murasaki

Maybe Laura__ real problem came in admitting this: there was nothing new under the sun. To write a story would be, somehow deep down, to embrace her limits, to admit that, indeed, she would someday die__f not of a worm or a ceiling, then of something else. The very nature of a story admitted this reality. To be a writer was to say, yes, I am just another Murasaki, and it is quite possible that no one will remember my name.

When my brother,_, was a young boy learning the Chinese classics, I was in the habit of listening with him and I became unusually proficient at understanding those passages that he found too difficult to grasp and memorize. Father a most learned man, was always regretting the fact: __ust my luck!_ he would say. __hat a pity she was not born a man!_ But then I gradually realized that people were saying __t__ bad enough when a man flaunts his Chinese learning; she will come to no good,_ and since I have avoided writing the simplest character.