of the time were not disposed to disencourage them altogether.
The Court was the focus of society, and the utmost ambition of ladies
of some birth was to be introduced there. As to the state of politics,
the Emperor, it is true, reigned; but all the real power was
monopolized by members of the Fujiwara families. These, again, vied
among themselves for the possession of this power, and their daughters
were generally used as political instruments, since almost all the
Royal consorts were taken from some of these families. The abdication
of an emperor was a common event, and arose chiefly from the intrigues
of these same families, although partly from the prevailing influence
of Buddhism over the public mind.

Such, then, was the condition of society at the time when the
authoress, Murasaki Shikib, lived; and such was the sphere of her
labors, a description of which she was destined to hand down to
posterity by her writings. In fact, there is no better history than
her story, which so vividly illustrates the society of her time. True
it is that she openly declares in one passage of her story that
politics are not matters which women are supposed to understand; yet,
when we carefully study her writings, we can scarcely fail to
recognize her work as a partly political one. This fact becomes more
vividly interesting when we consider that the unsatisfactory
conditions of both the state and society soon brought about a grievous
weakening of the Imperial authority, and opened wide the gate for the
ascendency of the military class. This was followed by the systematic
formation of feudalism, which, for some seven centuries, totally
changed the face of Japan. For from the first ascendency of this
military system down to our own days everything in society--ambitions,
honors, the very temperament and daily pursuits of men, and political
institutes themselves--became thoroughly unlike those of which our
authoress was an eye-witness. I may almost say that for several
centuries Japan never recovered the ancient civilization which she had
once attained and lost.

Another merit of the work consists in its having been written in pure
classical Japanese; and here it may be mentioned that we had once made
a remarkable progress in our own language quite independently of any
foreign influence, and that when the native literature was at first
founded, its language was identical with that spoken. Though the
predominance of Chinese studies had