Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan

Rating:
Summary: Whining depression in Heian Japan
Review: I found the author to be a whining depressing mess. She spend half of her time moaning about how miserable she is because her husband doesn't pay any attention to her, a quarter of her time snidely gossiping about her husband's other women and the other quarter of her time she's gloating about whatever "great" poem she's recently penned.

This is the second book I've read from Heian Japan. I found Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book to be a much more engaging read.

Rating:
Summary: A Context for Gossamer Years
Review: If you are new the Heian period, this should not be your first book; The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu and The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon are required reading, along with excepts from the Kokinshu. However, if you're already familiar with the literature and history of the Heian period, and want to know more about the lives of women in this time period, then this diary is an excellent source.

Teachers of Japanese literature might find it useful to pair readings from the idealized novel Tale of Genji with similiar episodes in the real life Gossamer Years -- all too often students are left dazzled by the brilliance of Murasaki's novel and tend to believe it represents an accurate view of court life in the Heian period. Murasaki's novel is high literature and possessed of significant psychological insight and truly deserves its status as a great work of world literature, but it is fiction. The Gossamer Years, written by a real woman about her real life, gives a very different view of how it felt to actually live with a philandering husband and court intrigues, as well as worrying about more ordinary tasks such as sewing and raising a son.

The reader who wants more exciting stories and courtly tales from the Heian period would probably be better entertained by works such as The Changelings (a tale of a brother and sister who swap places in life), The Tale of Ise (poetry and episodes from the life of a gentleman famous as a poet and a lover), and the The Tale of the Heike (the epic tale of the rise and fall of the House of Taira, a sequence of events which formally ended the Heian era and ushered in the rule of the samurai).

Rating:
Summary: Bad relationships never change
Review: The author was far away in time, place, and culture from where I am now. Her self-induced misery is completely up to date, though.

This piece is divided into three books. The first was mostly a series of conversations, held in short, oblique poems, often in terms of proverbs lost to history. My western eye found little to cling to.

The second book is more readable, describing the long slow fall of her relationship. She was concubine to Kaneie, second to his actual wife. Even so, she had a large household of her own. Perhaps she was a she was a kept woman, but she was very well kept. Not well enough for her taste, though. She constantly demanded more of Kaneie's time, but seemed to reward him, most often, with excuses or aloofness. She really could not see how hard she worked to put him off, while faulting him for being put off.

The third book completes her estrangement from Kaneie, not in any harsh way, but with a mutual numbing of interest. It's not for me to say - still, I wonder whether this is a first-person account of clinical depression. She finally shifts her interest to her son's future, then leaves us with the most dramatic cliff-hanger ending in all of literature.

"Gossamer Years" is a good addition to a well-rounded library of Eastern classics. I wouldn't suggest that it be among the first in that library, though. Shonagon's "Pillow Book" is a much more enjoyable piece of Heian women's literature.