Polygamy, Effect on love

          Poetry was the main means of communication among aristocrats in Japan. It was 1000 years ago. The quarrels were poetically, too. 

Japan ran on polygamy for the longest time. Male aristocrats were encouraged to have multiple affairs simultaneously. It wasn’t considered unusual for women to have affairs outside their marriages either. It doesn’t mean that people didn’t get upset for being “cheated” on. The first wife of a noble called Fujiwara-no-Kaneie, wrote a very dark autobiography SOLELY to grumble about her husband who kept chasing other women throughout their marriage. One day, she wrote her husband a letter with a poem that was translated into English from Japanese poem:

"You do not know how long dawns slept alone take to break."

She pierced a purple chrysanthemum through the letter. White Chrysanthemums are white at the beginning of autumn but they turn purple towards the end of the season, after being exposed to the cold. What the flower decoration on the letter meant was a symbol of the couple’s tarnished love. 

Her dark and candid chronicle of resentment and the records of her husband’s unforgivable treachery has survived over a millennium.