Chifuru

Chifuru is fictional—yet there must have been someone like her. She is my first fictional character to arise from one of Murasaki's actual poems. In the headnote to the very first, and most famous poem of her Poetry Collection

Murasaki wrote:

‍ I met someone I had known long ago as a child, but the moment was brief and I hardly recognized the person. It was the tenth of the tenth month. They left hurriedly as if racing the moon.

Meguriate/ Mishi ya sore tomo/ Wakanu ma ni/ Kumogakerenishi/ Yoha no tsukikage

Brief encounter;/ Did we meet or did it hide/ Behind the clouds/ Before I recognized/ The face of the midnight moon.

And the headnote for the second poem continues:

I heard they were leaving for a distant place. They came on the last day of autumn and just before dawn the next morning I found myself deeply moved by the singing of the insects:

Nakiyowaru/ Magaki no mushi no/ Tomegataki/ Aki no wakare ya/ Kanashikaruramu

As their song fades/Do insects in the hedge/Also find sadness/ In autumn partings/ One cannot prevent?

‍ (Richard Bowring translations)

There is also a poem from a friend whose family was posted to Tsukushi (modern Kyushu) who may have been the same person referred to in the first two poems. I have interpreted it thus, rolling them all into the character of Chifuru. It is impossible to know for sure what sparked the genius of Murasaki to start writing her Genji tales, but I suspect that she began them quite early in her life, as a way to entertain herself and her friends, in a scenario like the one imagined in my novel.