction. For the most part educated men, much like their counterparts in medieval Europe, scorned the use of their own tongue for any serious literary purpose and continued to write histories, essays, and various official documents in Chinese; but the women of the imperial court, who usually had insufficient education to write in Chinese, had no other medium for literary expression than their own language. As a result, while the men of the period were pompously writing bad Chinese, their ladies consoled themselves for their lack of education by writing good Japanese, and created, incidentally, Japan’s first great prose literature.
The golden period of the first flowering of Japanese prose was in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. Most of the writers were court ladies living in ease and indolence, and their commonest form of literary expression was the diary, liberally sprinkled with poems of thirty-one syllables to commemorate moments of deep emotional feeling. Some of the diaries told of travels, but more often they concerned the luxurious life and constant flirtation and love-making which characterized the court at this time.
The outstanding work of the period, however, was not a diary but a lengthy novel—the Tale of Genji, written by Lady Murasaki early in the eleventh century. This is an account of the love adventures of an imaginary Prince Genji, made slightly tedious to a modern reader by the similarity of his many experiences, but unquestionably a distinguished piece of writing and one of Japan’s outstanding contributions to world literature.
