Genji's Handwriting

Handwriting was arguably the most important skill that anyone could possess at this time. It could determine the quality and length of a career and love life. The most popular way to write about any event or occasion, private or public, was with poetry. There are many times in the Tale where Genji describes the quality of a persons handwriting and how it could make him feel certain ways about the person who wrote it. Genji had eloquent handwriting and used it to gain the affection of the ladies.
Genji went nowhere for the next two or three days, not even to the imperial palace, so that he might converse with the child and win her affection. Perhaps with the thought of letting them serve as models, he produced various things with his brush for
Japan had a lifestyle that was structured greatly by trends that they adopted from the Chinese but now they are moving away from those old ways of life and creating a new culture for themselves. They created a new writing style that used different calligraphy that represented their Japanese language. Along with this new handwriting they created new ways to write poetry that many of the women wrote.
Painting also experienced a change. Artists were starting to create paintings that were distinctly Japanese themes. Heian people developed a different style that used bright colors to create a new art style that further changed the culture, separating themselves from the Chinese. Their paintings were heavily influenced by religion. Buddhism created an inspiration for not only art and paintings but also architecture of temples, government buildings, houses, shrines, and statues that reached new levels of radiance that represented the new Japanese
They would be beautiful and smell lovely but they would eventually die and lose their color and scatter. This thought of never lasting that long was a part of Buddhism that left Heian aristocrats in a mental bind. The thought of all of their beauty and existence being taken at any moment did not sit well with them. Many times throughout Genji there are times where he or one of the ladies that loves him is crying because they know that they have lost the other and will no longer have the relationship that they did before and that is the worst thing that could happen. This loss of love shows that not everything is permanent and like the once beautiful cherry blossom that dies and scatters into the wind so does the love that was once