Lady Murasaki (Hannibal)

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Gong Li as Lady Murasaki from Hannibal Rising

Lady Murasaki Shikibu is a fictional character featured in Thomas Harris' novel Hannibal Rising. She is Hannibal Lecter's step-aunt. She was portrayed by Gong Li in the film adaptation of the novel.

[edit] Character History

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

After the young Lecter escaped from the men who brutally murdered and cannibalized his younger sister, Mischa, he was a ward of the Soviet state until (in his family's former castle.) In 1946, his uncle Robert, Count Lecter, a respected painter, discovered him and brought him to France to live with his family.

Robert was married to a Japanese noblewoman named Lady Murasaki Shikibu. They had met in 1921, at an exhibition of Robert's paintings in the Tokyo Metropolitan. She was a young girl then, but Robert was smitten, and when in 1936 her father came to Paris as the new Japanese Ambassador to France, bringing his daughter with him, Robert at once came to the embassy and offered to convert to Shintoism. Her father said Robert's religion was not his primary concern; he understood that his real intention was to court her. Her father neither understood nor approved of their marriage, but her mother did, and they were happily married until his death in 1946. Bereft, she turned to the younger Lecter, and their relationship bordered on the romantic. It was the Lady Murasaki who trained the boy in the ways of cultural sophistication.

Hannibal Rising proposes that Lady Murasaki was the fictitious descendant of two real-life Japanese historical figures. One is, of course, her namesake, Murasaki Shikibu, the poet and author of the world's first major novel, The Tale of Genji (The fictitious latter-day Murasaki was very knowledgeable about poetry, especially her namesake's work, but not a writer herself). The other is Lord Date Masamune, a prominent daimyo during the Sengoku Period and a participant in the 1615 siege of Osaka.