Yang Guifei in Japan 日本に渡った楊貴妃

1) Reading Genji (桐壷) 2023

The Heian Court. It was a world where the most brilliant minds of the time gathered. In clothing so beautiful it boggles the mind, they wiled away their days exchanging love poems in clouds of perfume and fragrant incense. Playing elegant games, they would attend banquets where dances from Central Asia– slowed way, way down– were performed by the light of the full moon, and in Chinese-style dragon boats they floated around ponds drinking sake and moon-viewing.

The Heian elite were not only connoisseurs, but they were performers of the arts as well– because, of course, back in those days “art” was not something only to be appreciated passively, but rather was something practiced and lived.

And Murasaki Shikibu was part of this world—albeit not of the highest rank. Still she could count herself among a very small group of elite aristocrats. My classical Japanese professor once asked us to imagine how small this group of people must have been. Maybe fifty persons? Because of the small scale of the readership, a great deal of knowledge could be assumed in the writing of poetry and stories.

Like a bell tolling, stories evoke other stories and emotions thereby multiply.

The first chapter of The Tale begins with the words,

In a certain reign (whose can it have been?) someone of no very great rank, among all His Majesty's Consorts and Intimates, enjoyed exceptional favor.

This is no “once upon a times” opening —but rather immediately alerts readers that this Tale of Genji is going to evoke another famous story. And this is going to happen right off the bat; for Bai Juyi’s The Song of Everlasting Regret was a poem from China that all educated Japanese people knew intimately, and which similarly begins with “A certain emperor…”

Like the emperor in Bai Juyi’s poem, the emperor in the Tale of Genji falls inappropriately in love with a woman of “no very great rank.” This woman is Genji’s mother and the emperor is Genji’s father. In translator Royall Tyler’s very first note, he explains that:

The beauty Yokihi (Chinese Yang Guifei) so infatuated the Chinese Emperor Xuanzong (685–762) that his neglect of the state provoked a rebellion, and his army forced him to have her executed. Bai Juyi (772–846) told the story in a long poem, “The Song of Unending Sorrow” (Chinese “Changhenge,” Japanese “Chogonka,” Hakushi monjū 0596), which was extremely popular in Heian Japan.

The story of Yang Guifei was one that would shake the empire.

How this came about is one of the most re-told of all Tang dynasty tales. It was during the second-half of the Emperor Xuanzong’s reign (r. 712-756) that all the trouble started. Xuanzong’s court, which saw the very apogee of the “Golden Tang,” was a one of great refinement and luxury. While Xuanzong started off his rule as an exemplary Confucian leader, he would later fall utterly under the spell of his beautiful concubine, Yang Guifei, Toward the end he was spending more and more time with her-- playing polo, participating in concerts with her Pear Garden Orchestra, commissioning paintings and collecting antiques-- doing this all instead of ruling the empire (which was after all his main job!)

Lady Yang’s presence at court was enormous, and truly she was the femme fatale and great arbiter of taste of her day. Under her influence “the plump look” was in a great vogue, as well as a hairstyle known as “just fallen off the horse look”-- the hairstyle having come about one day when Lady Yang’s elaborate coiffure had become disheveled after tumbling from her horse. Looking particularly alluring, she caused yet another small sensation at Court as all the other court ladies tried to emulate her hairstyle without having to go through all the trouble of falling off their horses.

With her “hundred charms,” she was said to be as intelligent as she was beautiful, and her extravagant tastes for wine, lychee fruits, beautiful bird feathers, cosmetics, aromatics, and clothes were legendary.

She also had exotic taste in men, for she was to fall completely under the spell of a powerful general of famously foreign descent known as An Lushan (or, Rokhshan, “the bright”).

It’s hard to imagine a more sure recipe for imperial disaster.

The emperor of China could not get enough of her.

So, Murasaki Shikibu, is saying: that is how much Genji’s father fell for Genji’s mother. An obsessive passion so great that it threatened to become a serious problem at court—just like what happened at the tang court.

In Japan, Yang Guifei is known as Yokihi. There is a legend that Yang Guifei did not die in China, but rather made her way East-- to Japan. And for that reason, in Japan you can find her grave in Yamaguchi Prefecture, as well visit various shrines dedicated to her —here and there around the country.

Just like at the Heian court, music and dance were highly prioritized at Tang emperor Xuanzong’s court. The dance most closely associated with the beautiful Yang Guifei is one known as the Rainbow Dance. Michel Beurdeley, in his book The Chinese Collector Through the Centuries, writes:

Her most beautiful dress, a gown "shimmering like sunlight" was made of rare feathers brought as tribute to the Emperor. It was a fairylike robe which she wore to perform the famous Rainbow Dance (still preserved in modern Japan) before the Emperor. A dress of feathers was the dream of every woman of the Tang Court.

A shimmering gown and a shining prince….a glittering and glowing world.

光る君, hikaru kimi~~~ 光る源氏 hikaru genji ~~~~霓裳羽衣舞 Rainbow and feather dance

One of the “Three Famed Beauties” of Noh Theater, according to Noh actor Minoru Shibata, it is Yang Guifei alone who is able to move between the world of the living and the world of the dead. (Usually, the dead are depicted as ghosts, or are part of a dialog of times past). Like the scattering cherry blossoms, rather than the splendid flowering of their love, it is the Emperor’s unbearable loneliness after she is gone that serves as the central theme of the plays dedicated to her story.

And this is the same way Genji’s father feels when Genji’s mother Kiritsubo dies. He is inconsolable and says as he is looking through her things left after her death:

Looking at the keepsakes Myōbu had brought back, he thought what a comfort it would be if some wizard were to bring him, like that Chinese emperor, a comb from the world where his lost love was dwelling. He whispered: “And will no wizard search her out for me. That even he may tell me where she is?”

Royall Tyler explains after Yokihi’s death, the Tang emperor Xuanzong also inconsolable, sends a wizard to find his beloved in the afterworld (the fabulous island of Hōrai [Chinese Penglai]), and the wizard brings back an ornamental hairpin from her.

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Image at top

Scene from the Chang Hen Ge, depicting Emperor Xuanzong (center) and his concubines. Japanese painting by Kanō Sansetsu (1590–1651).