I’m working on a novel now that is set in a world heavily inspired by Heian Japan around the year 900 CE, and the research has been extremely… challenging.
Because left to my own devices, I would just RESEARCH FOREVER.
Research, for me, is this endlessly fascinating wonderful journey into worlds I don’t know. It’s basically how I got into writing fiction. My background is in history. Specifically, pre-modern Japanese history, which in academic terms really means anything before 1603 (the start of the Edo period) which… well, that’s quite a lot of time. I love history because essentially you’re trying to uncover the stories of people and times and make sense of what happened. The best historians, in my view, have the sympathy, imagination, and curiosity of the best novelists.
My interest at university was in the Heian period (794-1185 CE), in part because we know so much about it, but also because we know so little. I know that seems contradictory. What I mean is, what’s survived about the period is a wealth of personal writing, letters, diaries, poems, personal essays like Sei Shonagon’s biting and hilarious Pillow Book, and, of course, what some call the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji. In addition to these we also have an excess of bureaucratic records, legal documents, official histories, and other administrative records.
I bet you already know what we don’t have. This is a common problem of history — that history belongs, more often than not, to the privileged and the powerful. We have very little idea of what life was like for non-literate, non-aristocratic people during this time. And that’s the part that interests me the MOST.
I read once that there were an estimated 30,000-50,000 homeless or transient people living in and around the splendid capital city of
Heian-Kyo around the year 1000. No one knows for sure because they didn’t count those people. So I started thinking, what sorts of professions would they take on? How did they live their lives? How would they relate to the other, more prosperous people of the capital? How did they survive?
We can turn to archeology, a bit, for some answers. Sacred Texts and Buried Treasures is a wonderful book that dives into early Japanese history (about 100CE – 800 CE) and, more importantly in some sense, I think, also illustrates how well archeology and history can be married. Another fantastic resource — although quite a bit later than the period I’m specifically interested in — is Susan Hanley’s Everyday Things in Premodern Japan. And finally there’s Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 edited by Gail Lee Bernstein, which uncovers women’s roles, because not everyone can be a Lady Murasaki or a Sei Shonagon or even sad Lady Sarashina.