What Speculative Fiction Writers can Learn from the Tale of Murasaki
Lately I've been reading Liza Dalby's The Tale of Murasaki, which is a bit of an outlier read for me. I don't often read historical fiction (though there are exceptions), and usually I like a bit more action in my plots—and I'll admit, there have been parts reading this book that I've itched for something to, you know, happen. But I find the content and context fascinating enough that it's kept me reading, albeit a bit slowly.
One of the reasons I picked up The Tale of Murasaki was to get some context for The Tale of Genji, which I made an aborted attempt to read a few months back. A bit of a mental shift is always necessary when reading something from so long ago, but I found Genji particularly opaque because much of the plot hinges on the rhythms and expectations of Japanese imperial court, a world foreign to me in just about every respect.
And I'm happy to report that The Tale of Murasaki makes an excellent bridge in that regard, bringing just enough of a western, modern sensibility to ground me in this world. In many respects, this kind of far-in-the-past setting requires the same attention to worldbuilding as a secondary world. Honestly, it's easier for me to picture how the world works in a future Earth setting like Star Trek than in 11th-century Japan, probably because a speculative future world is inevitably laced with the perspectives of the time it's written in. It can't fully spring from the substrate of the future because that culture doesn't yet exist, and we don't really know what will happen between now and the 24th century that will shape how people then think. With things that happened in the distant past, there is an established cultural context separate from our own, even if we no longer know or understand the full details of it.
Historical novels are similar to future ones in this regard. While they aim to accurately represent the time setting, they’re also infused with the author’s knowledge of the time in which they’re written and everything that’s happened in between those two points. Given Liza Dalby's history, I'm confident The Tale of Murasaki is as accurate as it possibly can be. For those who aren't familiar with Dalby's work, she's an anthropologist who specializes in Japanese culture, specifically Geisha culture, and even performed as a Geisha in the mid-'70s. Those experiences were the basis of her book, Geisha, and she was also the primary consultant for Memoirs of a Geisha. Basically, the American sense of the Geisha community relies heavily on Dalby's research and knowledge. At the same time, though, even though Dalby lived in Japan, she never lived in the Heian period when Genji was written. She can only know it from notes like the rest of us, and those are inevitably read and filtered through a modern lens.
What historical novels often do beautifully is frame cultures from the past in a way that makes them accessible to readers. This isn't just useful to people who want to study Earth's past, but can also serve as a treasure trove of unique details for speculative fiction writers. They provide functional, fully realized cultures that are very different from our own, which can make studying them very handy for laying the foundation of an invented society. They can also yield smaller details that can be woven into these worlds, ones that are both unknown to most readers and relatable at their core since they were developed by other humans.
There are two of these details in particular that have stuck out to me as I've been reading The Tale of Murasaki. I've already filed these away into my mental filing cabinet to use in future projects, but I figured they might spark some similar creativity for other folks, too.
Poetry as communication
When I tried to read The Tale of Genji, one of the things that struck me as odd was how often the messages between individuals included poetry. Often, these poems seemed to have nothing to do with whatever was being discussed, usually heavy on nature imagery. Reading The Tale of Murasaki filled in some extra context about this habit. During the Heian period in Japan, it was common for nobles and aristocrats to communicate with each other using poetry. Specifically, this was often done by lovers, and the quality of someone's poetry was considered an important factor in their suitability as a mate. These poems were sometimes straightforward, stating the individual's thoughts and feelings directly in meter. Other times, they were more obtuse, using figurative language and imagery from nature to convey a hidden meaning.
Brief tangent here from a rabbit hole I fell down doing this research: these poems were an ancestor to modern haiku. The form used in the Heian period was known as waka, which originally referred to all Japanese poetry. By the 11th century, the term waka became synonymous with what we would today call the tanka, a form with 31 on (syllables) arranged in a 5-7-5-7-7 pattern. Around the 12th-13th century, the waka/tanka became associated almost exclusively with the imperial court. The form also became highly regulated, with the topics and words they were allowed to use dictated by strict rules. As a result, the communal form called the regna became more popular with the general population. This form would alternate an upper 3-line verse (5-7-5) and a lower 2-line verse (7-7), each of which was added by a different poet. The opening verse of a regna was called a hokku, which by the 19th century evolved into the haiku we know of today.
(There are many more interesting things about the development of Japanese poetry, including the intersection of its evolution with the development of the Hiragana writing system and how that opened the door for a renowned school of women poets, but I'll leave those details for readers who want to fall down their own rabbit holes.)
From the standpoint of mining details for speculative work or secondary worlds, there are a few key points about this that stuck out:
- The images used demonstrate the shared context of the society. I found the nature imagery in Genji poems difficult to parse, but for a reader at that time those metaphors would have been clear. Different animals, plants, weather patterns, etc. all had defined associations that would have instantly come to mind for a contemporary reader. Introducing a similar set of “shared vocabulary” into the communications of an invented culture can be an excellent way to flesh out that world without long exposition. It actually put me in a mind of the Star Trek episode “Darmok” and the Children of Tama, who speak exclusively in metaphor.
- This kind of communication could be particularly useful in highly regulated cultures, where people might face repercussions for speaking their thoughts freely. It's a way to weave in subtext that only select members of your society would be able to interpret, which could be a useful device in dystopian settings at any technological level.
- The way the regna, and eventually the haiku, spiraled off from the original waka establishes a long history and natural logical progression to the culture. Establishing a similar evolution of art and communication in a fictional world can add depth to that society, building its history in a slant way that makes the world feel fully lived in without bogging the reader down with too many dry details.
Seasons on seasons
Throughout The Tale of Murasaki, the Lady Murasaki references a Chinese calendar that divides the year into far smaller chunks than the 4 seasons we're accustomed to today (and that were used broadly in Japanese society at the time, as well). These many seasons are known today as the 24 Solar Terms, each of which covers 15 degrees of the sun's movement along the ecliptic. They include some that are easy to parse, like the beginning of each major season, the solstices, and the equinoxes. Between these, though, are more poetic sounding periods like The Waking of Insects, Grain in Ear, and White Dew (you can see the full list of the solar terms here if you're curious). The ones referenced in the book are often even more flowery, though I’m not sure if it’s simply a different translation or if she’s drawing from an older set.
Now, this set of terms isn't a complete departure from the four seasons that are followed fairly universally around the Earth today—it's more of a deep dive that further subdivides them. But that also makes sense, because it's still based in the movement of Earth's sun. And that's the thing about seasons: they would naturally derive from the patterns of the world where they were developed. Another Earth-like planet with a single moon and sun might have very similar weather patterns to the ones we're used to, and if humans colonized a planet that's very different it's likely we'd still try to make our usual four seasons apply (because we tend to be stubborn like that).
In other situations, though, that kind of division probably wouldn't make as much sense. The lesson from these Chinese solar terms, for me: even on Earth, there isn't just one way to describe the passage of seasons, so surely if the world has many moons, or two suns, or is a society developed underground or on a space station or somewhere else separated from the movements of the sun through the sky, they would divide time in a different way.
As writers, we naturally bring our own context to everything we create. That's helpful when you're writing realism because readers can assume the same details are present and true—things like the movement of the seasons are so much an integral part of our existence that nobody questions them, or really considers that they could be any other way. But when you're creating a world that you want to feel very different from modern Earth, you need to interrogate even these baseline assumptions. A world that has the typical four seasons will feel intrinsically human in at least some respects because it's using those same familiar patterns. In contrast, changing that pattern can be an easy way to make a world feel more alien, without you needing to put forth a ton of effort to do so.
How cultures define the passage of time also conveys more information than just the weather patterns. Studying those Chinese solar terms gives details about the natural world. For instance, it tells you both that insects exist and that they aren't active all year. It also indicates an agrarian cycle, once which centers grain as a primary crop, considering it appears in 3 of the 24 terms. If you're constructing new seasons for a secondary world, building those kinds of details into their calendar establishes the kind of consistent history and identity that makes a place feel real and lived-in.
And as a bonus, once you establish this foundation, it becomes a cheat sheet to discern the rhythms of sentient cultures inhabiting that space. The first solar term is the Beginning of Spring, corresponding to the Chinese New Year holiday. The holidays and through-the-year rhythms of whatever society you're creating would similarly track to the movement of their seasons. Generally, Earth societies have celebrated life during planting and growing seasons, while the fallow, cold periods are most often associated with death and the underworld. You don't need to necessarily hold to this on a secondary world (and breaking from that expectation could be another way to reinforce the non-Earthness of the setting) but establishing a similar link between their understanding of time and their culture and rituals enhances your secondary world's cohesion.
I'm definitely not giving any groundbreaking advice here. Pulling details from the past is a long-established practice for speculative writers. But reading The Tale of Murasaki has been a good reminder of some of the less expected ways that historical fiction can be a treasure trove of inspiration, and not just for people who write in realistic genres.
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