How old was Murasaki Shikibu when she married her second cousin? And why did she marry him?
score:9
We don't know for sure.
We know very little about Murasaki Shikibu's life, and much of what we do know is highly circumstantial. There are no direct attestations of either her birth or death. Mainstream theories all place her birth between 970 and 978, which means she married Fujiwara no Nobutaka when she was between 20 to 28 years old. It is impossible to verify which is correct, though Wikipedia's unsupported claim of "early thirties" can be ruled out.
We also do not actually know if Shikibu accompanied her father to Echizen to avoid Nobutaka. Her works seem to indicate that she had been giving Nobutaka the cold shoulder, yet she continued to exchange poems with him during her time in the countryside (including an apparently fumbled gesture where he inked a letter in red as his "tears"). Some scholars, parsing these poetry exchanges, posit that Nobutaka succeeded in wooing Murasaki in this period.
Again, it is impossible to verify the truth of this. However, in 998 Murasaki abruptly left her father and returned to the capital alone. She married Nobutaka shortly afterwards, and tradition describes the union as a happy one. So the theory that Nobutaka won her heart while she was (perhaps bored and lonely) in Echizen, seems as plausible as any.
Sources:
- 上野辰義《紫式部と藤原宣孝》
- 日向一雅《源氏物語の歴史的文化論的研究》
- http://www.genji.co.jp/tyosyo/kikyonowake1.htm
- Hisamatsu, Senʼichi. Murasaki Shikibu: The Greatest Lady Writer in Japanese Literature. Japanese National Commission for Unesco, 1970.
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