The Woman in the Deutzia Month

Omori and Doi, in 1920, give the opening English this archive is allowed to keep: “Many months had passed in lamenting the World, more shadowy than a dream.” Already the tenth day of the Deutzia month was over. Shade under the trees, grass on the embankment greener. The woman notices what no one else is obliged to notice. Then the old poem about tachibana in May, sleeves of someone no longer here, is placed in her hand like a dare.

What follows is exchange. Waka go out. Waka come back. Nights are arranged and fail, succeed, become rumour. Heian love at this rank is never only two people. There are messengers, nurses, a palace, a city of eyes. Atsumichi had a wife. She left him. That leaving is not a romantic accessory. It is a household breaking because a prince would not stay inside the marriage the court had made.

The nikki is often read as moonlight, screens, wet sleeves, the perfume of a sleeve in the dark. The moonlight is real in the poems. So is power. A prince’s attention is a political weather. A woman who answers it becomes a public fact. Izumi Shikibu was already a poet of dangerous skill. The diary does not make her innocent. It makes her awake.

In 1007 Atsumichi died. He was twenty-six by Western count. The nikki, as a designed work, does not always go that far; the life did. What remains is a woman who wrote herself as “the woman,” as if the only way to keep a scandal was to set it at a slight distance and let the poems do the heat. Complexity, here, is not a spice. It is the court.