Read As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams Recollections of a Woman in 11thCentury Japan Penguin Classics Sarashina Ivan Morris Books

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Product details Series Penguin Classics Paperback 176 pages Publisher Penguin Classics; Reprint edition (December 5, 1989) Language English ISBN-10 9780140442823 ISBN-13 978-0140442823 ASIN 0140442820

As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams Recollections of a Woman in 11thCentury Japan Penguin Classics Sarashina Ivan Morris Books Reviews

• The Heian Period in Japan must have been extraordinary. It produced such great writers and poets. This is another in a group of wonderful women authors. It's remarkable that in a society so bound in restrictive social limitations and formalities that there was also so much freedom of expression. Lady Sarashina (or whatever her real name was) produced a remarkable autobiographical book/diary/travelogue/social commentary. Unfortunately, this edition is quite unremarkable. The extremely poor paper quality, resulting in very poor print, makes it difficult to recommend it wholeheartedly! Also the illustrations which reputedly come from an ancient copy, suffer from the same problems. The story (and the translations) are excellent but if you are a reader like me who enjoys the feel and appearance of a book you are reading, find another edition. I intend to do so. The seller is first rate, sending in record time and in good condition. I highly recommend them.
• This book is a travelogue written by a Japanese woman almost a thousand years ago. It is the recollections of her life. She was a daydreamer, often more involved in her dreams than her husband and children who receive scant mention in the book. She talks about the places she visited and shares poems written everywhere she went.
  The book is another glimpse in a world long gone. It is one of the few to survive from this period. Tale of Genji and others are more interesting, but for someone really interested in this time period, it is a worthwhile read.
• Imagine if 12-year-old Anne of Green Gables lived as a little princess in medieval Japan, and she wrote a diary. This would be it. I keep on rereading this thing just because the author is so dang likeable! Also, there are rumors that she was the author of the hilariously bad exotic Tale of Genji fanfic, "Hamamatsu Chunagon Monogatari," which involves reincarnation, long-lost parents, a Chinese Empress, and is everything you could hope for in that. I wish she'd lived long enough to discover Livejournal.
• I didnt get to really read this book that well so I am thinking that it is pretty good considering it was reccomended by a professor. Sorry not much help.
• Every thing was all around "PERFECT". Yes, I would buy from this seller again.
• Lady Sarashina may have lived around the same time as Sei Shonagon, but you couldn't imagine two more different accounts of Heian life. Where Shonagon is witty, arch and often cutting in her observations of life, Sarashina is a dreamer who seems poorly equipped for life at court.
  
  Although occasionally frustrating in its slightness, this casts yet more light on an exceptional period in Japanese history -- and the history of literature as a whole. Sarashina describes the world as she sees it in lucid, often beautiful detail. She talks of her pilgrimages, life at court, an unrequited romance.
  
  Translator Ivan Morris writes in his excellent introduction that there was a lot more going on in Heian society than we see through the court ladies' eyes -- there were wars, uprisings, unrest. But he compares these writings to looking at a beautiful garden in minute and sparkling detail.
  
  If you liked Shonagon's Pillow Book, this will give you a different but no less fascinating view of that garden.
• First I would like to point out that the book in its present form had not been known for centuries. A careless book binder in the17th Century had bound the book in a way that it misplaced chapters and caused her work to be perceived in a totally different manner for almost 300 years. Finally, in 1924 Professor Tamai was able to examine the original copy and discover the 'seven major errors' and thus reconstruct the book to its original form. This is all explained in the excellent introduction by Ivan Morris, who is an authority in translation of Japanese lierature and also provides all the background information about her life and travels.
  
  Lady Sarashina, as the writer of the book is called, was a woman on the 'fringes' of high society and power, a member of a minor branch of the Fuwijara clan. As noted by Proust in his great novel "Remembrance of Things Past" "only ladies that hold secondary salons are able to write well about the period in correspondence and diaries, the ladies who have the real important salons are always too busy to be able to do so". The perfect examples are Sarashina and Murasaki in the generation before her. However it is very important to note that her aunt, on her mother's side, was also a great writer, in Heian Japan it was in bad taste to refer to a lady by what we would call in the West "her Christian name" so most of their real names are unknown to us, it is the oblique reference by which they were known at court that we know about, and she was only known as "the mother of Michitsune" , she wrote "The Gossamer Years", an important non-fictional account of her bad marriage. When Lady Sarashina was born the great Sei Shonagon had completed her "Pillow Book" and Murasaki was still working on "The Tale of the Genji", the greatest novel of Heian Japan, the first work considered a novel, and one of the best ever written. She was very familiar with these works and many others that have been lost as she spent her childhood and youth as an avid reader.
  
  This lady is a pioneer in the development of the concept of the exquisite. Her sensitivity and refinement are the main forces in her writing, as she herself says "Ever Since I was a child the news of people's death, even the deaths of strangers, had disturbed me greatly and it used to take a long time to recover from the shock" this trait goes hand in hand with her introspection, which is marvellously described in the introduction in a sentence that pretty much says it all ""In 1028 a large-scale insurrection broke out in the province of Kazusa, where she had spent her childhood, and it took the government three years to bring it under control. Lady Sarashina appears to have been quite oblivious of this revolt, if indeed she ever heard about it, and continued busily writing about the mist-shrouded moon and the rustling of bamboo leaves' Now there is someone that is concentrating on the important, for while historical events come and go, the lyrical rendering of her point of view, is to me the aesthetic essence of that age that she captures so well in her descriptions. Nothing says it better than this fragment from chapter 11 "The height of my aspirations was that a man of noble birth, perfect in both looks and manners, someone like Shining Genji in the Tale, would visit me just once a year in the mountain village where he would have me hidden like Lady Ukifume. There I should live my lonely existence, gazing at the blossoms and the Autumm leaves and the moon and the snow, and wait for the occasional splendid letter from him. This was all I wanted; and in time I came to believe that it would actually happen". We can see from this rendering that the Lady loved romance, beauty, and dreams. This is also a premonition that Mme Butterfly would fulfill in Puccini's opera many centuries later.
  
  She married late, at 36, but still managed to produce three children which leads me to believe she must have both enjoyed sex and maintained a youthful vigor beyond her younger years, as is usually the case with people that love life. Her dreams of perfection, were of course never fulfilled but we must not forget that the whole notion of melancholic regret, was during her period, as in many other elegant ages through history, a sign of good breeding and education, so a lot of what we read in her book follows that conventional approach. Even in "The Tale of the Genji" it was already "de rigueur" to have one's sleeve "wet with tears" from thinking about an absent one or a full moon. Bursting into tears, by both men and women was common and expected at reunions and partings.
  
  The most striking difference between this book and Western literature is that the main subject here are introspection and contemplation, and not action. This may be hard to read if you are looking for a story that develops 'normally'. But if you accept that crossing the Bridge of Dreams is entering the world of Lady Sarashina's lyrical appreciation of nature, and beauty, you are in for a memorable trip.