Fujiwara no Michinaga

It would take several more centuries before the rest of Japan fully understood what that meant.

The clans that shook the court, for most of the heian period the imperial court at heian-kyo operated on a principle that might generously be described as elegant fiction the emperor sat at the centre of everything in theory divine by bloodline supreme by tradition surrounded by ritual and ceremony and a calendar of obligations so detailed that it left very little room for anything as inconvenient as actual governing in practice real power had been quietly gathered by a single aristocratic family the fujiwara who had perfected over generations the art of placing their daughters in the imperial household ensuring that the next emperor was almost always a Fujiwara grandson, and then governing on his behalf as regent while he was young, and as chief advisor once he reached adulthood.

It was a system of enormous sophistication and almost no military muscle whatsoever.

The Fujiwara at their height in the late 900s and early 1000s controlled appointments, land grants, and court policy with remarkable efficiency.

Fujiwara no Michinaga, who dominated the court around the year 1000, is remembered for composing a short poem comparing himself to the full moon, nothing lacking, nothing hidden.

He was not being modest.

Three of his daughters became empress consorts.

He never bothered to formally take the title of regent because he did not need it.

What we can reconstruct is this.

She was born in the 970s into a minor branch of the Fujiwara clan.

Her father, Fujiwara no Tamatoki, was a scholar of Chinese literature and a middling provincial official.

She reportedly picked up classical Chinese by listening in on her brother's lessons and learning faster than he did, which prompted her father to lament she hadn't been born a boy.

She married an older distant relative, Fujiwara no Nobutaka, around 998, had a daughter a year later, and lost her husband to an epidemic two years after that.

The widely accepted view is that she began writing Genji in her widowhood, and she distributed them or read from them in a serialized way.

The early chapters made her famous enough to get her recruited, around 1005, into the Shoshi's father was Fujiwara no Michinaga, the man who effectively ruled Japan through his daughter's imperial marriages.

He's also the man who later walked out of a room with her now legendary manuscript.