BY THE END OF THE EDO PERIOD, it had become common practice to distinguish the Genji commentaries of that era from those of the medieval era. The former were called the “New Commentaries” and the latter, the “Old Commentaries.” But what was so “new” about the New Commentaries or, for that matter, “old” about the Old Commentaries? At first glance, the last of the Old Commentaries, Kitamura Kigin’s Moonlit Lake Commentary (Kogetsushō), actually looks newer than anything by Keichū, Kamo no Mabuchi, or Motoori Norinaga. As we have seen, it contains a complete text of The Tale of Genji, as well as a whole panoply of aids to help the reader understand the text. On closer scrutiny, however, we find that despite surface resemblances, there are good reasons for considering the New Commentaries strikingly newer and better than the Old. Here is how Hagiwara Hiromichi, the first commentator to make this distinction, defines that difference:
Now, Kakaishō, Kachō yosei, and most of the other [early] commentaries were written by ranking gentlemen of the court nobility, and they date from an age nearer to antiquity than our own. One might well wonder, therefore, how they could be [so inaccurate]. But let us consider the reasons. These learned gentlemen of the past had one unfortunate failing: whatever they learned they kept secret. Even the most insignificant bits of knowledge were kept secret. As a result, these commentaries would be transmitted secretly to no more than one or two persons. Not only was there no custom of sharing their work, but they were lax about the collection and collation of ancient texts and the study of evidence. In many cases they would simply decide that such-and-such was the case and compose their annotation from memory…. Of course, if we know all there is to know about something, there is no need for anyone to write a commentary on it. But the amount of detail that remains unknown, despite this plethora of commentary, is extraordinary, which makes it difficult to trust anything they have to say. For this reason, the Kogetsushō and all commentaries before it I call the “Old Commentaries,” and I do not, as a rule, cite them.
In contrast,
Genchū shūi [Gleanings of Commentary on Genji, 1696], by the monk Keichū, is a fascinating and magnificent work. On the basis of an extensive investigation of ancient texts, the author demonstrates the failings of the aforementioned Old Commentaries and rectifies their errors. The author is an extraordinarily learned man. In his interpretations of the poetic anthologies, he is never bound by the views of [previous] commentary. He makes not a single unfounded assertion; indeed, he is the pioneer scholar of modern “critical philology” [kōshōgaku]. His Genchū shui totally changed the nature of commentary on this tale. For this reason I set it and those that follow it apart and call them the “New Commentaries.”1
For Hiromichi, then, the distinction between old and new is as much a social as a scholarly distinction. The Old Commentaries were compiled principally by aristocrats of the imperial court and a few lesser mortals, like Sōgi, who had been granted entrée to court society. By contrast, none of the authors of the New Commentaries were aristocrats or even hangers-on at court. Nor was it simply that the baton had passed to a new generation. There was a decided sense of opposition between the two camps. For example, Lord Karasumaru Mitsuhiro confided to one of his worshipful disciples that “the honored houses of the nobility deign not to consult” Bansui ichiro, a commentary compiled by a provincial renga master, while Motoori Norinaga was at pains to point out that “the work of someone of a certain [noble] house may be of no worth whatever, whereas it often happens that someone of the most humble birth will produce surpassingly fine work.”2 And as James McMullen notes in his introduction to Discursive Commentary on Genji (Genji gaiden), even Kumazawa Banzan, a samurai who collaborated with a ranking aristocrat in his study of Genji, wanted “to liberate the tale from courtly patronage and to claim it as a text of universal relevance.” Their success in this endeavor must be counted a major accomplishment of the New Commentators and their contemporaries.
The rigor of their scholarship and their social sensibilities aside, however, commentators and critics of the Edo period continued to be exercised by some of the same moral issues as their medieval forebears: Genji’s value as a fictional narrative; the overt eroticism of the tale; and, particularly, Genji’s secret liaison with his own father’s empress, which, in the eyes of some, constituted a “taint” (mono no magire) to the hitherto unbroken line of emperors descended directly from the gods. As the title of this chapter suggests, even those scholars whose principal purpose was exegesis prefaced their commentary with lengthy treatises in which they developed quite a variety of solutions to these problems. Whereas medieval commentary might interpret the depiction of “flaws” of this sort as moral homilies, justifiable by resort to the Buddhist concept of Expedient Truth (hōben) or, alternatively, as Confucian object lessons, Edo-period scholars were more inventive.
For Kumazawa Banzan, Genji was essentially a work of history, depicting the “fine style” of ages past, which, unless recorded, might deteriorate and “be lost in vulgarity.” But Murasaki Shikibu was well aware that her good intentions might come to naught if her work did not last. So the amours that she depicts are meant to serve the important function of attracting readers to the tale, thus ensuring the long life of the lessons that were her main purpose in writing it.
Andō Tameakira, too, treats the same moral issues, including the troublesome “taint” to the imperial line, but he insists that the exemplary personal character of Murasaki Shikibu is ample assurance that her motives can be only admonitory. In Tameakira’s view, The Tale of Genji serves the important Confucian function of encouraging good and chastising evil (kanzen chōaku), but it does so subtly, through the depiction of “human feeling” (ninjō) and the “ways of the world” (setai). Having read The Tale of Genji, readers will see the consequences of the social transgressions that Murasaki depicts, particularly Fujitsubo’s great lapse (mono no magire), and thus will be more cautious and circumspect in their own behavior. Significantly, Tameakira cites the Murasaki Shikibu Diary as proof that Murasaki Shikibu was both highly educated and a morally upright woman who, for example, rebuffs the amorous advances of Fujiwara no Michinaga. In this implicitly biographical criticism, the author’s own impeccable morality stands as proof of the tale’s moral integrity.
Perhaps the most famous defense of Genji against charges of moral turpitude was that of Motoori Norinaga. Though not totally dismissive of either the medieval commentators or his more immediate predecessors Banzan and Tameakira, Norinaga rejected absolutely all arguments based on Buddhist or Confucian doctrine. Although there are, he says, “points of chance resemblance and accord with Confucian and Buddhist texts, it will not do to seize on these as characterizing the work as a whole. Its overall import differs sharply from works of that sort.” Readers do not read fiction in search of moral instruction. Nor did Murasaki Shikibu write Genji in order to teach moral lessons. “The main purpose of the tale,” Norinaga insists, “is the depiction of the workings of the emotions [mono no aware].” In support of this claim, he explicates in great detail the passage in the “Hotaru” chapter generally taken to represent Murasaki’s own views on the writing of fiction. No commentator in the previous eight hundred years had ever identified the primary importance of this passage, much less analyzed it in such detail.
Hagiwara Hiromichi, the last scholar represented in this chapter, displays an entirely different form of originality. Whereas the work of his predecessors was in one way or another driven by ideology, Hiromichi is eclectic and open-minded; he seeks not to displace but to synthesize, to bring together the best work of past commentators and combine it with a new and more authoritative text of Genji. Unfortunately, Hiromichi’s health failed, and he died after completing only the first eight chapters of his commentary. But his introductory treatise remains a model of scholarly magnanimity, and his commentary on the early chapters of Genji, from “Kiritsubo” through “Hana no en,” leaves the reader regretting that there could not have been more.
T. HARPER
(Genji gaiden)
Kumazawa Banzan (1619–1691) was born into a samurai family that had suffered a decline during the final phase of Japan’s unification, yet retained proud traditions of imperial ancestry and ownership of land. Banzan himself was employed by the daimyo of Okayama, Ikeda Mitsumasa (1609–1682), who valued him both for his qualities of leadership and administrative ability and for his knowledge of Confucianism. As a young man, Banzan also studied briefly under the Ming-dynasty Wang Yangming scholar Nakae Tōju (1608–1648). From Tōju he learned Shingaku (Learning of the Mind), a tradition within Neo-Confucianism that valued the individual’s conscience as the highest moral authority. Banzan is traditionally associated with a period of enlightened Confucian-style administration in the Okayama domain. In fact, however, his success was largely limited to a period of reconstruction following a disastrous flood that afflicted the domain in 1654. He fell victim both to the hostility of senior hereditary vassals of the Ikeda house and to his own ill health.
In 1657, Banzan retired from active feudal service. He moved to Kyoto, where he cultivated a circle of court nobles (kuge) and pursued the study of music. Among his friends was the monk and litterateur Gensei of Fukakusa (1623–1668), with whom Banzan seems to have begun the systematic study of The Tale of Genji. Another friend was the court noble Nakanoin Michishige (1631–1710), a member of a senior court lineage long associated with the study of Genji. But Banzan’s activities in Kyoto aroused the shogunate’s suspicion, and he was expelled from the city in 1667. He settled eventually in Akashi, the site of Genji’s own exile in the tale. It was in Akashi that he began a remarkable and secretive collaboration with Michishige on a joint commentary on Genji. The basic procedure was for Michishige to send Banzan copies of his own drafts. Banzan responded by inserting his own interpretations into Michishige’s manuscripts. At a later stage, Banzan’s contribution was excerpted from the joint work to form an independent commentary. This work, known as Genji gaiden (Discursive Commentary on Genji), is the main source of his views on the tale.3
Banzan had come late to court culture, and he read Genji from a fresh, albeit provincial, perspective. His reflex was to liberate the tale from courtly patronage and to claim it as a text of universal relevance. Unlike most of his Confucian contemporaries, who condemned the work for its “debauched morality,” Banzan saw it as a highly serious historical record of a phase of history in which Japan still retained many features of the ideal Confucian government that, he believed, had characterized the world in the remote past. Banzan recovered from the tale a society of high culture and manners or, as he termed it, “style,” which contrasted with the military and authoritarian society of his own times. Society was, he believed, still articulated by “ritual” and music; authority still resided in the court and was exercised through virtue rather than law or coercion; the family was respected; women were conceded dignity and importance, especially as mothers; and society had not yet been divided into the separate estates of courtier and warrior. At the same time, a modest level of consumption preserved Japan’s pristine, forest-clad mountains from deforestation. Perhaps most of all, this was a society in which the good and the cultivated could, irrespective of their hereditary status, as Genji’s own ascendancy demonstrated, rise to positions of political influence. Banzan insisted, furthermore, that the tale should form the basis for the reconstruction of Japanese society. But he also found negative features, signs of incipient decline, in the world of Genji. The tale, in fact, described a society already in transition: the delinquent lack of interest in the personal administration of emperors and the oligarchic exercise of power by the kindred of the Minister of the Right were symptoms of the approaching end of the “royal age” (ōdai). Thus Banzan was able both to exploit the tale as embodying an ideal and to put it to admonitory and cautionary purposes for his contemporaries.
The problem of the salacious nature of the tale remained. Banzan constructed an elaborate set of arguments to explain this. In his introduction (translated here), he insists that superficial appearances notwithstanding, this was basically a historical narrative. The erotic license that it depicted was simply a device to ensure that the work attracted readers and thus survived. Properly understood, Genji was a text of universal relevance, an invaluable national resource, a witness to the high moral and cultural achievements of Japan in the age before the ascendancy of the warrior state and the associated instability that had characterized Japanese history ever since, and Genji himself, though not without flaw, was an exemplar of human potentiality.
JAMES MCMULLEN
Introduction
A certain lady said, “Among the various books from former times that contain teachings for men, there must be lessons for women, but for the unlettered [in Chinese texts], they are hard to read and interpret. So we have no alternative to reading just the kana stories that have been passed down in written form from the past and gaining some slight understanding from them. Even among these, there do not appear to be any that offer reliable teachings. The Tale of Genji is a fictional account dedicated to amorous matters, but since it is the work of such a very clever woman, and perhaps because the style is easy or because it is suited to the same feminine minds, reading its multifarious incidents offers much that is readily accessible. Would even a work of that kind, by any chance, possibly provide lessons for foolish women?”
The reply: On the surface, The Tale of Genji describes amorous events, but the reality is different. For this reason, among those who are fond of reading The Tale of Genji are people who are excessively fastidious. The motive for writing this tale is that the author lamented that, since her whole age was proceeding to its end, the fine style of the remote past was deteriorating and would be lost in vulgarity. Yet people would shun and keep away from an overtly proper book. Since it would have few readers, it would not be universally available. Although a given book may be educational, when the language is stiff and people are alienated, it does not long survive. Or even if it survives, since it lacks readers, it is as good as lost. So, judging that it would be to no avail were she to leave [a book of that sort], she deliberately did not display a didactic style. She simply treated [her narrative] as an amorous amusement and thereby bequeathed a detailed account of the courtly fine style and attitudes of past times. With no understanding of its original [purpose], people think of [Genji] as a wholly fictitious tale. Praising its telling and style, they conceive of it as a tale from the mouth of an ordinary narrator. This is because people of shallow views are unfamiliar with Japanese and Chinese books. In fact, [Genji] belongs to the same category as Zhuang Zhou’s apologue;4 it sometimes identifies this with that, speaks of the circumstances of the people of past times as though they concerned contemporaries, and writes of Chinese matters as Japanese. But with regard to the reality [behind them], all matters are supported by evidence. Therefore a man of old said that with regard to its factuality, [Genji] is in the style of Sima Qian’s Shiji.5 It must be that in order to disguise matters concerning people of recent times, she improvised the name of the amorous man Lord Genji; treated [his story] like a fictitious tale; and, gathering together stories ancient and modern, Japanese and Chinese, even down to things of her own age, attributed them to him. It also is said that Murasaki Shikibu’s father, Tametoki, was an erudite and talented man and left a draft with the intention of writing a sequel to the national histories and that Shikibu got hold of this and rewrote it in the form of this tale. Thus the Ichijō Emperor as well, reading this tale, is reported to have said that [the author] was well read in the Nihongi.6
So then, a would-be reader of this tale should not be concerned with the amorous and immoral content but pay attention to the author’s inner motive and be concerned with the good aspects of the book. Devoted readers ignorant of this approach suffer much detriment and derive little benefit.
Now the reason that the Royal Way of Japan has long endured is because rites, music, and literature have not been lost or fallen into vulgarity. The excessively hard and strong do not last long, but the generous and soft endure. Such phenomena as the teeth being hard but quickly dropping out; the tongue being soft but lasting till the end are all-pervasive principles. The military houses may on occasion grab power over the realm through the awesomeness of their great strength, but like teeth falling out, they do not last long. Royalty dwells in submissiveness but does not lose its position. However, when it combines softness with a lack of virtue, people’s respect for it is slight. When it lacks the capacity to inspire people to shame and respect in its presence, even though it exists, it is as though it did not. In the end, it verges on extinction. Only in this tale does there survive the means to revive what has become extinct and to afford a vision of rites, music, and literature. Therefore, what one should first pay attention to in this tale is the fine style of the remote past. The way in which rites were correct and gently paced and music was harmonious reflects the fact that men and women alike were courtly and constantly played court music and were not demeaned in spirit.
Next, the descriptions of human feelings in the book are detailed. Ignorance of human feelings frequently results in loss of the harmony of the five human relations. When one contravenes these relationships, the state is not well governed nor is the house in order. For this reason, the preservation, even in the Maoshi, of the debauched style7 is in order to familiarize [readers] with human feelings both good and bad. Were the people of a state all superior men, administrations and punishments would serve no function. The Way of Government is simply to teach ordinary men and so is impossible without knowledge of human feelings and historical change. This being the case, in this tale, too, by the use of various transpositions, she [Murasaki] provides an exhaustive account of human feelings and, further, gives a good description of how times progressively change. Beginning from the poetry right down to the least significant prose passages, there are descriptions of the temperaments of the respective characters as though painted in pictures. Therein lies the great marvel of the comprehension of human feelings in this tale.
As far as the poems are concerned, their language is deep and mysterious, and they are difficult to understand unless one is qualified in the field. Furthermore, with regard to the composition of verse, the people of the past related the feelings in their hearts much as the people of the present write letters. However, [since that past] the hearts and language of people have gradually approached closer to the vulgar; a dichotomy [between speech] and verse has resulted; and with the coming into being of what is called “the Way of Poetry,”8 matters have become vexatious. Were this trend to continue, the elegance of the language of the people of the past would, in future times, become hard to understand, and [language] would become more and more lost in vulgarity. So one should select those passages where the text is admirable and where the old language is hard on the ear and understanding and should concentrate on them. Thus the people of the past also said that to resolve uncertainties about language, nothing can rival The Tale of Genji.
In general, this tale was written basically to transform style. In this context, she [Murasaki] gave a particularly detailed account of the Way of Music. The pastime of strings and woodwinds is the activity of superior men. Therefore, when there is ignorance of the pastime of woodwinds and strings, the courtly style and customs die out and are lost in common feelings. The reason for this is that the hearts of people are living things and so are always in motion. Music is the correct and beautiful form of pastime. Therefore, when one relies on pastimes that contain this correct Way, people become courtly of their own accord, and their style and customs become noble and elegant. However, a person who is a stranger to the Way of Music is unattractive. When he grasps its spirit a little, [it is found to be] supremely delicate and attractive. Delicacy without satiety is perfection. There is an ancient saying, too, that the relations of a superior man are delicate like water.9
Music is the object of the affections of the superior man who takes pleasure in the Way; it is thus an activity that anyone of a little sensibility cannot afford not to know. For this reason, long ago, from farthest Tsukushi as far as the end of Michinoku, anyone of a little sensibility, whether man or woman, played music. Still less was there anyone among the court nobility ignorant of it. But with the arrival of recent times, the pastimes of the courtly have been lost in vulgarity; tasteless things are done; people devoted to and knowledgeable of musical matters have become rarer and rarer; and houses in various respective fields have been formed. In the end, a state of barely maintaining performances has resulted. As they have become the occupation of respective houses, the pastimes of the superior man have degenerated into [mere] techniques. Since [the practitioners] feel like functionaries, matters have become progressively shallower; a selfish concern with establishing rival houses has resulted; and contrary [to its true purpose], music has become the resort of the affections of small men. Although there are some people dedicated to their Way, since they do not release it beyond their own houses on the grounds that it is an esoteric treasure, people who know it subsequently become rare. Scarcity of people with the requisite knowledge leads, in the end, to extinction. The Way of the superior man is for universal dissemination among men, so there is nothing at all to make an esoteric treasure. Though he wishes to inform people of it and to preserve a written record for universal dissemination, the superior man takes it as a matter of sadness that those in the know simply become progressively rarer. Thus, although setting up esoteric treasures looks like valuing a Way, in most cases it derives from the small man’s profiteering and competitive spirit of self-satisfaction and self-assertion. Had she [Murasaki] not recorded the Way of Music in this tale, with the arrival of the present age there would be no one with knowledge of it. [Such practitioners as there are] would not be deeply versed in their Way, and it would be hard for them to gain understanding of their tradition.
With all Ways, the loss of the furi is difficult to repair. Therefore in this tale, there is a great deal written to record the furi. Furi refers to the style of performance. Even this tale finds it hard to express comprehensively on paper the esoteric and oral traditions of the various houses of the time. They are recorded in outline to “await the superior man of the future.”10 Since Ways in all cases proceed from the superior man, even in later ages a true superior man will, on obtaining a little clue, understand its significance and be able to revive what has been abandoned. It is said that “to change style and alter customs, there is nothing better than music.”11 This is the reason that in this tale, [Murasaki] paid special attention to music in writing her account. By exhausting the way of transforming style, people naturally gain inspiration. This is why the tale is useful for the Way of administration.
In all cases, the manners of remote antiquity were pure, bountiful, and noble. The usages of a terminal age are extravagant, depleted, and base. She [Murasaki] lamented the fact that teachings of rites and music were deteriorating in each successive age, that the elegance and beauty of manners and customs were progressively changing as time wore on, that the residual style of the Ninefold [Palace], too, with the advent of the terminal age, was lost in vulgarity, and that the manners and customs of the court noble houses were on the verge of extinction. In accordance with the saying “catching a fish and forgetting the trap,”12 with this tale, she made a fishing line of the amorousness that people naturally have a predilection for, and provided universal entertainment to people of the world. [The resulting work reflects] her ambition to preserve [the inheritance of the past] until an enlightened lord should arise. So, without this tale, how might one behold and know the style bequeathed by the royalty of remote ages? Therefore, the Juntoku Emperor also left a description of this tale as the supreme treasure of Japan.13 The profound significance of its quality as a supreme treasure, however, is not accessible to people of mediocrity and below14 who are not versed in the Way of Rites and Music.
The lady said: “From listening to you, I understand its meaning. Although one hears that [The Tale of Genji] is a fictional tale, reading it does not give that impression at all. This must be because it disguises matters that [actually] happened.”
TRANSLATED BY JAMES MCMULLEN
(Shika shichiron)
Andō Tameakira (1659–1716) was born in Kyoto as the second son of Andō Sadatame, whose great-grandfather was a Fushimi no Miya prince.15 Together with his older brother Tamemitsu, Tameakira served Tokugawa Mitsukuni (1628–1701), lord of the cadet branch of the Tokugawa house in Mito. For a time, Tamemitsu was the acting director of the Shōkōkan, the research institute established by Mitsukuni for the study of historical texts, and during his fourteen years in Mito, Tameakira was one of the many people who worked on the compilation of the Dai Nihonshi (History of Great Japan) and contributed to a commentary on the Man’yōshū.16 He also received instruction from Nakanoin Michishige (1631–1710) as well as Keichū (1640–1701).
Seven Essays on Murasaki Shikibu (Shika shichiron),17 completed in 1703, relies heavily on Tameakira’s reading of Murasaki Shikibu’s diary, which, he maintains, provides irrefutable proof that she was a virtuous woman of great intelligence. He argues that although Genji scholars had always spoken of her superior intellect (sai), they never studied her memoir and thus did not comprehend Murasaki’s true nature, which was, above all, that of unyielding feminine virtue (futoku). Failing to understand the author, they also failed to understand her intent in writing The Tale of Genji, which was to provide moral instruction for her readers.
According to Tameakira, although the tale was written to admonish women, it could serve just as well to educate men. As he writes in Essay 6, the most important lesson to be learned from Genji is found in the clandestine affair between Genji and Fujitsubo. Although earlier scholars had shied away from speaking openly of this “incident” (onkoto), Tameakira maintains that there is no disruption of the imperial line, since the child born to Genji and Fujitsubo, who becomes the next emperor, is in fact a blood descendant of the preceding emperor. According to Tameakira, this episode serves to warn future emperors against possible temptations and shows Murasaki’s desire to avert any problems of this sort that might arise in the future.
Because of his insistence on the tale’s didactic function, Tameakira is often seen as adhering to conventional Confucian readings of The Tale of Genji. But he actually emphasizes that the tale was not meant to influence people to adopt the Ways of either Buddhism or Confucianism. Thus although Motoori Norinaga deplored Shika shichiron in Genji monogatari Tama no ogushi (1796) for extolling Murasaki’s Confucian ideology, Tameakira did not in fact write a simplistic Confucian apologia for The Tale of Genji.
According to his epilogue, Tameakira completed Shika shichiron after discussing The Tale of Genji with Keichū and being encouraged by the similarity of their interpretations of the tale.18 However, Shika shichiron diverges considerably from Keichū’s Gleanings of Commentary on Genji (Genchū shūi, 1696), which highlights the beauty of the text over any possible instructional utility.19 Nonetheless, their shared attention to historic detail and their willingness to debunk previous theories may well be attributed to their mutual respect for the diligent study of historic records. Tameakira’s use of the Murasaki Shikibu Diary to correct previous theories of dating and the like underscores his complete trust in it. For him, the diary is a sincere, unfiltered record of her thoughts and actions. Tameakira’s Seven Essays also gave rise to the first commentaries on the Murasaki Shikibu Diary.20
SATOKO NAITO
Essay 1: Possessing Both Intellect and Virtue
As a rule, intellect and virtue are seldom found combined in a single individual, even in men. In women it is even rarer, both in Japan and China. Those who have discussed Genji have spoken only of the superior intelligence [eisai] of Murasaki Shikibu, without mentioning her true virtue [jittoku], which not only obscures the true significance of the tale but also is an insufferable affront to Murasaki Shikibu.
I, Tameakira, have carefully read The Tale of Genji and the Murasaki Shikibu Diary. Considering her character and pondering the truths of her life, I find that in Japan there exists no one who can even compare with Murasaki. She was a sagacious woman [kenpu] of both intellect and virtue.
Now, if I were to cite one or two examples [of this intellect and virtue] in the tale, there is Lady Murasaki, who is gracious and magnanimous, yet mature and prudent; the Akashi lady, proud and yet possessing great reserve; Hanachirusato, never one to envy; the Fujitsubo Empress, who is quick to repent her errors and takes vows early in life; Asagao, who deeply values her good name; Tamakazura, who cleverly deflects the amorous advances of various men; and the Agemaki lady, who vows to live in accordance with her father’s last wishes. Such are the several female virtues [futoku] depicted in the tale. In particular, in the Ranking of Women scene [in the “Hahakigi” chapter], frivolity is scorned and true virtue is praised. These frequent admonitions, though they represent the beliefs of Murasaki herself, are related as if they all were tales of the time. But because she does not make an overt display of her wisdom, those who read the tale think it is simply composed of gossip. This may be compared to the puppets of the theater: the audience remains unaware of the talents of the puppeteers maneuvering them. A reading of Murasaki’s diary reveals this same general principle.
Tameakira here quotes passages from her diary in which Murasaki Shikibu speaks against criticizing others and laments the unflattering reputation that precedes her.21
To those who had not yet met her, Murasaki Shikibu had the reputation of being lascivious, a poetaster who enjoyed showing off her scholarship, a woman who could be expected to speak ill of others. But upon meeting her, to their surprise they found her a truly gracious and thoroughly modest woman. These traits can also be inferred from various passages in The Tale of Genji.
Her Majesty too has often remarked that she had thought I was not the kind of person with whom she could ever relax, but that now I have become closer to her than any of the others. I am so perversely standoffish; if only I can avoid putting off those for whom I have genuine respect.22
Because Shikibu was such a gentle and placidly serene person, the Empress became very close to her as well. Those who only feigned goodness and gentility were likely envious and vexed by her.
The key to everything is to be pleasant, gentle, properly relaxed, and self-possessed; having this as the foundation, grace and composure will naturally follow.23
This passage merits the most careful consideration. Virtue is the foundation; intellect, what follows.
Tameakira praises her humility in refraining from writing even the simplest Chinese characters so as not to appear to flaunt her learning. He also urges “both men and women to take note of her discretion [yōi].”24
In studying the several foregoing passages, we find that they concur with the admonitions set forth in the Ranking of Women scene. The good manners and prudence of Lady Murasaki and other characters in fact represent the standards that Shikibu herself adhered to, yet her tale appears as if she were portraying people of the past. From this we may infer that Shikibu herself was a virtuous woman.
Moreover, after [her husband] Nobutaka died in Chōhō 3 [1001] and Murasaki Shikibu was living as a widow, because she was an intelligent woman she was summoned to serve both Jōtōmon’in [Shōshi]25 and Takatsukasa-dono. And while she was at court, we can see how Shikibu tactfully evaded Michinaga’s amorous advances.
Tameakira quotes a famous series of exchanges, said to have taken place between Michinaga and Murasaki Shikibu, comparing her favorably with Gen no Naishi no Suke and claiming that if unhindered by practical concerns, she would have taken vows as Utsusemi did.26
Again, [Murasaki’s] diary says in Kankō 6 [1009]:
His Excellency happened to see that Her Majesty had the Tale of Genji with her. Out came the usual comments, and then on a piece of paper that held some plums he wrote:
It is well known to be a sour fruit,
but who could pass or stay his hand who saw such ripeness here?
And he handed it to me.
Who is it who can be so glib
about the reputation of a fruit that has not yet been tasted?27
Indeed, Shikibu has no intention of being “plucked” [orarumajiki] by any man other than her husband, Nobutaka. Again it says:
One night as I lay asleep in a room on the corridor, there came the sound of someone tapping at the door. I was so frightened that I kept quiet for the rest of the night. Early next morning I received:
All night long I cried and cried
Even louder than the water rail tapping at your door.
To which I replied
Apparently insistent, the water rail
just tapped an instant; how galling to have opened it!28
As the months and years passed, Michinaga’s advances never ceased. We can well imagine how in such an unpleasant situation, she must have longed to take vows. We must both respect and pity her for her constancy. Those who have not carefully studied her diary surmise that she was Michinaga’s mistress; this is despicable. It is a world of slander and lies we live in. This shows Shikibu’s womanly virtues.
For her intellect, there has been much earlier praise, but it all refers only to the tale and does not consider the author’s diary, so here I shall at least show an example.29
Tameakira cites accounts of her reading Chinese texts as well as her nickname “Lady Chronicles” [Nihongi no mitsubone].30
Were she a man, she would have been a scholar without rival, past or present.
Then Her Majesty asked me to read with her here and there from the Collected Works of Po Chü-i [Bo Juyi], and, because she evinced a desire to know more about such things, we carefully chose a time when other women would not be present and, amateur that I was, I read with her the two books of Po Chü-i’s “New Ballads” in secret; we started the summer before last.31
We know from this diary that Shikibu left the neck [of her kotos untouched,] propped up between the cabinet and a pillar in her study, and instead read Chinese texts. She understood well the Nihongi, Records of the Historian [Shiji], and Bo Juyi’s Collected Works. Aside from these, she was familiar with the details of the Three Histories and Five Classics, the sutras and commentaries of the Buddhists, various families’ records [among which it seems that she carefully read the records of Prince Shigeaki],32 collections of Japanese poetry [from the Kokinshū and various family collections], old romances [Utsuho, Taketori], incense blending, drawing, sewing, and other womanly accomplishments. This we can infer from her diary and also from the content of her tale. Noting how much brighter she was, to an unusual degree, than her brother Nobunori, we realize what a brilliant and studious young girl she was, gifted with natural intelligence. Those stacks of books that filled those two great cabinets—what were they? We would very much like to know. This tale, written by a brilliant woman possessed of both virtue and wisdom, ought not to be lightly overlooked.
Essay 2: The Seven Characteristics That Determine Her Nature
In Essay 2, Tameakira outlines what he regards as the seven defining charactering of Murasaki Shikibu’s character: (1) her father, Tametoki, was a high-ranking scholar; (2) her brother was also a poet; (3) she read both Japanese and Chinese and practiced music and the arts; (4) she was versed in the full range of court ceremonials; (5) she was born in neither great antiquity nor the degenerate age of later years; (6) she visited an exceptional number of famous places and historical sites; and finally, (7) she was a woman of the middle rank.
If The Tale of Genji had been [written] by a man, neither the conception nor the wording of the text as a whole would have been as complex as they are. Because she was a woman, she could write about things no man would ever think of. Even among women, those of the highest classes know nothing about the ways of those in the lower ranks. Even more so, how could those of the lower class possibly imagine the lives of those above them? Because Shikibu happened to be born into the middle ranks, no corner of life lay beyond the reach of her imagination. This is the seventh point.
Because Shikibu possessed all seven of these characteristics in combination, she was able to produce this tale even without the divine support of the deities of Ishiyama Temple.33 The myth that she was an incarnation of the Bodhisattva Kannon is likewise a foolish notion made up by people of later times, of whom it must be said that they did not understand Shikibu. It is extremely rare to find anyone with all seven of these characteristics, which is why there has never existed, before it or since, a tale as excellent as The Tale of Genji.
Essay 3: Chronology Corrected
The diary says, in the entry for the Eleventh Month of Kankō 5 [1008]:
Commander of the Gate Guards of the Left Kintō poked his head in.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Would our little Murasaki be in attendance by any chance?”
“I cannot see the likes of Genji here, so how could she be present?” I replied.34
From this passage, it is apparent that the tale was completed before this time, that it already was in circulation among members of the court, and that it was also read by men. Kintō refers to Shikibu as “little Murasaki.” Again, in the sixth year it says: “His Majesty was listening to someone reading The Tale of Genji aloud.”35 As this was added to the record later, from here forward it becomes difficult to determine the year [in which the incidents recorded occurred]. Again in the same year, it says: “His Excellency happened to see that Her Majesty had The Tale of Genji with her.”36
The Kakaishō37 says that the tale was written at the beginning of the Kankō era [1004–1013]; this must be based on the preceding passages. In any case, it was likely written at the end of Chōhō [999–1004] or the beginning of Kankō, after Shikibu had been widowed, returned to her [father’s] home, and had time on her hands. In Kankō 5, when Michinaga was forty-three years old, he made amorous advances toward Shikibu, and in the following year he knocked on the door of her room on the corridor, lamenting [her coldness]. Considering this, she could not have been very old at this time. Conversely, as she herself claims that she has aged, neither can it be that she was a young woman in her prime. We must keep in mind, however, that in A Tale of Flowering Fortunes [Eiga monogatari], in the “Tenjō hanami” chapter, Empress Takeko [999–1036], at age thirty-one or thirty-two is said to have “passed her prime.”38
In both Japan and China, it has always been that those of incisive intelligence can accomplish anything very quickly, and so this tale, too, must have been written with greater ease than might be imagined. The obtuse nature of later people led them to think there was something strange and mysterious [about this accomplishment] and to formulate such foolish notions as that she was the Bodhisattva Kannon, that her father, Tametoki, had helped her [write Genji], or that Michinaga revised the tale. None of these people knew Shikibu, and careful consideration of what they wrote requires us to declare it nonsense.
I was asked: “In the ‘Ura ura no wakare’ chapter of Chōtoku 2 [996] in A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, it is written, in praise of the good looks of the Palace Minister Korechika [974–1010], that ‘the Shining Genji, too, must have looked like this.’39 Thus this tale must have been written and in circulation at court before the Chōtoku period [995–999] for Akazome Emon to have compared Korechika with Genji. What do you say to this?” In reply, I say: “It is precisely because there are so many passages of this sort that I maintain that Akazome Emon is not the author of Flowering Fortunes. This work would appear to have been compiled by a person living in an age later than both Akazome and Murasaki, someone who gathered old records and patched them together with interstitial additions to make a single whole. The ‘Hatsuhana’ chapter was pieced together from fragments lifted directly from Murasaki’s diary. The diary contains critiques of Akazome Emon, Sei Shōnagon, Izumi Shikibu, Sai’in no Chūjō, and others; these cannot have been be divulged during their lifetimes. Besides, how could Akazome ever have purloined the diary of a contemporary colleague and then used it, just as she found it, to write the ‘Hatsuhana’ chapter? We must consider this carefully. What is more, the ‘Nunobiki no taki’ chapter [of A Tale of Flowering Fortunes] records the reign of the Horikawa Retired Emperor [1079–1107]. Had Akazome been alive then, she would have been a hundred and ten years old. I have yet to hear of anyone living such a long life. Although there is much further evidence that Akazome did not write the A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, [to recount] it would be tediously long, so I will omit it. Instead of being led astray by unfounded theories and false transmissions, we should simply read with close attention.” When I said this, my questioner departed with a perplexed look on his face.
Essay 4: Writing Like No Other40
Both the poetry and the prose of The Tale of Genji are far different from those of the old style found in the Man’yōshū, Kokinshū, Ise monogatari, Taketori, and the like. Serene and easily graceful, Genji epitomizes the refinement of this land. No one who reads it could ever weary of it. Indeed, nothing surpasses Genji in all of Japan’s literature. The work as a whole has that air of gentility possessed by those of wealth and rank, and it is written in the refined language of the court. Nonetheless, throughout it we encounter those who have taken Buddhist vows and retreated to mountain temples, and we are shown the marketplace and the countryside as well as poverty and sorrow. Every chapter depicts the myriad emotions of women. Such are the portrayal of human feeling and the descriptions of scenery that we feel as if we are face to face with that very person and as if we were visiting that very place.
In overall form, the tale is a narrative, and thus there is the introductory style, the conclusive, the descriptive, the analytical, and the epistolary [styles]; we can find in Genji these various different styles. In particular, the Ranking of Women scene in “Hahakigi” is uncannily well done. In the past, when I was examining the several divisions of this passage, [I found that] it employs a number of Chinese narrative devices. Following an introduction, there is refutation, acquiescence, discussion of essentials, and discussion of tangentials. It moves from the coarse to the detailed and ranges from the mundane to the refined; from the complex it reverts to the simple, and there are “great changes and sudden obstacles” and “retroactive reflection and foreshadowings.” The flow of the text is measured and magnanimous, its force smooth and tactful. These qualities are found not only in the Ranking of Women passage but also throughout the entire text. It is similar to the Record of the Historian, the Zhuangzi, and works by Han Yu [768–824], Liu Congyuan [773–819], Ou Yangxiu [1007–1070], and Su Shi [1037–1101]. For something written by a woman, it is extraordinary and wondrous; Shikibu must truly be deemed a brilliant woman, without peer, past or present.
It has long been the custom to speak of Murasaki and Sei Shōnagon as two of a kind. But Sei Shōnagon’s talent is so narrow and slight and her intellectual pretensions so obvious that her work is often distasteful. These two women can hardly even be compared….
A certain person said to me, “Shikibu’s writing does not convey historical fact; instead, she has left us a useless work of fiction. It is by no means unthinkable, is it, that at worst it may well incite lasciviousness?”
In answer I say: “This is an unfortunate problem that would not exist were she a son of Tametoki. Had she been a man, she would have compiled a comprehensive national history, which would have served as a model for myriad ages to come. Although a woman, she was of great intellect, and therefore, being unable to accomplish what she wished, she instead wrote a tale of a sort appropriate to a woman, which teaches the proper ways and prudent behavior of a woman’s world; this is precisely what Shikibu did. To judge from a careful reading of both her tale and her diary, it was not in Shikibu’s character to do anything excessive. She disdains displays of cleverness. Had she written anything resembling a historical record, it would have been deemed unseemly for a woman. It would have been excessive. That would have been a willful display of cleverness. It would have been at odds with the modesty that is her nature. Yet if one insists on a historical record, then her diary is precisely such a record. The ‘Hatsuhana’ chapter of A Tale of Flowering Fortunes is lifted almost entirely from this diary, which must once have comprised volumes that spanned several decades, but unfortunately they no longer exist. I believe the diary that survives today is but a fragment of the whole.”
Again, this person said, “Those who read this tale and grasp its meaning may well reconsider their own behavior and, be they men or women, themselves may become wantons.” Yet if we are to call this tale lewd, must we then bring the same charge against the love poems included in our own land’s anthologies? The encouragement of good and the chastisement of evil is one of the very virtues of poetry; yet though our forebears have taken great pains to teach us this, we seem to find it difficult, feeble-minded as we are, to grasp their admonitions. Fortunately, however, this tale does not hew to the ideals of Confucianism or Buddhism from far-off lands, but adheres to the familiar customs and feelings of Japan. In this way it praises and admonishes implicitly and, in its deeper sense, deplores wanton behavior, leaving an impression of profound seriousness. Those who do not know Shikibu wrongly accuse her of being lascivious. Those who do know her realize how obvious is the instructional nature of the tale. Thus this tale should be revered as a classic of the Way of Poetry. When I asked if this were not so, the person in question nodded in agreement and allowed that as The Tale of Genji is born of so frightfully flawless a person of our own land, it would be difficult to criticize it; that her gentle admonitions are like medicine to combat a disease, are indeed the true essence of the Way of Poetry.
Essay 5: The Author’s True Intent
This tale portrays human emotion and the ways of the world, depicting the manners and customs of the upper, middle, and lower levels of society. Without openly expressing either praise or blame, it allows readers, through the medium of the amours it depicts, to discern for themselves what is good and what is bad. Although the principal aim of the tale is said to be the moral instruction of women, it also contains much that serves naturally to admonish men. I will cite one or two examples:
The Kiritsubo Emperor, placing love above all else, devotes excessive attention to his Mistress of the Wardrobe. Paying no heed to his people’s warnings, he treats her in ways that could set a dangerous precedent. His behavior becomes a source of anguish for his courtiers and others of high rank, as well as for everyone else in the land. Doesn’t the author depict this shameful lack of virtue on the part of the Emperor as a lesson for future Emperors?
The same Emperor thinks of Genji as his own private treasure. From the time of his coming-of-age ceremony, he treats him as if he were in no way inferior to the Crown Prince and even hints that he might name him his heir apparent. Is this not unseemly behavior for an Emperor?
In her overbearing and arrogant manner, Kokiden purposely takes no notice of the Emperor’s grief [following the death of the Kiritsubo Mistress of the Wardrobe]. Where in this is the imperial virtue that we expect of an Empress? All women who read this, from the rank of Empress on down, should reflect on their own manners and mores, lest they, too, earn the reputation of a “wicked Empress.”
The entire Ranking of Women scene in the “Hahakigi” chapter is an admonition for women, which every woman who calls herself a woman should be made to read and put into practice. And clearly there are lessons to be learned from the “Utsusemi” chapter, from the way Nokiba no Ogi plays go with her robes untied in the inner chambers and in her propensity to oversleep. Utsusemi, however, is so uncompromisingly chaste that she is determined to remain unaffected [by Genji’s advances] throughout; in this, she represents Shikibu’s own beliefs. And then that poem that Yūgao writes with such casual charm on the fan that she favors—this is in many ways open to criticism for amorous laxity. Because she is so excessively pliant, naive, and deficient in deep consideration, she is ultimately led to ruin. Any woman who hears of this should ponder what it means to be loved by a libertine.
As for Genji, his unbridled frivolity leads him to dally with Yūgao and eventually cause her death, while he himself falls from his horse at the riverbank and suffers the utmost despair—a clear admonition against the furtive amorous activities of noblemen. Nor is the sin of Koremitsu, who accompanies him on all these adventures, at all light; those who serve in close attendance on their lords should ponder this. As we read the chapters that follow with this point of view in mind, we see the deeds and thoughts of the characters in all of them as if reflected in a mirror. Neither the good nor the bad is hidden, for this is no frivolous work; instruction in the ways of the world was the author’s main purpose.
In particular, there is the incident in which Genji violates Fujitsubo and she bears his child, who then ascends the throne, allowing Genji to take control of the government. This story is truly a mirror for courtiers, which should send shivers of fright through those of the rank of Prime Minister and below. I shall discuss this further in the next essay. This being but a tale of times past, the teller incurs no crime; and if the people of the land are moved to reflect on it, it will serve as a gentle warning—as the old saying goes, like soft cotton used to strangle someone. As it says in the “Hotaru” chapter:
It isn’t that they describe the events of some person’s life exactly as they happened. Rather, there are some things that happen as people go through life, be they good or bad, that one cannot simply see and let pass, or hear of and pay no heed to. One cannot shut all these away in one’s heart, but wants to pass them on to subsequent generations—and so sets out to tell a story.41
This appears to reflect Shikibu’s own opinions, presented in the guise of a discussion of old romances; her tale, therefore, cannot be deemed naught but a fiction. Throughout, it depicts the lives of people who lived in that world, during which it conveys praise of the good and admonition of the bad. Those who fail to recognize its true intent and see The Tale of Genji as lascivious literature are the lowest of the low. And those who appreciate it only for the pretty poems and flowery phrases are like those who praise only the decorations on the hilt of a sword and fail to mention the keenness of the blade. Taken as a whole—with all its fine writing and its cautionary qualities—it is a poetic work endowed with both beauty and benefit. Given this, it would be no exaggeration to term it a “Golden Classic of the Way of Poetry.”
Essay 6: The Crux of the Entire Work42
Regarding the incident [onkoto] involving the Reizei Emperor: there are some who say, “Genji is just a fiction; don’t even bother discussing it.” Others say this is a very delicate matter and do their utmost to conceal it. Still others say it is such an unseemly subject that no part of the tale should be read at all. And none of them has any inkling of Shikibu’s true intent. I, Tameakira, shall set forth my own views here and await the opinions of later scholars regarding their merits and demerits.
In “Kiritsubo” it says:
Genji was not free to live at home [at his father-in-law’s residence], for His Majesty summoned him too often. In his heart he saw only Fujitsubo’s peerless beauty. Ah, he thought, she is the kind of woman I want to marry; there is no one like her! His Excellency’s daughter was no doubt very pretty and well brought up, but he felt little for her….43
In this way, the author foreshadows what she will finally describe further on as an illicit affair. In the “Wakamurasaki” chapter, [Fujitsubo’s] pregnancy is revealed; in the “Momiji no ga” chapter, the child is born; in the “Aoi” chapter, he is named Crown Prince; and in “Miotsukushi,” he ascends the throne and thereafter is known as the Reizei Emperor. Then in the “Usugumo” chapter, the monk in night attendance upon him secretly reveals to him for the first time that he is in fact Genji’s child. Yet having no one whom he can ask, he himself decides to investigate past precedents [in the histories]:
[H]e plunged into his studies more ardently than ever in order to peruse all sorts of works. These taught him that while in Cathay there had been many such irregularities, some open and some concealed, no example of the kind was to be found in Japan. And even if something like that happened, how, if it was kept well hidden, could knowledge of it have been passed on?44
In the latter “Wakana” chapter, when Genji finds out about Kashiwagi’s clandestine meetings with the Third Princess, he ponders the matter thus:
In early times as well there were those who might violate an Emperor’s wife, but that was different. No wonder liaisons like that may occur, when there are so many people in palace service waiting on the Sovereign. What with one thing and another it must happen quite often. Even a Consort or an Intimate may err for this reason or that. They are not all as serious as they might be, and strange things happen, but as long as no obvious lapse comes to light the man can carry on as before, and it may be ages before anyone finds out…. When a woman wearies of giving her service meekly and all too respectably, even to the Emperor himself, she may yield after all to urgent pleas, love where she is loved, respond when she feels she must…. He realized bitterly that despite his fury he could not afford to show it, and he thought of his father, His Late Eminence. Did he really know all the time and just pretend not to? That, yes, that was a fearful and a heinous crime!45
Considering the manner in which she writes this, Shikibu seems to be describing her own feelings about what she has seen and heard, whether they were events of the past or of more recent times. The significance of these finely nuanced reflections is far from shallow; the reader should not dismiss them lightly. Such women as the Nijō Empress in Ise monogatari [who is visited by the Middle Counselor Narihira], Kyōgyoku Miyasundokoro in the Gosenshū [who had an affair with Prince Motoyoshi], Lady Kazan in A Tale of Flowering Fortunes [who was amorously involved with Lord Sanesuke], Lady Reikeiden, and Lady Shōkōden [both of whom were said to have been involved with Lord Yorisada] all were women who lacked a steadfast heart and allowed themselves to be swayed by their own desires. But fortunately—it gives me great pleasure to record—there is no evidence that this led to any untoward consequences [mono no magire] for our land.
Tameakira next cites the case of Emperor You (J. Yūō, 795–771 B.C.E.) of Zhu (J. So), who was rumored to have been illegitimately conceived.46
Although this occurred in another land, it is nonetheless upsetting. It need hardly be said that in this country of ours, from the time we were vouchsafed this divine land down to the present day, there has been one continuous imperial line through all the myriad ages, without a single aberrance. Yet in ages to come, among the Dames of Honor [nyōgo] and Mistresses of the Wardrobe [kōi], there may well be some who lack strength of will and could thus cause a disruption in the imperial line. In thinking so far ahead and seeing the need gently to warn against this, Shikibu, though a woman, in the beauty of her character combined with the strength of her scholarship, displays a degree of perspicacity equal to that of the greatest Confucian scholars.
And then, the way in which the principle of heavenly retribution is demonstrated in the case of Kaoru is identical to what is seen in Helinyulou [J. Kakurin gyokuro, ca. 1252]. As this single incident is the crux of the entire work, those who discuss this tale must grasp its significance. Some say that discussing a tale written as casually and lightly as this in terms of such profound principles goes against Shikibu’s intentions. In reply I would say: In the Ranking of Women scene it says, “Why should anyone, just because she is a woman, be completely ignorant of what matters in this world, public or private? A woman with any mind at all is bound to retain many things, even if she does not actually study.”47 This is a salutary bit of writing.
If even a single generation of our imperial line were tainted by Ariwara or Fujiwara blood, it would be a tragedy for our land of the sort that moved Lu Zhonglian [J. Ro Chūren] to throw himself into the Eastern Sea. Genji’s clandestine affair with Fujitsubo, resulting in the birth of the Reizei Emperor, was indeed a transgression that should never have taken place. Yet though the sin of Genji’s licentiousness is great, still it did not in any way disrupt the imperial line. Genji and Reizei are the legitimate son and grandson of the Kiritsubo Emperor; they both are of the bloodline of the Jinmu Emperor. They are thus to be worshipped at the Imperial Shrine in Ise, as is the populace of the entire realm obliged to submit to their rule. Even so, Reizei’s son is passed over and the reign is returned to the proper line of the Suzaku Emperor—a majestic piece of writing, is it not? After all, which is the graver, and which is the slighter sin: a momentary moral misstep or a long-term disruption of the imperial line? Even though it was likely a difficult decision, speaking as subjects, we must be delighted that [the Emperor] chose to pretend ignorance of Genji’s sin so that the imperial line could continue undisrupted. Shikibu’s principal intention here merits careful consideration. Would someone as profoundly prudent as Shikibu, in a tale that would circulate in the court at that time, have written of such things without due consideration? This fictional admonition, so very carefully crafted, must have served to prevent in advance any future disruptions, for it was not impossible that such dubious things could happen. It is frightening, is it not, to call to mind such clandestine affairs as that of the Nijō Empress in Ise monogatari? Genji’s infatuation, mentioned earlier, is entirely the work of Shikibu, who is determined to demonstrate in full detail the consequences of a clandestine affair. Seeing the incident with Kaoru, any loyal subject should be on his guard. In China, there have been many such untoward incidents. For example, we see in Records of the Historian the often-repeated rumor that Qin Shihuang [J. Shikōtei, 259–210 B.C.E.] was in fact fathered by a minister, Lü Buwei [J. Ryōfui, d. 235 B.C.E.].
In [Murasaki Shikibu’s] diary, it says, “The key to everything is to be pleasant, gentle, properly relaxed, and self-possessed; having this as the foundation, grace and composure will naturally follow.”48 We should also note how in the tale the clandestine affair between Genji and Fujitsubo at first is described in gentle terms, but ultimately is shown to be a frightful transgression that should never have been committed. What is more, we see in her descriptions of the womanly virtues of several characters throughout the tale, as well as her appraisal of Akazome, Shōnagon, Izumi, and others in her diary, that Murasaki is a woman whose character is marked by prudence and dignity. This tale being the product of such a mind, those who see it as no more than something agreeable but inconsequential fail to understand Murasaki. Without searching out the tale’s true intent, its attractions amount to no more than pretty poems and fine phrases. Although its true intent is meaningful instruction, it is skillfully wrought in a feminine style, written as though it were but a smooth piece of storytelling. One is reminded of what Jakuren [d. 1202] once said, that even a ferocious wild boar may seem a gentle creature when described in a poem as being asleep in its nest. I was then asked, “If what you say is true, then it would appear that the teachings of earlier scholars concerning how one should read Genji are soundly conceived and not ill written, wouldn’t it?’ I replied, as before, that this tale is a classic of the Way [of Poetry] and a treasure to those poets who compose waka. The person in question again nodded his head in agreement.
Essay 7: Some Mistaken Traditions Rectified
Since times long past, there has been no authoritative explanation of how this tale came to be written, just one person after another mouthing one notion after another as it happened to occur to him. It is no wonder that the commentaries question which of these theories might be correct. As I, Tameakira, consider them carefully, it seems to me that none are true and all are false.
First of all, there is the story that Tametoki constructed the larger out-line and had his daughter fill in the details. This is the notion of some hopeless person who knows nothing whatever about literary structure. An examination of the content of the several chapters [of Genji] reveals many things that no man could ever have thought of. Not only is it thoroughly feminine, but the flow of the prose is such that the whole could have been written by only one person. Anyone who reads the work in its entirety with attention to detail will not be misled on this score. Furthermore, as I noted earlier, the author is a woman of superior intellect and virtue, who possesses the seven characteristics [listed in Essay 2], given which, it is clear that she could easily have composed this tale without any help from her father. What is more, her diary is a work written entirely on her own, with no assistance from her father, and yet its prose is in no way inferior to that in the tale. Those who read her diary carefully should be even less tempted by these blind theories….49
In reading the tale and the diary, we come to understand Shikibu’s personality and can calculate the time [when she was in service at court]. We note then, for instance, that when the High Priestess requested a new work and the Empress summoned Shikibu and asked what they might offer, the newly arrived Shikibu, rather self-importantly, apparently replied that they had nothing interesting and she herself would write something new. It is said that she then took it upon herself to compose this tale. This story can only be the blind notion of someone who has no idea how humble a person Shikibu was, someone ignorant of how she pretended she could not even write the number “one.” It was only after the early death of her father, Tametoki, and the death of her husband, Nobutaka, that she went to court. She remained at home as a widow, and to while away the tedium of those days, she began writing the tale. When word of this reached the court, she was summoned to service, after which she came to be known as Murasaki Shikibu.
Tameakira then criticizes the Kakaishō for its account of the myth that Murasaki Shikibu began writing the “Suma” and “Akashi” chapters on the fifteenth night of the Eighth Month at Ishiyamadera.
The Kakaishō was written by a gentleman of exalted rank, so it is rather worrying that he would write passage after passage of groundless fabrications. But because he is such an exalted personage, those who read his text trust it. Whereas whatever I myself might have to say, even if once in a hundred times I am right, is likely to be dismissed as slipshod. Still, one must say what one thinks—otherwise one’s stomach feels so bloated that it might burst—so I shall just let my brush do its work.
Murasaki Shikibu would have been too young to have known Takaakira before he was banished from the capital; she may not even have been born by then. The legend that her retreat to Ishiyama coincided with the period in life when she was suffering from the loss of her friend cannot be true.
Even if the scenes in the novel had appeared to her, as if out of the blue, and she had begun writing “Suma” and “Akashi” so that she would not forget them, how could anyone living in a later age know what went on in Murasaki’s mind? This is simply laughable. It should be obvious that the tale was written beginning with the “Kiritsubo” chapter. When I was young, I believed the story told in the Kakaishō, and wishing to see the copy of the Hannyakyō in her own hand, I went to stay with a monk I knew at Ishiyama. When I questioned him about this matter, he told me immediately that it was false. So whose idea was it, and when was it that they decided to call [one of the rooms in the temple] the “Genji Room,” display a portrait of Shikibu there, and install a desk and inkstone in the style of her time?
Tameakira also denounces the Kakaishō’s claim that Michinaga contributed an epilogue to The Tale of Genji, as well as the Sairyūshō’s foolish attempt to demonstrate that the tale covers the historical period beginning with the Daigo Emperor.
This nitpicking manner of reading is inappropriate to fictional tales. It might be suitable to a discussion of A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, but we can hardly countenance such an understanding of The Tale of Genji.
Then, too, it says, the author’s intent was to lead people to the path of benevolence, reason, and the five constant virtues, and ultimately to enlighten people concerning the principle of the Middle Way and the nature of True Existence, thus establishing the root of renouncement of this world. This, too, is impossibly pretentious. And in various other commentaries, it says that the tale is based on the homilies of the Zhuangzi, that it derives from the Records of the Historian or the Commentary of the Scribe of the Left [Zuo zhuan], that it is modeled on the sixty volumes of the Tendai treatises, or that it adheres to the Four Noble Truths. The various schools of Confucianism and Buddhism each hew to their own doctrines and try to make Shikibu conform to them in ways that she never intended. There are, indeed, many points in which, by chance, Genji happens to conform to the principles of Confucianism or Buddhism, or may call to mind earlier legends from either China or our own land. But her true intent was not to illustrate the Ways of Confucianism and Buddhism. Nor was it to provide a historical record. This should be understood by anyone who holds forth on the subject.
Regarding the Hōbutsushū’s account of Murasaki Shikibu appearing in peoples’ dreams:
This is naught but a hallucination within a dream; it is a waste of ink even to discuss it. But among the Buddhist poems in the Shinchokusenshū [no. 602], we find:
Upon sending “The Parable of Medicinal Herbs” to be dedicated at rites of bonding with the Buddha, for the benefit of Murasaki Shikibu.
ACTING GRAND COUNSELOR MUNEIE
nori no ame ni ware mo nuren mutsumashiki / wakamurasaki no kusa no yukari ni
By the rain of the dharma, would that I, too, might be blessed, for my close
affinity with the tender young murasaki sprouts.
It seems that this poem was composed as an offering during a day of copying sutras for use in rites of dedication. Also written at this time were what are called “Proclamations” [hyōbyaku]. There were those who believed that these evanescent dreams indeed represented reality and thus charged Shikibu’s tale of instruction and admonition with the sin of Falsehood.50 This is indeed despicable and stems from the delusion of shallow-minded people.
Although the various commentaries set forth such theories, I have cited only one or two as examples of the rest. Uji Dainagon monogatari is an old text, but even this is full of blind myths, while those theories that were developed later are even more replete with unreliable matter. Yet if, as we must, we first consider [Murasaki Shikibu’s] character as it is reflected in the tale and then ascertain the facts as they are set forth in her diary, we shall not often go wrong.
TRANSLATED BY SATOKO NAITO
(Genji monogatari Tama no ogushi)
Motoori Norinaga’s (1730–1801) preface to The Tale of Genji: A Little Jeweled Comb is one of those texts so central to its culture that its influence extends far beyond the small community of those who have actually read it.51 For its compelling critique of The Tale of Genji, scholars rightly deem it one of the most original works of criticism in the history of Japanese literature. Its wider renown, however, grows not out of the argument of this critique but out of the informing premise on which it is founded, Norinaga’s mono no aware ron. As the locus classicus of this well-known phrase, Tama no ogushi has become a major contributor to the store of concepts—and clichés—that the Japanese nation as a whole draws on in construing and defining itself. Tama no ogushi is thus a work with a double identity: its importance is determined as much by what it has been imagined to say about the Japanese people as what it actually says about The Tale of Genji.
How, then, are we to explain this appeal to two so widely disparate audiences, this capacity to serve two so widely disparate ends? We are often told that the character of a thinker and the character of his thought are intimately related, and it is true that Norinaga was a man capable of both rigorous academic reason and monomaniacal chauvinist passion. Why these two traits should appear in such an unhomogenized blend in Tama no ogushi, however, is probably better explained in terms of the accidents of its textual history than the psychology of its author.52
Norinaga’s interest in Genji extended throughout his literate life, yet it was only in his early years as a scholar that he wrote on the subject; it never became the principal focus of his scholarly activity. When Norinaga first read Genji is not recorded. He may well have begun while still in his teens, for the first written evidence of his reading it, a miscellaneous collection of memoranda on the meaning and orthography of words in Genji,53 dates from his twentieth (1749) or twenty-first year (1750). Thereafter, during his years in Kyoto (1752–1757), where he had been sent to study medicine, he records the copying and purchase of a few works of criticism of and commentary on Genji. And finally, just before he returned home to Matsusaka, he invested the substantial sum of 1 ryō, 3 bu, 210 mon in a complete twenty-five-volume set of Kitamura Kigin’s Moonlit Lake Commentary (Kogetsushō). This text, which survives, replete with interlinear, marginal, and appended annotations, is the text he used in teaching Genji throughout his career.
Norinaga’s career as a teacher and a scholar began almost immediately after his return to Matsusaka. In 1758, aged twenty-nine, he began his first series of lectures on Genji, which met nine times a month and continued with interruption through the next eight years. It was probably in the same year that he completed his first treatise on poetry, Ashiwake obune, and composed the very short treatise Aware ben, in which he adumbrates his later use of the term aware.
Over the next five years, Norinaga’s scholarly activities seem to have continued along the same paths, for in 1763, aged thirty-four, he completed two more substantial treatises: Isonokami sasamegoto, on the art of poetry, and Shibun yōryō, on Genji. These two early works were not to be harbingers of his subsequent career, however, for shortly after their completion Norinaga experienced something of an epiphany upon meeting the renowned scholar Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769), who happened to pass through Matsusaka on his way to the Great Shrine at Ise. Norinaga presented himself at the inn where Mabuchi was lodged, and the grand old man granted him an audience, during which he urged the young scholar to take on a task that he himself was now too old to begin: the study of the ancient chronicle Kojiki. So overwhelmed was Norinaga that thereafter he made the Kojiki the principal object of his scholarship, a life’s work that culminated in 1798, only three years before his death, in the completion of his massive commentary Kojiki den.
Throughout these thirty-five years, however, Norinaga continued to lecture to his disciples on Genji with undiminished diligence and frequency. His second series of Genji lectures was begun in 1766, barely a month after the conclusion of the first, and continued through 1774. The third series, begun immediately after the New Year festivities, lasted from 1775 until 1788. At the time of Norinaga’s death 1801, the fourth series had advanced as far as the “Wakana” chapters. Genji was still very much on his mind, but had it not been for another fortuitous encounter, he might never again have written on the subject.
Matsudaira Suō-no-Kami Yasusada (1747–1807), lord of the Hamada domain in the province of Iwami, was a daimyo with a strong scholarly bent. How he had learned of Norinaga’s work is not recorded, but his interest was sufficiently aroused to send one of his vassals, an accomplished Confucian scholar named Ozasa Mino (or Min; dates unknown) to Matsusaka to study directly under Norinaga. Ozasa’s reports must have been favorable, for while en route to the Great Shrine, Yasusada himself summoned Norinaga to his lodgings and talked with him “into the night.” Three days later, on his return from the shrine, Yasusada again summoned the scholar. This time, Norinaga arrived at midday, lectured to Yasusada on the “Hatsune” chapter of Genji throughout the afternoon, and thereafter the two conversed until about ten that night. Norinaga found his lordship to be “a staunch devotee of ancient studies [kogaku] and a diligent scholar.” Yasusada, too, must have been favorably impressed, for during this long meeting, he seems to have offered to finance the publication of a commentary on Genji, which he asked Norinaga to compile “as quickly as possible.” This was an offer he could not refuse, yet neither was he willing to devote so much time to the project that it would prevent him finishing his commentary on the Kojiki. Norinaga’s solution to this problem was to cobble together a commentary on Genji from bits and pieces already at hand, some of them written more than thirty years earlier. In this way he was able to complete the manuscript of Tama no ogushi within a year of Yasusada’s original offer.
Chapters 1 and 2 of Tama no ogushi, his general introduction to the “new” commentary, are revised versions of the two volumes of Shibun yōryō, first written around 1763 and modified in minor ways, mainly for stylistic reasons, sometime before 1779. Chapter 3 is a chronology of Genji, consisting of a schematic diagram and a chapter-by-chapter listing of indicators of the passage of time and the ages of the characters. This work originally was entitled Genji monogatari nenki kō and was probably begun shortly after Norinaga’s return from Kyoto. Chapter 4 is a list of textual emendations to the Kogetsushō, which he compiled in the course of two collations of his teaching text in 1763 and 1772. Chapters 5 through 9, constituting about three-fifths of the work, are made up of commentary on the fifty-four chapters of Genji. The sources of this material cannot be identified with complete certainty. “Kiritsubo” and “Hahakigi” are annotated quite extensively; the notes to these two chapters alone fill all of chapter 5 and half of chapter 6. The remainder of chapter 6 is devoted to “Utsusemi,” “Yūgao,” and “Wakamurasaki,” following which Norinaga appends a note explaining that
in annotating the foregoing five chapters I have omitted nothing whatever that I have thought should be said, but the several chapters that follow are extremely long. With so much else to do, I am unable to carry on and, for the time being, must stop here. It distresses me terribly that I must do something so unseemly, but I am nearing seventy and know not but what I may die today or tomorrow. Here at the end of my years, the chief work in my life, my commentary on the Kojiki, remains unfinished.54
It is hard to know what moved him to insert this lament, but it appears to indicate that his annotations to “the foregoing five chapters” were composed at some earlier date, and it explains why the remaining forty-nine chapters of Genji are annotated so sparsely. Many of the entries for subsequent chapters appear to be drawn directly from slips of paper pasted into the copy of the Kogetsushō that Norinaga used in his lectures.
How, then, does this history of the compilation of Tama no ogushi affect the way we read Norinaga’s criticism? Above all, it means that we must keep constantly in mind that the ideas Norinaga expresses in Tama no ogushi were formulated in the earliest years of his study of literature and remain substantially unchanged in the finished version of his Genji commentary. This is particularly true of the idea for which Tama no ogushi is best known, the so-called mono no aware ron. This term, which most often appears as an element of the phrase mono no aware o shiru, is so closely associated with Norinaga and so central to his critique of Genji that it is often taken for granted that he is the author of the concept, or at least was the first to use it in the senses that he assigns to it. Hino Tatsuo (1940–2003) has demonstrated, however, in a series of brilliant articles, that the phrase mono no aware o shiru was widely used in the popular literature of Norinaga’s day and that popular usage corresponds precisely with the sense in which Norinaga uses it, meaning “to empathize or sympathize with the feelings of others.”55 Hino notes, moreover, that after 1763, when Norinaga completed Shibun yōryō, he never again used the term until he refurbished this early work to serve as the prefatory chapters of Tama no ogushi. We can only speculate what might be the significance of these thirty-some years of neglect. But as Hino points out, Norinaga was very tenacious of his pet ideas and hammered them home with relentless repetition. It may simply be that mono no aware no longer seemed as important or as relevant to his current interests as it once had, that in Norinaga’s mind it was a youthful fancy that he had outgrown and to which he returned only as a matter of urgent editorial necessity.
If, then, the phrase that expresses the formative principle of Tama no ogushi did not originate with Norinaga, and apparently failed to interest him sufficiently to apply it in his later work, what is left to justify the high regard in which the work is still held? Attempts to explicate Norinaga’s mono no aware ron have mostly been of two sorts: endeavors to flesh out the denotational meaning of the term, and enumerations of the ways in which it is applied. Both unquestionably are needed.
Norinaga’s own definition of mono no aware is too cursory to serve as the foundation of a well-reasoned theory of literature. Aware, he tells us, derives from two ancient expletives, aa and hare, uttered in moments of overwhelming emotion, whether of sadness or joy, dejection or elation, disappointment or satisfaction. And mono is an affix that “broadens the reference of the word to which it is attached” (hiroku iu toki ni soeru kotoba), as in monogatari, in which “speaking” becomes “conversation” or “story-telling,” or monomi, in which “looking” or “seeing” becomes “gazing” or even “sightseeing.” To say that The Tale of Genji is a work of mono no aware identifies it unambiguously as a work of the literature of feeling. That claim, however, takes on significance only in specific contexts. Norinaga provides a vast array of examples, some highly judicious and some in which logic is stretched to the point of contradiction, and non sequiturs abound.56 His insistence that Genji is a work of mono no aware—written only to depict the varieties of human emotion (mono no aware), to acquaint the reader with the workings of human emotions (mono no aware o shirashimuru koto), and to depict people who are deeply sensitive to human emotions (mono no aware o shiru hito)—is often linked to counterclaims concerning what Genji is not. Genji is not a moral homily written to illustrate Buddhist or Confucian moral principles. Genji is not a guide to good governance. Genji is not a tale of moral dissolution to be kept out of the hands of impressionable young boys and girls. Genji is not a seditious work, depicting a taint to the imperial line of the sort that should never even be contemplated, let alone mentioned. These claims are a refreshing antidote to the views of Genji often voiced in the medieval commentaries that Norinaga so deplores. Yet, as Hino points out, when Norinaga goes on to assert that Genji was written to show readers the sensitivity to emotion to which they themselves should aspire, he in fact contradicts his own claim that the author has no didactic motives; he simply replaces one form of didacticism with another. But is this all there is to Tama no ogushi: a mixed bag of timely and intelligent observations given a certain thematic unity by gathering them under the rubric of mono no aware? I think not.
Norinaga can lay claim to yet another significant accomplishment, little noted in modern scholarship but that emerges with greater clarity in a comparative context. In eighteenth-century England, the era of “the rise of the novel,”57 there arose a recognition of prose fiction as “a new species of writing,”58 a distinct genre as worthy of consideration as epic, drama, or poetry. In the words of Norinaga’s near contemporary Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), the distinguishing feature of the genre is that it “exhibit[s] life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind,” as opposed to “the wild strain of imagination” of earlier ages.59 Johnson did not go so far as to give this “new species” a new name, but by the end of his century, a clear distinction had developed between the older sort of fictions and the newer—and better—sort. The former continued to be called “romances” or “old romances,” and the latter, in recognition of their supposed novelty, became “novels.” The differences between them were described succinctly and precisely by Clara Reeve (1729–1807), in The Progress of Romance:
The Romance is an heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and things. —The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the time in which it is written. The Romance in lofty and elevated language, describes what never happened nor is likely to happen. —The Novel gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural a manner, and to make them appear so probably, as to deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses, of the persons in the story, as if they were our own.60
In the light of these developments on the far side of the world, it is fascinating to note that every shift in literary perception and opinion that accompanied “the rise of the novel” is echoed in Norinaga’s treatise. The recognition of prose fiction as a discrete genre of literature (hitokusa no fumi), the distinction of a newer version from the old, the advocacy of a more appreciative attention to these fictions—they are all there in Norinaga, and then some. Individual elements of his argument may be foreshadowed (albeit faintly) in earlier commentary, but his deployment of them in concert as a unified theory, which he expounds at length and proposes as an alternative to previous characterizations of Genji, is totally unprecedented.
The very first words of the introduction to Tama no ogushi read: “In the Heian period [nakamukashi] there was a form of writing called monogatari, or ‘tales.’ These monogatari are what we would now call ‘stories’ [hanashi], or ‘tales of times past’ [mukashibanashi].” Further on, at the beginning of his discussion of“Larger Purposes,” he continues: “As I mentioned briefly at the outset, these tales [monogatari] possess a nature [omomuki] uniquely their own…. What the nature of all these tales is and why people read them can be learned from passage upon passage in chapter after chapter of The Tale of Genji.” Norinaga then cites a number of these passages, in which Murasaki Shikibu describes her characters as reading old romances to while away the tedium, to learn more about the world and the people who live in it, to experience vicariously what they could never do in real life—but decidedly not, Norinaga adds, for moral homilies and admonitions of the sort found in Confucian and Buddhist treatises. In this, Norinaga was a step or two ahead of the protagonists of “the rise of the novel,” for while Johnson still grounds his approval of the newer “familiar histories” in their ability to “convey the knowledge of vice and virtue with more efficacy than axioms and definitions,” Norinaga explicitly rejects this line of argument and appeals instead to the psychological processes of reading. In reading the old romances, he says, “readers put themselves into a situation from the past and enter into the emotions that moved people of the past [mukashi no hito no mono no aware o mo omoiyari]. They liken their own circumstances to those of the past and thus come to comprehend these emotions [mono no aware o shiri]. In this way, they find some solace in their melancholy.” Moving on from the satisfactions that fictions afford their readers, Norinaga proceeds to describe Murasaki Shikibu’s underlying motives in writing this greatest of all Japanese fictions. Here again, he bases his argument on the author’s own words and in a way that seems never to have occurred to any previous commentator.
In the “Hotaru” chapter of Genji is a remarkable passage often described as Murasaki’s “defense of the art of fiction.”61 It is, of course, integral to the dramatic structure of that chapter and not a piece of literary criticism. But so revolutionary is its argument, that the worth of fictions lies not in their service to any external goals but in their intrinsic qualities and the effects of these qualities on their readers, that it is usually—and probably rightly—taken to represent Murasaki’s own views on this subject. Almost equally remarkable, however, is the fact that for nearly eight hundred years, none of the countless commentators on Genji ever paid much more than minimal attention to this passage. Norinaga changed all this. He not only identifies the passage as one of great significance, but also quotes it in its entirety and explicates it “sentence by sentence,” devoting most of the section “Larger Purposes” to the project. Norinaga, of course, takes Murasaki’s declaration that “among these fabrications, some show us people’s feelings in so real a manner as to convince us that so life may well be” as a description of “the very essence of The Tale of Genji.” His logic is not impeccable; Murasaki’s aims here are nowhere near as grandiose as Norinaga’s. But elsewhere in his exposition of this fascinating passage, he makes scant reference to mono no aware and is judicious and untendentious in his reading of Murasaki.
This, then, is where Norinaga’s true genius lay: he listened to his author, recognized that her understanding of fiction was dramatically different from that of anyone before her time, and saw that no one before his own time had ever taken more than cursory notice of this. He then molded what he had learned from Murasaki into a theory of fiction that was unprecedented in eight hundred years of previous Genji commentary.
Unfortunately, however, it was with divided attention that he set about this task. Shibun yōryō, his source text, is not only an exposition of Murasaki Shikibu’s views on fiction, but also an elaboration of Norinaga’s conviction that “all Japanese poetry springs from a sensitivity to human emotion [mono no aware o shiru koto yori izuru], while Ise, Genji, and other such tales all depict these emotions [mono no aware o kakinosete], thus enabling us to comprehend them [hito ni mono no aware o shirashimuru].” The two concerns become intertwined and confounded; Murasaki is called on to corroborate Norinaga’s mono no aware ron, on the strength of which, mono no aware is identified as the essence of The Tale of Genji—an argument that is both circular and illogical. Even so, the results of this confusion are not as disastrous as might be imagined. The concept of mono no aware proved to be a convenient rubric under which a number of important but otherwise unrelated observations on the art of fiction could be grouped, and very little damage was done to Murasaki’s vision. But in attempting to unify all that he had to say under the rubric of mono no aware, Norinaga indelibly identified his entire treatise with that rubric; his extraordinary exposition of Murasaki’s even more extraordinary vision was all but lost in the shadow of mono no aware. Perhaps Norinaga himself came to realize this, for he concludes Shibun yōryō with an impassioned plea to the reader not to condemn him for the roughness of his writing, and in the years thereafter he ceased to mention mono no aware. Thirty-some years later, mono no aware reappears, but only as a reincarnation of its former self. Now in his late sixties, Norinaga’s priorities had shifted, and he was unwilling to spare the time to do more than edit what he had written as a much younger man. The preface to Genji monogatari Tama no ogushi thus remains, like its predecessor Shibun yōryō, a flawed masterpiece, a work of double identity, but nonetheless well worth our attention and admiration.
T. HARPER
sono kami no kokoro tazunete midaretaru / suji tokiwakuru tama no ogushi zo
To untangle the tousled strands; to seek out, set straight, and know aright
the minds and hearts of times past: this little bejeweled comb.62
TALES IN GENERAL
In middle antiquity [chūko] there was a form of writing called monogatari, or tales. These monogatari are what we would now call “stories” [hanashi], which is to say “tales of times past” [mukashibanashi]. In the Annals of Japan [Nihongi], the character 
, “converse,” is read monogatari. Perhaps the first piece of writing to be entitled thus was [The Tale of] the Bamboo Cutter [Taketori (monogatari)], for in the “Eawase” chapter [13:370] we read that “the progenitor of all tales, The Old Bamboo Cutter, was matched against ‘Toshikage’ of The Hollow Tree [Utsuho].”63 When and by whom this story was written, we do not know, but it does not appear to be of great antiquity. Probably it dates from the Engi era [900–922] or later. It is said that a great many of these old romances existed before the time of The Tale of Genji. The titles of several are known to us, but most of them seem to have been lost in later times. Quite a number from around the time of Genji and thereafter survive even today. In the “Keburi no nochi” chapter of A Tale of Flowering Fortunes we read of a monogatari-matching competition: “New works by twenty people were divided into two groups, Right and Left, and then were matched against each other. How fascinating it was!”64 From this we see that even then, tales continued to be written in great numbers.
Now, although they may differ in their particulars, all tales, of whatever sort, purport to relate actual events from the past. Some are based in minor ways on actual events that are altered in the writing. Some conceal the names of the persons concerned, or change them. Some are total fabrications; and once in a great while, one may describe an event exactly as it happened. Of these several sorts, however, the greatest number are fictions.
What, then, is the nature of [these tales], and why do we read them? Tales depict the myriad aspects of life: the good and the bad, the fantastic and the amusing, the intriguing and the moving [aware]. Some may even include illustrations of such scenes. In our idle hours they amuse us. When our hearts are troubled and we are beset by worries, they console us. They help us understand our lives in this world and the workings of the emotions [mono no aware o shiru].65 That tales treat principally of relations between men and women is for the same reason that we find so many love poems in the anthologies of every age: nothing so deeply engages human feelings as does love. I shall have more to say about these matters further on.
THE AUTHOR OF THE TALE OF GENJI
That this tale was written by Murasaki Shikibu is a matter of common knowledge. Since evidence of this is found even as early as in her own diary, there is no disputing the fact. There are, nonetheless, a variety of theories on this subject. First of all, in Uji no Dainagon no monogatari it says, “Genji was written by Tametoki, the Governor of Echizen, after which he had his daughter Shikibu fill in the details.” Even Kachō yosei quotes this, but the idea is unacceptable. Even the aforementioned commentary does not claim this as a certainty, but asks, “Which [theory] might be correct?”66 Moreover, in the Kakaishō we find, “The Chancellor [Michinaga] added a colophon in which he wrote, ‘This aged monk has made emendations.’”67 This, too, is in error, the reasons being as argued in some detail by one Andō Tameakira in his Shika shichiron.68 There are various other theories, but they are nothing but the inventions of men of later ages. In the end, it is difficult to accept any of them, other than that maintaining that Murasaki Shikibu wrote [The Tale of Genji]. There is also the theory that the ten Uji chapters were not written by Murasaki Shikibu, but this, too, is in error. It is obvious that they were written by the same person. And then there is the “Hidden in Clouds” [Kumogakure] chapter: owing to Shikibu’s sensitivity, we are told, only the title exists but no text; yet nowadays, we have even the chapter itself. This is the work of some later person—a wretched thing, hardly worth looking at. There is also “Dew on the Mountain Path” [Yamaji no tsuyu], which takes up where “The Floating Bridge of Dreams” [Yume no ukihashi] ends. It is somewhat better written than “Hidden in Clouds,” but still, it is the work of a later person and cannot compare with the work of Shikibu. She has no superior.
CONCERNING MURASAKI SHIKIBU
The genealogy of Murasaki Shikibu can be found in any of the several commentaries. Her father, Tametoki, is referred to variously as the Governor of Echigo or the Governor of Echizen. He appears as the Governor of Echigo in the headnote to a poem by Shikibu’s elder brother Nobunori in chapter 8 of Goshūishū [466]. His transfer from the governorship of Echigo to that of Echizen is mentioned in chapter 9 of Zoku yotsugi.69 He was thus first the Governor of Echigo and subsequently became the Governor of Echizen.70 [Murasaki’s] husband, Nobutaka, was descended in the fifth generation from [Fujiwara no] Yoshikado and was the founder of the Kajūji house. That Shikibu herself was a lady-in-waiting to Jōtōmon’in is indisputable, but I cannot imagine what evidence there might be that she was ever in the service of [Michinaga’s wife] Takatsukasa Dono. The notion that she was Michinaga’s mistress is utter nonsense.71
Now, the name Murasaki Shikibu is not her real name. As a rule, the names of gentlewomen—Shikibu, Shōnagon, Ben, Ukon, and the like—are all what we call “sobriquets.” I mention this at the outset for the benefit of beginning scholars. The real name of this particular person has not been handed down. Neither, as a rule, are the real names of most well-known gentlewomen of the past anywhere to be found. Even in the anthologies, they are designated by their sobriquets. Likewise, among those called Shikibu are those known by such names as Murasaki [Shikibu], Izumi [Shikibu], and Koshikibu. So many are called Shikibu that it becomes confusing; therefore, they are distinguished one from another in this way. They are so designated on the basis of their surname, the office held by their father or husband, or the name of their mother. Sei Shōnagon and Gō Jijū have the surnames Kiyowara and Ōe. Izumi Shikibu is the wife of Izumi no Kami Michisada. Koshikibu is the child of Izumi Shikibu. Ise no Taifu is the daughter of Ise no Saishu Sukechika. Daini no Sanmi is the wife of Dazai no Daini Nariakira. Thus Murasaki Shikibu, too, was originally called, after her surname, Tō Shikibu. Gō Jijū, too, should be read similarly, just as with Sei Shōnagon. They should not be read “Fuji Shikibu” or “E no Jijū.” With men, too, such names as Gō Sotsu, Tō Dainagon, and Zai Chūjō should all be read in their Sino-Japanese pronunciation.
Now then, as to the reason she should also be called Murasaki, the Kakaishō says: “According to one theory, she was originally called Tō Shikibu, but because this lacked resonance, it was changed to Murasaki for this word’s associations with the color of the wisteria flower.” Upon present consideration, this explanation seems but conjecture based on the fact that she is called Murasaki. How is it lacking in resonance to call her by her surname? Fuji is a word of exceptional elegance! Moreover, in Lord Kiyosuke’s Fukurozōshi, it says: “Concerning the name Murasaki Shikibu, there are two theories. According to one, she acquired the name as a result of the great profundity of her writing in the ‘Wakamurasaki’ chapter. According to the other, she was a child of the nursemaid of the Ichijō Emperor. And so when he sent her into the service of Jōtōmon’in, he said, ‘She is very close to me, please take good care of her,’ hence the name, which derives from the ‘Musashino’ poem.”72 Of these two theories, all the commentaries follow the first. Even in the Kakai[shō], it says: “Because her characterization of Lady Murasaki is far superior to that of all the others, in place of Tō Shikibu she was dubbed Murasaki Shikibu.” Upon present consideration, it seems indeed the case that “her depiction of Lady Murasaki is far superior.” But I fail to grasp how it could be “the result of the great profundity of her writing in the ‘Wakamurasaki’ chapter.” How is it that only the “Wakamurasaki” chapter is so exceptionally profound? Now it may well be that because she was the daughter of the Ichijō Emperor’s nursemaid, he said, “She is very close to me.” This does not have the ring of conjecture from hindsight. Shikibu’s mother appears in the genealogies as “the daughter of Hitachi no Suke Tamenobu.” I wonder, though, if any document says that this person was the nursemaid of the Ichijō emperor? This bears investigation. Now, when the Ichijō Emperor says that “she is very close to me” because she is the daughter of his nursemaid, this would mean that they were brought up as brother and sister by the nursemaid. “Derives from the ‘Musashino’ poem” means that [her name] derives from the poem in the Kokinshū, Miscellaneous I:
murasaki no hitomoto yue ni musashino no / kusa wa minagara aware to zo miru
For the sake of this one sprig of Murasaki, I look with fondness
on all the plants that grow upon the moors of Musashi. [Kokinshū 867]
From this it became the practice to refer to murasaki as [a symbol of] close relationship. In the Diary of Murasaki Shikibu, it says, “Saemon no Kami «Lord Kintō»73 inquired, ‘I beg your pardon, but is little Murasaki in attendance hereabouts?’ Hearing this, I thought, ‘I don’t see anyone who resembles Genji; why, then, should that lady «Lady Murasaki» be here?’”74 In the light of the text of this diary, the close relationship theory seems to me the more attractive. The reason is this: according to the close relationship theory, the name Murasaki [Shikibu] has no connection with Lady Murasaki, and thus it becomes humorous to refer to her as if it did. As a rule, a jest is humorous precisely when one refers to something in a novel way when it is least expected. But if her name were the result of her superior characterization of Lady Murasaki, what would be so novel about a jest that calls her little Murasaki?
CIRCUMSTANCES OF COMPOSITION
It is difficult to ascertain definitely the circumstances under which this tale was written. One story has it that when she was in the service of Jōtōmon’in, the High Priestess [of Kamo] asked whether they had “any interesting stories,” whereupon [Murasaki] wrote [Genji] for Her Ladyship. It is difficult to accept this, the reasons being as argued in some detail in the aforementioned [Shika] shichiron. Then, too, there are chronological contradictions in the claim that she knew Lord Nishinomiya [Minamoto Takaakira] well when she was young. The claims that she wrote it while in retreat at Ishiyamadera or that she wrote it on a copy of the Daihannya kyō are nonsense. The “fair copy by Lord Yukinari” was probably invented because of this man’s reputation as a calligrapher. And it is utterly impossible to accept the claim that when she was in retreat at Ishiyama, the reflection of the full moon on the lake, on the fifteenth of the Eighth Month, so suffused her mind that the plan of the tale came to her, and she began writing the “Suma” and “Akashi” chapters—this being the reason that it says in the “Suma” chapter, “Then they realized that it was the night of the full moon” [13:194]. But if the sentence “It was the night of the full moon” is to be taken as proof that she wrote it on the fifteenth, then is the sentence “Today was the Day of the Rat” in “Hatsune” [14:139] to be taken as being written when the first day of the New Year fell on the Day of the Rat? This is positively puerile. And the “Genji Room” at Ishiyamadera, as well as the image of [Murasaki] Shikibu and her writing desk and inkstone that are kept there—these all are the inventions of some overly ardent enthusiast who believed this story. Although Genji may well be modeled on the Nishinomiya Minister, the claim that Lady Murasaki is modeled on Shikibu herself is simply ridiculous. How could she ever have come up with such a presumptuous notion?
TIME OF COMPOSITION
In the Kakaishō, it says, “This tale was completed at the beginning of the Kankō era [1004–1011] and was in general circulation by the end of the Kōwa era [1099–1104],” and this has been accepted by several [subsequent] commentaries. To judge from the Diary of [Murasaki] Shikibu, it must indeed have been completed at the beginning of the Kankō era. These matters are considered in some detail in [Shika] shichiron, which says, “Its completion must surely have been either at the end of the Chōho era [999–1004] or the beginning of the Kankō era.” Yet there are those who say that because the passage in the “Uraura no wakare” chapter of A Tale of Flowering Fortunes that says, “I expect the Shining Genji must have looked just like this” dates from the second year of the Chōtoku era [996], the tale must have been in circulation before this time, and that to say that it was written at the beginning of the Kankō era is an error. This claim is itself incorrect. Had Flowering Fortunes been written by the second year of the Chōtoku era, then one might indeed make such claim, but since Flowering Fortunes was completed after the Kankō era, what problems does it pose? What, then, about its being “in general circulation by the end of the Kōwa era”? In the Diary, it is apparent that [the tale] was already in wide circulation within the palace while Shikibu was still in service at court. And what, too, about the theory that it found particular favor from the time of Lord Shunzei [1114–1204] and Lord Teika [1162–1241] onward? This is but another instance of unbridled conjecture, based on Lord Shunzei’s judgments in the Poetry Contest in 600 Rounds and Lord Teika’s words of praise.
THE TITLE OF THE TALE
Judging from the titles of the several tales [that still survive], most take their titles from the name of the principal character. The same is true of this tale. Since it depicts mainly Genji the Shining Lord, it is called The Tale of Genji. This lord is referred to by the name of “Hikaru” in “Kiritsubo,” where it says, “So incomparably radiant was his beauty that people called him the Shining Lord” [12:120], and “The name Shining Lord, it is said, was given him as a token of admiration by the Korean” [12:126]. It is wrong, I think, to regard these as two [contradictory] explanations. It simply means that the name Shining Lord by which people referred to him was given him originally by the Korean. And so it is that in chapter after chapter, the appearance of this lord is often praised using the word hikaru. In “Momiji no ga”: “His face seemed to shine with a radiance even greater than usual” [12:384], and “He emerged with the same radiance” [12:401]. In “Aoi” [13:18]: “They were overwhelmed by his radiance.” And there are many more. At the beginning of “Niou Miya” [16:11], this lord’s death is described as “after his radiance had been hidden.” In contrast, Kaoru is often praised with reference to his fragrance.
Now then, Genji is this lord’s surname. We see in “Kiritsubo” where he is made a member of the Genji [clan] at the time of his initiation ceremonies. In the tale, the words “Shining Genji” are found in combination in several chapters, such as at the beginning of “Hahakigi” [12:129], in “Wakamurasaki” [12:283], “Tamakazura” [14:123], “Kōbai” [16:42], and “Takekawa” [16:85]. And so there are those who say that the title of the tale should be The Tale of the Shining Genji and not simply The Tale of Genji, but this is not the case. As early as in the author’s own journal, it is called simply The Tale of Genji [Genji no monogatari].
HISTORICAL BASIS
Various commentaries claim that this tale is founded upon historical fact. Some say, for example, that although there never lived an actual Hikaru Genji, the character is modeled on the Nishinomiya Minister of the Left, Lord [Minamoto no] Takaakira [914–983]. But not every event in the life of every character depicted in a tale is patterned on an actual event. Most of them are fictional, with some among them based on a shred of fact whose particulars have been reshaped in the writing. Nor are the lives of people in them ever drawn on a one-to-one correspondence [with historical models]. Events in the life of Genji can be traced to events in the lives of several different persons of the past, both Japanese and Chinese, from each of whom the author has drawn some bit of information, according to no fixed plan. This “basis in history,” then, consists mainly of fragments of information in the mind of the author, not all of which can be identified precisely though subsequent research. Be that as it may, I make these few general remarks only because for ages the matter has been a topic of discussion.
In passing I might add that the “relics” one hears about, such as that of Yūgao in the Fifth Ward [of Kyoto], Genji in Suma, or Tamakazura in Hatsuse, are the work of antiquaries who failed even to realize that the tale is fictional. This is extremely naive and likely to mislead no one. I mention it merely for the benefit of beginning scholars, to put them on the alert.
MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS
The theory that describes this tale as “Genji in sixty chapters,” and says that it was patterned after the sixty Tendai volumes, is mistaken. Though this tale does have fifty-four chapters, there is no evidence that it ever had sixty; most likely it was the attempt to force a correspondence to the Tendai texts that led some to assert that it did. And even if it were to have sixty chapters, the matter of the Tendai texts would still be far [from proven].
It also is said that the arrangement of the several chapters follows that of the “Annals,” “Hereditary Houses,” and “Biographies” of Records of the Historian, but this, too, misses the mark. As a rule, when one speculates retrospectively concerning such matters, one is bound to find resemblances and correspondences, but this is mere coincidence; to argue that the one is based upon the other totally misses the mark.
The arrangement of chapters in synchronous groups and consecutive groups [tate yoko no narabi] is of no great use, but as this has been a matter of discussion since ages past, one should be familiar with it in a general way.
One should commit firmly to memory the genealogies of the characters of the tale. If one does not know the genealogies of the characters, one will frequently confuse them and fail to grasp the finer points of the work. But in the genealogies that have come down to us, there are many omissions and occasionally even errors. As readers have been confused by this, some of these have been corrected in later commentaries, but even now they are far from perfect. On account of this, I have long wished to study these matters in greater detail and construct new genealogies, but I’ve not had time to finish the job. Although a work of fiction, [Genji] has been composed so that the ages of the characters and the chronological progression of the chapters all jibe with one another; these matters thus must be set aright. This has been a subject of discussion since ages past, and thus we have the chronology drawn up by Lord Go-Jōonji.75 But this work is fraught with errors throughout, and in the Uji chapters his errors are particularly numerous. [Some] have been corrected in subsequent commentaries, but since mistakes still remain, I too have set down my own ideas, elaborating on them in some detail. I have also constructed a chart as an aid to ready comprehension of the chronological progress of the chapters.
It is said that in the past there were, broadly speaking, two lines of texts: the Kawachi-bon and the Aobyōshi. From among them, out of no consideration for its merits or demerits but simply because it is the text of Teika no Chūnagon, all of the more recent commentaries adopt the Aobyōshi. Now what is one to make of this? Any text whatever should be adopted or rejected strictly on the basis of its merits or demerits. The choice should never be made because of the person who compiled it. As it happens, each of the numerous texts now extant, whether printed or in manuscript, differs here and there in some small way from each of the others, and each has its own merits and demerits. I have collated several of these texts and, wherever they differ, selected the best version and noted it down. These notations are collected in a separate section further on [in the volume]. Each and every ancient text written in kana that has been handed down to the present day contains numerous scribal errors and omissions, and hence many passages are difficult to decipher. But this tale, perhaps because it has enjoyed such deep appreciation and wide favor with age upon age of readers, in comparison with lesser works, contains very few scribal errors. This is not to say, however, that no passages whatever appear mistakenly copied.
COMMENTARIES
The Kakaishō [ca. 1362–1367] ranks first among the commentaries. There are others that precede this work, but they are limited in scope and lacking in detail, whereas this work draws on a wide range of texts, Japanese and Chinese, Confucian and Buddhist. Everything in the tale, almost without exception, is explicated here. There is also the Kachō yosei [1472], which treats items either omitted or in error in the Kakaishō; this is in many ways an extremely useful work. These two commentaries are absolutely indispensable, yet they do often err. Their definitions of terms, in particular, are replete with errors and are not to be relied on.
Following these come the Rōkashō [1510] and Sairyūshō [ca. 1510–1513], which set right the errors in the Kakaishō and Kachō yosei and also present new ideas of their own. In addition, we have the Myōjōshō [ca. 1552], Mōshinshō [1575], Mingō nisso [1598], Bansui ichiro [1652], Kogetsushō [1673], and others. These contain a multitude of headnotes and other materials of various sorts, but all of them draw on the several earlier commentaries; they differ slightly one from another but present no new information.
Of these, the most widely used today is the Kogetsushō. This commentary draws extensively and judiciously from several commentaries of several sorts and cites this information in headnotes and interlinear notes, together with the author’s own theories and those of his teacher.76 And it is formatted in a manner that makes it extremely convenient to consult all this information.
There is also the Genchū shūi [completed 1698], a work in eight volumes by the monk Keichū [1640–1701]. This is not an exhaustive commentary, but a work that treats a variety of matters either omitted or in error in the other commentaries. The author, a man of uncommon brilliance, has many unusual new ideas. In all his writings he accepts none of the irresponsible notions of more recent times, but goes directly to the ancient texts for documentation, and in this way has achieved many new insights.
As mentioned earlier, there also is a volume called Shika shichiron. This work is not a commentary, but discusses the larger purposes of this tale; considers in some detail the genius and virtue of Murasaki Shikibu, citing evidence from her diary; and analyzes the many mistaken notions that have been handed down from the past. It is an unusual and individual work and should definitely be read. By and large, however, the author thinks only in terms of precedent from the works of Chinese writers and gives no consideration to the nature of these works we call tales. He fails to realize that tales are written principally to depict human emotion [mna]. Rather, he views tales as homilies, in the same spirit as do the Confucianists.
My own teacher, [Kamo no] Mabuchi [1697–1769], has also written a Shinshaku [completed ca. 1758] on this tale. I have known of this work for some time but so far have been unable to read more than the first volume, the “General Discussion,” in which his ideas resemble those of Keichū and Tameakira. It also cites material from [his own] Shinshaku.
There is also Genji gaiden by Kumazawa Ryōkai [Banzan], but this work is so thoroughly of the Confucian mentality that it is of no use in understanding the tale.
Besides these, there are doubtless other, lesser-known works. Of such guidebooks, there are many, but their treatment of the broader aspects of the tale aside, they seldom penetrate to the finer nuances of the language or the deeper aspects of the author’s intentions. So one ought not to depend only on commentaries for the general sense and content one-self with that. To probe more deeply into its intricacies is to find this a work of inexpressible savor.
“ALLUSIONS TO POETRY”
Those passages in the tale that quote a single phrase [ku] of poetry in order to convey the sense of an entire poem or to convey the sense of the words that follow that line are called “allusions to poetry” [hikiuta]. Most of these poems are identified in the Kakaishō, and those few that were missed appear in Kachō yosei. Those quoted in the later commentaries are taken from the Kakaishō and Kachō yosei. Of the allusions cited in the Kakaishō, however, some are mistaken and a great many are quoted incorrectly, while some confuse one poem with another, and some cite a spurious poem that is neither ancient nor identifiable. On the whole, [these citations] are extremely careless. As Keichū, too, has pointed out, it appears that whatever came to [the author’s] mind, whether mistaken or otherwise, he just jotted it down. And in subsequent commentaries, they simply cite the Kakaishō with no further consideration. This, too, is careless scholarship. One must always consult these works with great caution. Now, in the Kakaishō and other commentaries, there are passages marked “allusion unidentified,” whose source poems are not known. One hopes that these will be studied further and identified.
THE KOGETSUSHŌ
Among the numerous texts of this tale currently in circulation, most people find it convenient to read it in the Kogetsushō edition. In this connection, certain cautions are in order. In the first place: although for the most part the text given in this commentary is good, occasionally there occur passages that are corrupt or from which words are missing. I have collated [the Kogetsushō] with another text and noted all of these; they are as recorded further on [in volume 4]. Moreover, the punctuation of this commentary is extremely unreliable throughout and often mistaken. Frequently the meaning of the sentence is seriously distorted by its punctuation. One must be alert to this as one reads. There also are many errors in the indication of voiced and unvoiced syllables. The fact that kana spellings are invariably incorrect hardly calls for special mention, as this has become the norm in recent years.
What is more, many passages marked as “allusions” [hikiuta] are in fact not allusions. An “allusion” is a passage based on an old poem and is absolutely unintelligible without reference to that poem. Yet this commentary frequently fails to distinguish these from passages cited in the Kakaishō or Kachō yosei not as “allusions” but simply as quotations from old poems. It regards them all as allusions and marks them as such.
Furthermore, in the annotations, those that should be marked as deriving from the Kakaishō or Kachō yosei are invariably cited as quotations from some later commentary and are marked as deriving from the Rōkashō or Sairyūshō. It should be understood, therefore, that many explanations quoted from the Rōkashō or Sairyūshō derive originally from the Kakaishō or Kachō yosei.
I note here only these one or two points as they happen to come to mind. The reader may infer from them what further problems there may be. Owing to its convenience as the most widely read text, I have in most cases followed the Kogetsushō faithfully in compiling this [Tama no] ogushi, as, for example, in the page numbers cited in the several chapters [of this commentary].
LARGER PURPOSES
From of old, there have been various interpretations of the intentions of this tale. All, however, fail to take into account the nature of these works we call tales. They argue entirely in the idiom of Confucian and Buddhist texts, which is not what the author intended. Although there are, as it happens, points of chance resemblance and accord with Confucian and Buddhist texts, it will not do to seize upon these as characterizing the work as a whole. Its overall import differs sharply from works of that sort. Tales possess a nature uniquely their own. And, as I mentioned briefly at the outset, Genji stands out from the old romances as a work composed with more than ordinary seriousness. This matter will be discussed in detail later.
Now, the nature of these tales, as well as the reasons that people read them, can be learned from passages found in the various chapters of The Tale of Genji. Let me cite some of these and say a few words about each by way of explanation.
In “Yomogiu” [13:320], it says:
Frivolous old poems and romances and other amusements of that sort might have helped her to dispel the tedium and reconcile herself to such a life; but…77
“Such a life” is the forlorn and lonely life of Suetsumuhana. The reason such a person would find it comforting to read old romances is that in reading descriptions of others like oneself one finds it consoling to think that there are those in this world in just such dismal straits as one’s own.
In “Eawase” [13:368]:
His travel journals…were so touching they might have brought tears to the eyes of anyone of the least sensitivity, even someone seeing them for the first time with no knowledge [of the circumstances]. How much more so…
The “travel journals” are Genji’s journals from the time of his sojourn at Suma. “Seeing them for the first time with no knowledge” means that even someone with no knowledge of the events of the time, but now, seeing only the journal for the first time [would be moved]; how much more so the feelings of a reader who did know [the circumstances of Genji’s exile] and had lived through [those times].
In “Kochō” [14:175]:
In her reading of old romances she had gradually been learning something about what people and the world were like….
Since tales generally depict events of this world and the various thoughts and deeds of human beings, in reading them one naturally gains a good knowledge of life and comes to understand better the deeds of people and the workings of their emotions. This is the principal aim of those who read tales.
In “Hotaru” [14:202]:
The rains this year had persisted much longer than usual, and the ladies of the household were amusing themselves whole days at a stretch with illustrated romances.
And again [14:206]:
“My but these are very well drawn,” she said, looking at the pictures of the Tale of Komano.78 The scene of the little girl peacefully napping reminded the lady of herself in times past.
The “lady” is Lady Murasaki. “Times past” refers to Murasaki’s own childhood, which she here recalls.
In “Makibashira” [14:364]:
One knows from reading old romances that even the most loving parent, when his affections shift and he comes under the sway of another woman, may do the most heartless things. But this man….
Here they learn about life and the world from reading tales.
In the latter “Wakana” chapter [15:203]:
As always on nights when he was not at home, she stayed up late and had her people read tales to her. In all these old stories,79 these stores of worldly wisdom—indeed, even in those that tell of the most fickle and wanton men, and of women who take up with faithless lovers—everyone ultimately settles down with someone they can depend upon. How strange that I should continue to lead such an uncertain life.
The passage that begins “In all these” describes Murasaki’s feelings on having tales read to her. Kayō should probably be read waga yō, the wa having been missed out.80 “How strange” refers to her own situation.
In “Yūgiri” [15:401]:
Sometimes in the old romances, even if some outsider should learn the secret, they are still able to hide it from their parents.
When he had heard his young ladies reading old romances, there would always be some story of this sort, and he had dismissed them impatiently, thinking that such things could never actually exist; but now it must have struck him that there were indeed truly affecting little scenes to be found in hidden corners of this world.
In “Agemaki” [16:256]:
…if anyone ever wants to tell a tale of warning for posterity, ours will do nicely as an instance of the sort of woman they invariably depict as such fools in the old romances.
And again [16:214]:
It made them realize what a help these old turns of phrase [furukoto] are in giving vent to a person’s feelings.
“Old turns of phrase” here refers to poetry, but the same is true of old romances.
In “Yadorigi” [16:401]:
She had always been puzzled, in both reading old romances and hearing the experiences of others, why women in such a predicament worried so dreadfully about it. Now that it had happened to her, she realized that in fact it was no trifling matter at all.
Here the younger daughter from Uji, through experiences in her own life, comes to understand events in the old romances and realizes that such things can indeed happen. The “predicament” is that of a woman who frets over the infidelity of a man.
And further [16:404–5]:
Such festive and gay occasions as this are indeed a delight to behold, which is why they are described with such particular prominence in tales.
She recalled that in the old romances there were instances of just such strange goings-on as this.
And again [17:248]:
He could not help but liken his own situation to that beautifully drawn scene from The Serikawa Commandant, in which Tōgimi, of an autumn evening, despondent with yearning for the First Princess, sets out for her home. If only his own lady were as compliant, he thought to himself with chagrin.
These are Kaoru’s thoughts about the First Princess.
In “Tenarai” [17:300]:
“It seems like something out of an old romance,” he said.
In “Yume no ukihashi” [17:362]:
“I recalled the story in an old romance of someone who had been placed in a mortuary [coming back to life] and wondered, in amazement, whether just such a thing might have happened here….”
This, by and large, is the frame of mind in which tales are read. Readers put themselves into a situation from the past and enter into the emotions that moved these people of the past [mukashi no hito no mna o mo omoiyari]. They liken their own circumstances to those of the past and thus come to comprehend such emotions [mna o shiri]. In this way, they find some solace in their melancholy.
Thus we can see, from the foregoing descriptions in chapter after chapter, that the attitudes of those who read the old romances were the same as the attitudes of present-day readers of The Tale of Genji—and that these differ markedly from the attitudes in which most Buddhist and Confucian works were read.
Now then, Murasaki Shikibu’s intentions in writing this tale are set forth quite clearly in “Hotaru” [14:202–6]. She does not, however, state them outright, but speaks through Genji as he discusses old romances with Tamakazura, her underlying intention being to express the aims of her own tale. But the commentaries contain many errors, and the author’s underlying meaning is not readily apparent. Therefore, as a guide to readers of the tale, I will here quote this particular passage in its entirety and explicate it sentence by sentence so as to make clear its underlying meaning. The passage reads as follows:
There were a number of young gentlewomen who were no mean hands at the art and had collected all sorts of astonishing stories of people’s lives. Whether they were fact [makoto] or fiction [itsuwari] she had no idea, yet in none of them, it seemed to her, was there anyone who had experienced anything like what she had been through.
These are Tamakazura’s feelings as she reads the old romances.
The young lady in Sumiyoshi,81 at the time of her adventures, needless to say, and even in the present day, seemed still to be held in high regard; and her narrow escape from the Superintendent of Finance [Kazoe no Kami] did remind her of the ferocity of that Kyushu First Secretary [Gen].82
She reads the Tale of Sumiyoshi and compares it with events in her own past.
His Lordship could not help but notice all these things scattered here and there around the room.
“His Lordship” is Genji. “These things” are the texts of old romances.
“My, what a mess! You women seem to have been born only to be deceived by people, and without your ever even raising a complaint.”
From here forward, Genji is speaking to Tamakazura. These trifling tales, so full of lies, are a nuisance even to look at, he says; but you women, far from regarding them a nuisance, are quite fond of them. Indeed, you seem to have been born for the very purpose of being deceived. At first he teases her, belittling the old romances.
Now, from here on, the author’s underlying intent is to adopt the view-point of a reader of The Tale of Genji. At first, as in the belittling manner of this passage, her attitude is critical; then she then goes on, now praising, now belittling, while one after another she states the reasons why, ultimately, it would be difficult to do without these tales.
“You know perfectly well that there’s very little truth in any of these, and yet here you are, captivated and deceived by all this nonsense, copying away as if you were quite unaware that it is a stifling hot day in the middle of the rainy season and your hair is all in a tangle.” He smiled, but then went on.
From the fact that he “smiles,” we know that these words are spoken partly in jest. Thereafter, from “but then,” the argument takes a new turn. The underlying intent here is at first to find fault with The Tale of Genji: it is a trifling tissue of lies; to be taken in by it and to read it is but a waste of time.
“Yet without these old stories, how indeed would you while away this interminable tedium?”
His initial belittlement was just in jest; indeed, he says, if it were not for these old romances, there would be no way to while away the tedium. With the word “indeed,” he takes the part of those who enjoy tales. The underlying intent here is to respond to his previous criticism.
“For among these fabrications are some that show us people’s feelings in so real a manner as to make us feel that, yes, this is life as it really is. One thing follows another so plausibly that, although we know it to be sheer nonsense, still, for no good reason, we are deeply moved. And so we may see some lovely little lady stricken with grief and, in one corner of our minds, find ourselves quite caught up in her woes.”
Tales, Genji says, are for the most part fabrications, yet in them we find what strikes us as life as it really is. And though we know it to be a fabrication, still we find it affecting, and our feelings are moved. “For no good reason” refers to the futility of being moved by reading a piece of fiction. This is the same as when the preface to the Kokinshū speaks of [being moved by] “looking at a woman in a painting.”83 The “lovely little lady” is one seen in an illustration of such a scene in an old romance. To be “caught up” means much the same as to be “moved.”
The underlying meaning here is as follows: The passage “It shows us people’s emotions in so real a manner as to make us feel that, yes, this is life as it really is” describes the very essence of The Tale of Genji. This tale was written principally with the purpose of revealing to us, in just this way, the workings of the emotions [mna o shirashimuru koto]. I shall have more to say of this elsewhere. And from these words we realize that it is mistaken to claim that this tale was written to “encourage virtue and castigate vice.” I shall have more to say of this, too, further on.
“And then there are those tales of things we know could never happen, but that are told with such grandiloquence that they quite dazzle us. Upon a calmer hearing, we would only find them irritating, and yet how vivid are those scenes that do somehow chance to excite our interest.”
This describes yet another sort of old romance. Previously, we had the sort that describes “life as it really is,” to read of which we find moving, while here we have the absurd, of which we read only in wonderment. We are “dazzled,” she goes on to say, and they “somehow excite our interest.” “See” and “hear” in this passage amount to the same thing; we either read to ourselves or are read to by others. Generally, when something is just too outlandish or incredible, we are irritated when we read or hear of it again in a calmer frame of mind. Still, such things do have a certain fascination.
The underlying intent here is to divide the events depicted in The Tale of Genji into two sorts and to explain their significance. One sort is that discussed previously—“life as it really is”—which moves the reader’s feelings and reveals the workings of the emotions [mna o shirasetari]. For one’s “feelings to be moved” [kokoro ugoku] means one reacts to the emotional quality of a thing or situation [mna ni kanzuru]. Now, the second sort is the outlandish event described in this passage. The former, of course, is the principal concern of the tale; the latter sort is occasionally used merely to arouse interest. Thus in saying that “upon a calmer hearing, we would only find them irritating,” she is saying, in effect, that in this tale such absurd and astonishing events are extremely rare, whereas those that show us the workings of the emotions [mna o misetaru suji] are numerous. And those in this world who prefer books depicting the strange and unusual, and find uninteresting those that calmly depict the workings of the emotions [mna o misetaru], are insensitive dolts.
“Lately when I have stopped to listen to our young [Akashi] lady’s gentlewomen reading to her,”
Illustrated tales were considered a frivolous amusement for young girls—nothing a man would normally take the time to read. And so the author speaks here of his [Genji’s] stopping to listen to the women read. In reality, however, such was not strictly the case. Men, too, commonly read tales—so avidly, in fact, that they would even cite old romances on points of precedent. We see examples of this here and there, even in this tale. This is a bit of self-deprecation on the author’s part.
“I have been struck with what extraordinary tellers of tales we have these days. Such stuff could have come only from someone thoroughly accustomed to lying [soragoto], it seems to me, but am I perhaps wrong?”
Am I wrong, Genji asks, to think that a person who can write about something that we know does not exist and yet make us feel that it is so real that we are moved, or write about something we know never could have happened and yet arouse our interest in it, must be someone accustomed to lying and quite skilled at it? “But am I perhaps wrong?” means that although one might think this, such perhaps is not the case. The underlying intent here is to voice the doubts of a reader. The question posed is answered after this next passage.
“Isn’t it rather that it takes a person who is accustomed to lying even to imagine such things?” she said, pushing her inkstone away. “I myself accept them as completely true.”
These are Tamakazura’s words. The habitual liar, she says, as a matter of course doubts everyone and assumes everything they say to be a lie. Incidentally, the commentaries that say that this statement refers to Genji are mistaken.84 If she were speaking of Genji, she would use the deferential verb tamau, but because she uses the verb haberu, we know that she is speaking only of people in general. The words “I myself” are blurted out in a fit of petulance. She “pushes her inkstone away” because previously he had chided her for “copying away quite unaware that your hair is all in a tangle.” This is a part of her petulant manner.
“That was rude of me to run them down so, wasn’t it? As they say, everything that has gone on in the world since the age of the gods is recorded in them. The histories of Japan are really very one-sided. But these tales must be full of practical little details,” he said with a smile.
Here Genji speaks again. When Tamakazura says petulantly, “I believe they all are true,” he responds playfully, “Why, yes, indeed.” His attitude is clear from the fact that he smiles. The underlying intent here is to forestall the derision of those who might think that in praising tales too extravagantly and saying only good about them, she considers The Tale of Genji, with all its “practical little details,” superior to the official histories.
“It isn’t that they describe the events of some person’s life exactly as they happened. Rather, there are some things that occur as people go through life, be they good or bad, that one cannot simply see and let pass, or hear of and pay no heed to. One cannot shut all these away in one’s heart, but wants to pass them on to subsequent generations—and so sets out to tell a story.”
The transition from “he said with a smile” to this passage seems a bit abrupt. Perhaps this is due to the loss of a few words in between. Whether or not this is the case, the force of the transition would be clearer if one were to add a few words, such as “I spoke only in jest, of course, for in fact…” In any case, Genji’s previous denigration of tales does not at all represent his true feelings. He sees Tamakazura utterly absorbed in copying and reading tales and, just to be perverse, speaks ill of them. His jest extends only thus far; the passage from “the events of some person’s life” forward is intended as a genuine critique of tales. There are many, many tales of many different sorts, most of which are pure fabrication, but here, in order to make clear her motives in writing The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu speaks of it as a work depicting things that actually happened. “Be they good or bad…,” as with all mentions of good and evil, requires special attention. The subsequent reference to [description] in a “favorable” and an “unfavorable” manner is of the same sort. I shall discuss this matter in detail further on. The “things that one cannot simply see and let pass or hear of and pay no heed to” are those events one sees and hears of and cannot bear to shut away in one’s heart. All the things one sees and hears and experiences in this life, of whatever sort—be they joyous, delightful, strange, ridiculous, fearsome, irritating, distressing, or sad85—when one is deeply moved and struck by them, they cannot simply be shut away in one’s heart. We wish to tell someone or write them down and show them to someone. This sets our hearts at ease as nothing else does, and when the listener or reader is moved to feel as we have felt, our relief is even greater.
In “Kiritsubo” [12:106], it says:
“I should like very much to talk with you again, for it always clears away at least a small part of that darkness of a parent’s cares that we find so hard to bear; so please do visit me privately sometime when you are at leisure.”
In “Sawarabi” [16:338, 340]:
His Lordship the Middle Counselor [Kaoru] was longing to tell some-one the woes pent up in his heart and so set out to call upon the Prince Minister of War [Niou]…. Now comforting him so as to dispel the grief that burdened his heart, now soothing his overwrought feelings, [Niou] commiserated with him…so that bit by bit he [Kaoru] did in fact reveal to him the pent-up woes that seemed to choke his very heart, and he felt such comfort and relief as he had never known before.
In “Yadorigi” [16:413]:
“I [Nakanokimi] was so pleased to hear of all that you [Kaoru] did on my behalf the other day that it would be most regrettable, I thought, if I were to keep this to myself, as I usually do, and you were not to know at least some small part of the gratitude I feel.”
In “Tenarai” [17:328–29]:
She [Ukifune] had never been the sort who could put her thoughts into words when talking with others; much less was there anyone here close enough to confide in. She could only turn to her inkstone and, when her grief seemed more than she could bear, write down as best she could—as in writing practice—whatever came to mind.
From examples of this sort, the point should be clear. “Writing practice” here means amusing oneself by writing down with no forethought whatever comes to mind.
Now, the difficulty of shutting away in one’s heart anything whatever that has made a deep impression upon one remains the same in the present day, even for ordinary people with the shallowest of minds. For instance, when we see or hear of something marvelous or strange, even something that has nothing to do with ourselves, we are not content simply to muse, “how strange, how marvelous.” Invariably, we want to tell someone else as quickly as we can. The telling is of no benefit whatever, either to ourselves or to the other person, yet when we do so, spontaneously, we feel relieved. Such is simply the innate nature of human feeling—for which reason we are also moved to compose poetry.
The underlying sense is this: the previous passage that speaks of those “thoroughly accustomed to lying” is critical of this tale, but from here forward her intent is to answer that criticism. Murasaki Shikibu states clearly her own intentions in writing The Tale of Genji. This tale, she says, is indeed a complete fiction [soragoto], but it is not groundless nonsense. Although she does not state actual names or describe events as they actually happened, they all are events such as one sees or hears of every day in this world—events, be they good or bad, that so move us that we “want to pass them on to subsequent generations.” And since she cannot bear to shut these away in her heart, she writes them out in the form of a tale. We must realize, therefore, that fiction though it is, false it is not [soragoto nagara soragoto ni arazu]. One may wonder, thus, if these are all events that Murasaki Shikibu herself saw or heard of in her own time and wrote down, concealing only those persons’ names. But these are not necessarily particular persons or particular events precisely as they happened, but merely such things as one sees or hears of every day in this world, things that deeply moved her and that she could not bear to let pass into oblivion. Using them, she would create certain persons and events, assign thoughts and words to those persons, and thus express her own feelings.
Should one decide to describe someone favorably [yoki sama ni], one may select every good quality imaginable.
The tale being a fictional creation, when the author sets out to speak well of a person, she may select all the good qualities in the world, assign them to a single character, and speak of him only in the best of terms.
In its underlying sense, this passage applies to Genji—to his deeds and thoughts, needless to say, but also to his looks and appearance, his station and rank, and his brilliant career. She attributes to him every good thing in the world. This she does to deepen his emotional potential and thus move the reader more deeply [mna o fukaku shite yomu hito o fukaku kanzeshimen].
“Or instead one may defer to the tastes of others…”86
Considering the phrase that follows, we might expect the author to say here, in contrast to her remarks about the portrayal of a good character, “and should one decide to speak ill of someone….” But she does not. This is an interesting example of Murasaki Shikibu’s discretion. Generally it is best not to speak pointedly of people’s faults. Thus, without taking it upon herself to speak ill of anyone, she describes those things that are judged by others to be bad in accordance with that judgment. “Defer to the tastes of others” means she speaks not from her own inclinations but in accord with what others say. A similar use of the expression is found in “Momiji no ga” [12:412]: “He [Genji] deferred to his companion [Gen no Naishi] and exchanged playful jests with her.”
“…and gather in all manner of evils and marvels [ashiki sama no mezurashiki koto].”
“Evil” does not necessarily mean evil deeds as described in common-place Confucian and Buddhist works. This matter will be discussed in detail further on.
In its underlying sense, this passage applies to such characters as Suetsumuhana and Ōmi no Kimi, and encompasses as well everything described in unfavorable terms. This the author does, not with the intent of pointing out people’s faults and criticizing them; it is simply that in order to arouse the reader’s interest she from time to time writes of “evils and marvels.” Her intent we know from the phrases “defer to the tastes of others” and “marvels.”
Now, the two categories [of writing] mentioned previously, the one that “shows us people’s feelings in so real a manner as to make us feel that this is life as it really is” and the other, “told with such grandiloquence,” correspond to the present categories of “good” [yoki sama] and “evil” [ashiki sama]. The former category describes the spirit in which tales are read and the latter, the spirit in which they are written. When we consider all these in combination, we realize that the depiction of “all the good qualities imaginable” is for the purpose of “showing us people’s feelings in so real a manner as to make us feel that this is life as it really is” and thus to move the reader, whereas the “evils and marvels” are not integral to the tale, but are only occasional amusements. This we know from her previous statements that such things may “dazzle us,” but “upon a calmer hearing we would only find them irritating, and yet how vivid are those scenes that do somehow chance to excite our interest.”
But in neither case will these depart from the realities of this world we live in. Everything the author writes, be it good or be it evil, will be about the ordinary stuff of life, and not that which could never happen in this world.
“In other courts, their scholarship and their styles of writing differ from our own…”
“Other courts” means foreign lands. “Scholarship” means the learning a person acquires. In most tales, such learning is called “scholarship” [zae]. “Styles of writing” refers to the composition of their literature. The single word “differ” applies to both “scholarship” and “styles of writing.” To interpret this as meaning “that which is written by a person of learning” is contrary to the sense of this sentence.
Now, with regard to these differences in scholarship and differences in styles of writing: the nature of the scholarship and the styles of writing of foreign peoples, the author says, differ drastically from the nature of our own tales and the style in which they are written. For the most part, foreign writings run to stern, carping arguments over questions of good and evil, right and wrong. They probe into the principles of things, every man disputing against every other, and all of them affecting airs of omniscience. We speak of their tradition of poetic elegance and refinement, but it differs totally from the poetry of our own land. The innermost corners of the heart are left hidden and unspoken; they merely embellish the surface and carry on in a self-important manner. The tales of our own land, however, describe life in this world and the human emotions just as they are, with the result that they are often frivolous and insubstantial. But never are they pompous, pedantic, or overbearing. In this respect, their “styles of writing” differ from that of foreign lands.
“while even within this same land of Yamato, those of old are bound to differ from those of the present day.”
Texts that read “because” [nareba] in place of “while even” [naredo] are in error.87 Nor it it simply that Chinese books differ [from our own], but that even books of this same land of ours differ from past to present in their styles of writing. In saying “are bound to” [naru beshi], she means that these differences are no doubt the result of differences between times past and the present. The Japanese books of the past to which she refers are probably the aforementioned official histories and other works of that sort. These were written in Chinese, and the matters they describe are quite different from those in tales. “Those of the present” are tales, for by comparison with the ancient histories of Japan, even the old romances would have been works of a recent age. In its underlying sense, “those of the present day” refers to The Tale of Genji, which she was then in the process of writing.
“To be sure, there is a distinction to be drawn between deeper language and shallow language”;
In both instances, “language” [koto] means “writing.” “Deeper language” refers to foreign texts as well as to the official histories of Japan and other works of that sort—works written in Chinese, which young women find difficult to understand. “Shallow language” refers to tales, which are written casually in everyday language just as it is spoken, using women’s script. Since she does not simply say “deep” and “shallow,” but specifically mentions “language,” we know that she speaks [only] about the language in which these texts are written.
“yet to dismiss these [tales] totally as empty fabrications surely misses the point.”
“Misses the point” means much the same as the colloquial expression “mistaken.” In its underlying sense, everything from “It isn’t that they describe the events of some person’s life…” down to this point is in response to the previous criticism that tales are “empty fabrication” [soragoto]. This passage thus concludes that response. The passage that follows cites examples as evidence that tales should not be dismissed totally, even though they are fictions.
“Even the holy law that the Buddha in his beneficence has expounded for us contains what we call Expedient Truths [hōben].”
“Beneficence” signifies what in colloquial speech we would call “righteousness.” In the holy law that the Buddha in his righteousness has expounded to us, we should hardly expect to find untruths [soragoto], yet even there we find Expedient Truths. Why, then, she says, should not mere mortals, depending on the situation, fabricate events that never happened as a means to an end [hōben]? Although in a sense untruth and Expedient Truth may amount to the same thing, they differ in spirit. Untruth is what we call “falsehood” [mōgo], the utterance of which is harmful. Expedient Truth is meant to benefit the hearer. The underlying sense of the passage is: In the previous reference to “empty fabrication” [soragoto], the word was used to speak ill of tales. In reply, the author says that this tale cannot be called utterly untrue. It depicts all manner of things, both good and evil, for the purpose of revealing the workings of human feeling [mna o shirashimen tame], and thus is comparable to the Expedient Truths of the Buddha.
“which, owing to contradictions that occur here and there, the unenlightened doubtless view with suspicion.”
Those who lack the wisdom to understand the true nature of Expedient Truths in the teachings of the Buddha will be skeptical of the inconsistencies between what is taught in one place and what is taught in another. The underlying intent here is merely to pose an objection to this tale.
“In the Vaipulya sutras [Hōdōkyō] these are quite numerous”;
Expedient Truths, she says, are particularly numerous in the Mahayana [Hōdōbu] scriptures.
“yet in the final analysis they all share a single aim.”
Expedient Truths may appear to differ from the true teachings, yet ultimately they amount to the same thing.
“The disparity between enlightenment and delusion, you see, is comparable to the difference between good and evil in these people.”
The “single aim” is mentioned with reference to the “enlightenment” and “delusion” in this passage. The Buddha’s Law contains a variety of Expedient Truths, and though here and there these appear to contradict one another, in the final analysis they are the same as the true teachings and share the single aim of explaining the difference between enlightenment and delusion. From the phrase beginning with “these,” the foregoing illustration is applied to tales.88 “These,” then, refers to tales. “People” are the people in tales. As for the “difference”: the depiction of the difference between good and evil in the people in tales is like the explanation of the disparity between enlightenment and delusion in the teachings of the Buddha. Someone once asked me: “In that case, since tales, too, illustrate good and evil in people, ultimately this amounts to encouraging virtue and castigating vice, the same as in Chinese writings. Why then, do you say that tales differ so drastically from Confucian and Buddhist writings?” I answered: “As I said earlier, the good and evil depicted in tales are in many ways unlike the virtue and vice, right and wrong, described in Confucian and Buddhist writings, and thus they differ drastically in nature.” The underlying meaning here is precisely as it appears on the surface.
“Given its fair due, then, nothing whatever is utterly bereft of benefit, is it?” He made quite a case for tales as something of particular value.
“Given its fair due” means that although one might think of tales as trivial and worthless, when one considers the case in all fairness, one sees that this is not so. “Something of particular value” means that they are not trivial amusements but something indispensable. Although tales may be the playthings of young women, mere trivial amusements, Genji maintains, we could not get by without reading them. The underlying sense of this conclusion, from “tales” forward, has been carefully crafted by Murasaki Shikibu. Previously she has spoken of The Tale of Genji as if it were of some worth, yet in truth, she says, it is frivolous and worthless. With this humble touch, she sets her brush aside. The significance of this passage should be savored carefully until it is understood. As I have said repeatedly, this section of “Hotaru,” in its underlying sense, describes the author’s attitude toward writing this tale. And the manner in which she does this—with no proclamation of her general purpose at either the beginning of the book or the end, but by revealing it subtly and unobtrusively in a passage of no particular prominence—is simply magnificent.
Now the commentaries over the years have merely skimmed over this passage, explicating only its surface meaning without making clear the author’s underlying intent. They are fraught with errors throughout, but most particularly in their comments on the passage comparing tales with the teachings of the Buddha. This they explicate in the most pretentious manner, but only as it relates to the scriptures; not one of them hits on the significance of the comparison as it is cited here. Yet if the meaning of this passage is not made clear, neither will the import of the entire Tale of Genji be clear. I shall therefore point out just a few of the errors in these commentaries.
First of all, the passage that speaks of “the Buddha in his beneficence” is annotated with grandiloquent references to the Buddha illustrated with quotations from the scriptures, but all of them miss the point. In the tale, the word “beneficent” is used in its everyday sense of “righteous”; what more profound meaning than that might it have?
And then there is Expedient Truth. In the doctrines of the Lotus school, it may be perfectly correct to speak of the Lotus Sutra as Ultimate Truth and all previous scriptures as Expedient Truth. But to take this as the basis for construing the Expedient Truth of this passage as meaning the Lesser Vehicle of Buddhism is an egregious error. The Expedient Truths spoken of here are the sort found in all the scriptures. They are parables fabricated for the salvation of the masses. Discussion of the Greater and Lesser Vehicles, the Four Teachings, [and] the Five Ages is irrelevant here and quite out of place.
Furthermore, the expression “the unenlightened” can be used to refer to those who during the Buddha’s lifetime attended his meetings and listened to his sermons, but here it simply means those in this latter age who read or listen to the Buddha’s teachings. This we know from the inflection -beku, “doubtless [view with suspicion].”
“In the final analysis they all share a single aim” is interpreted as meaning “the teachings of the Five Ages all lead to the single truth of the Lotus,” or “ultimately all is Void,” or “the myriad dharmas are but a single Absolute.” All these are totally irrelevant to this context.
And concerning the passage that reads “the disparity between enlightenment and delusion,” they cite the story of the dragon girl who attained Buddhahood,89 and then claim that there is no distinction between enlightenment and delusion. This interpretation directly contradicts the statement that there is a “disparity,” and thus is a gross mistake. The “disparity between enlightenment and delusion” is likened to the “good and evil” of the people in the tale. But to claim that there is “no distinction” amounts to saying that there is likewise no distinction between the good and evil of the people [in the tale], does it not? In any case, this disregard for the meaning of the text, while interpreting it pretentiously only in terms of the scriptures, is utterly irresponsible.
The notion that Murasaki Shikibu was in receipt of a dispensation from the Tendai sect, was deeply learned in its doctrines, and thus wrote everything in accordance with the scriptures of Tendai is complete nonsense. This attempt to lavish praise on Shikibu only betrays her purposes. She herself had a strong distaste for women who boasted of their learning and affected airs of wisdom. We see evidence of this in chapter after chapter of Genji, and she often mentions it in her diary as well. Why, then, would she herself behave with such pomposity? More particularly, would Genji cite such frightfully abstruse points of Buddhist doctrine in a conversation with as young a lady as Tamakazura? Surely [the author] would never have written anything so inappropriate in this tale.
In the passage from “Hotaru” just cited, in which it speaks of “things that happen as people go through life, be they good or bad”; or “Should one decide to describe someone favorably, one may select every good quality imaginable. Or instead one may defer to the tastes of others, and gather in all manner of evils and marvels”; or the “good and evil in these people [in tales]”—the “good” and “evil” mentioned here and in a number of other passages in the tale are unlike the good and evil as usually described in Confucian and Buddhist texts, and thus, in many cases, it would be a mistake to understand the good and evil in tales strictly in Confucian or Buddhist terms.
First of all, good and evil extend to all manner of concerns and, even with regard to people, need not apply only to thoughts and deeds. There are good and bad in rank and social position, the noble being regarded good and the lowly, bad. In tales, those of high rank are called the “good people,” while even in colloquial speech we speak of “good family” or of “good or bad standing.” Needless to say, we speak also of good and bad looks or bearing. Again, long life, wealth, and prosperity and the acquisition of property all are good things; whereas short life, poverty, failure, loss of property, as well as illness, disaster, and the like are all bad things.
Nor is this so only in human affairs. Clothing, furniture, houses, and countless other such things all have their good and their bad. These [qualities] are by no means limited to the realm of human thoughts and deeds. Moreover, good and evil may change, depending on the thing, the time, or the situation. For example, an arrow is good if it penetrates its mark, while armor is good if it is impenetrable. On a hot summer day, that which is cool is good, while in the cold of winter, that which is hot is good. One traveling at night will consider darkness bad, but one seeking to conceal himself will consider moonlight bad. And so it goes in all matters.
Thus it is that even good and evil in human thoughts and deeds, although the contrast may not be so marked, will nonetheless differ according to doctrine. What Confucian doctrine considers good, Buddhist doctrine may consider bad; while what Buddhist doctrine considers good, Confucian doctrine may consider bad. And just as there is no absolute agreement here, some things in tales are considered good or evil, but do not accord with standard Confucian and Buddhist concepts of good and evil.
What sorts of thoughts and deeds, then, are considered good and evil in tales? Generally speaking, those who know what it means to be moved [mna o shiri], who have compassion, and who are alive to the feelings of others are regarded as good; whereas those who do not know what it means to be moved, lack compassion, and are insensitive to the feelings of others are regarded as bad. That said, there may appear to be no great difference from the good and evil of Confucianism and Buddhism; but to put the matter more precisely, there are many cases in which sensitivity or insensitivity to the feelings of others do not accord with Confucian and Buddhist concepts of good and evil. Moreover, even when the tale treats good and evil, it does so in gentle and moderate terms, rather than with utter obstinacy, as in a debate among Confucian scholars.
The main point of the tale being emotional sensitivity [mna o shiru], it often stands in opposition to the teachings of Confucianism and Buddhism. When one is moved by something, whether for good or bad, right or wrong, one’s feelings may run counter to reason. Improper though it may be to be moved, one’s feelings do not always follow the dictates of one’s mind. They cannot be suppressed, and one is moved despite one-self. For instance, Genji’s attraction to Utsusemi, Oborozukiyo, and Fujitsubo, and his affairs with these ladies, are, from the point of view of Confucian and Buddhist doctrine, immoral deeds of the worst sort. No matter how good he might be in other respects, he could hardly be called a “good person.” Yet in the tale his immoral deeds are given no particular prominence; rather, his great depth of feeling [mna no fukaki kata] is described again and again. Genji is depicted as the very model of the “good person,” possessing every good quality imaginable. This being the main point of the tale, the good and evil it depicts differ distinctly from those of Confucian and Buddhist writings.
Yet neither does it depict such immorality as good. The evil in Genji’s deeds would be plain to see even if it were never mentioned. There are books enough discussing sins of this sort; there is no need to seek such stuff so far afield as in a tale. Tales do not teach us that we must abandon earthly lust so that we may attain enlightenment or that we must regulate our lands, our households, and our persons, as do the stern teachings of the Confucian or Buddhist Ways. They are simply stories of life in this world and so leave aside questions of good and evil. Rather than concern themselves with such matters as these, they celebrate the virtues of understanding what it means to be moved [mna o shireru kata].
In this respect, the tale may be likened to a person who wishes to cultivate and enjoy the lotus flower, and so must keep a store of muddy water, foul and filthy though it may be. It is not the mud—the illicit love depicted in the tale—that we admire; it is the flower that it nurtures—the flower of the emotions it inspires [mna no hana]. Genji’s conduct is like the lotus flower, which grows up from the muddy water yet blooms with a beauty and fragrance unlike any other in the world. Nothing is said about the water’s filth; the tale dwells instead on Genji’s deep compassion and his awareness of what it means to be moved [nasake fukaku, mna o shireru kata] and holds him up as the model of the good man. I need hardly say more, but if I may cite one or two more examples:
In “Suma” [13:176], when Genji departs for that shore:
It was lamented by everyone; and some secretly reviled the court for it.
In “Akashi” [13:241]:
That year portents were frequently seen at court, and there was often great unrest. On the thirteenth day of the Third Month, on a night when thunder roared and lightning flashed and a violent rainstorm arose….
Since the previous year, the Empress Mother [Kokiden] had been tormented by malign spirits, and there had been frequent portents and disturbances.
And again [13:251]:
The Emperor’s eye ailment had lately grown much worse.
In “Yomigiu” [13:324]:
He was pardoned and would be returning to the capital; the whole land was in a tumult of joy.
In “Makibashira” [14:367]:
His Lordship, who had never been criticized by anyone….
We see from the “Akashi” passages that even the gods took pity on Genji. If the author had intended to convey a Confucian or Buddhist moral, why would she write about the gods, the buddhas, and the heavens taking pity on a man guilty of such grievous immorality?90
Again, three women are singled out as examples of good people: the Fujitsubo Empress, Lady Murasaki, and the Asagao High Priestess. Fujitsubo, for example, is praised in “Usugumo” [13:437, 438]:
Even among those ranked as the most exalted, she was remarkable for her unstinting kindness toward everyone, for there will always be those who, in the name of their own might, will bring grief to others. Never, however, was she guilty of the slightest license of this sort, nor would she allow anything to be done for her that might bring pain to the people…. Even the most ignorant mountain ascetics mourned her loss, and when the time came for her funeral, there was universal lamentation, for there were none who were not grieved.
If all this were meant in the same spirit as that of Confucianism and Buddhism, surely the author would not have depicted such a fine person in such an immoral situation as her affair with Genji, nor would she have cited her as an example of a fine person. Thus we can see how great the difference is between the good and evil in the tale and the good and evil of Confucianism and Buddhism. And when we consider along with this the case of Kashiwagi, which I shall cite further on, we realize that the main purpose of the tale is the depiction of the workings of the emotions [mna]. But our savants, one and all, down through the ages, have been so totally in thrall to notions taught in those severely dogmatic and doctrinaire texts of Confucianism and Buddhism that everything they think or say is twisted in some outlandish way. Never does it occur to them to investigate the nature of the tales themselves. Why, I wonder, did none of them perceive this thing I call mono no aware? The details of mono no aware I shall discuss in the next chapter.
Chapter 2
MORE ON LARGER PURPOSES
As to this “sensitivity to the power of things to move one” [mna o shiru]: first of all, speaking in general terms, aware originally was a cry of emotion such as we utter when we are moved by something we see, hear, or experience, just as in present-day colloquial speech we still exclaim aa! or hare! For example, when we are moved by the sight of the moon or the cherry blossoms, we may say, “Aa, what beautiful blossoms!” or “Hare, how magnificent the moon!” Aware is the combination of this same aa and hare; likewise, in Sino-Japanese texts, the characters 
are read aa. The same a- is found in such ancient [exclamations] as ana and aya. And the wa of wa ya and wa mo is the same as the ha of hare. In the speech of later ages, the word appare expresses the feeling aa hare and amounts to the same thing. For as time passed, the ha of ahare, through a process of euphonic change, came to be pronounced wa. In ancient times, however, in all such occurrences, ha was pronounced according to its original [sound value], as in [the Chinese characters for] “leaf” or “tooth.” This was, of course, the case with the word ahare, since it was an interjection formed from the combination of aa and hare. The explanation given in Kogo shūi [807], that “the meaning of aware is ame hare” [
], is quite mistaken.91 But from this text we can at least ascertain that in earlier times hare was pronounced the same as 
. Thus in ancient poetry, aware is a direct expression of emotion, the simple cry aa hare, as, for example: “The lone pine, aware…” [Nihon shoki, 24]; “Aware, the song of the bird…” [Man’yōshū 1756]; “Aware, this lodging of mine for these several nights…” [Kokinshū 984]; “Aware, he that in ancient days…” [Kokinshū 1003]. This is the origin of the word. Likewise with “‘Aware, aware,’ I sighed in an excess of grief…” [Kokinshū 1001], and “‘Aware, how dismal,’ I sighed as the days passed…” [Shinzokukokinshū 2038].
aware chō koto o amata ni yaraji to ya / haru ni okurete hitori sakuran
Is it because they would not share this word aware with the many,
that they bloom all by themselves, long after springtime has passed?
[Kokinshū 136]
The sense of this poem is that these cherry blossoms do not wish to share the words aa hare with the other blossoms; they want this said only of themselves, which perhaps is why they alone bloom after all the other blossoms have scattered.
From the foregoing, we can ascertain the basic sense of the word aware. Then, in slightly extended usage, we have expressions like aware to miru, “to be moved by the sight of…”; aware to kiku, “to be moved at the sound of…”; and aware to omou, “to be moved at the thought of…”; which mean that one reacts with the feeling aa hare to something that one sees, hears, or thinks. And an expression like aware nari indicates something of which one happens to feel aa hare. Then, too, in such expressions as aware o shiru, “to be susceptible to emotion”; aware o misu, “to show one’s feelings”; and aware ni taezu, “to be overcome with emotion,” aware is used to designate a situation of any sort whatever about which one may feel aa hare. And thus when one encounters something that by all rights should move one to exclaim aa hare, and one does indeed apprehend this emotional quality, we say of this aware o shiru that one is susceptible to emotion. The expression mono o awarefu/-mu, too, originally referred to the exclamation aa hare, as we know from phrases such as that in the Preface to the Kokinshū, kasumi o awarehi/-mi, “to be moved by [the sight of] the mist.”
In more recent times, aware has come to be written with the character 
92 and tends to be associated exclusively with a sense of deeply felt sadness [hiai]. But aware is not restricted to deeply felt sadness. Whenever one happens to feel aa hare—be it in joy, fascination, pleasure, amusement—this is aware. Hence it is used in combinations like aware ni okashiku, “touchingly amusing,” and aware ni ureshiku, “touchingly joyous”: one is moved by something amusing or joyful to feel aa hare, and this is described as aware ni. Now, the reason aware is often contrasted with joy, amusement, and the like is that of the many emotions experienced by human beings, joy and amusement are not deeply felt, whereas sorrow, misery, longing—any of the emotions experienced when things do not go as one would wish—are felt with particular poignancy. Thus these deeper feelings are distinguished as quintessentially aware. This also accounts for the fact that in common usage, [aware] refers only to deeply felt sadness. In “Wakana, jō” [15:65], for example, there is an analogous usage: “How I should like to see the plum blossoms [ume no hana] alongside the [cherry] blossoms [hana] at their peak.” The plum blossom is, of course, a blossom, but the cherry is contrasted to it as the blossom par excellence.
Now, in common usage the expression “to be moved with emotion” seems to be used only with reference to good things, but this, too, is incorrect. In dictionaries of Chinese characters, “emotion” [kan 
] is defined as being “moved” [dō 
], meaning that one’s heart is moved. Whenever one’s heart is moved, whether by something good or something bad, and one responds aa hare, then one is “moved to emotion,” which makes this character a highly appropriate rendition of aware. In Chinese, there is the phrase “to cause the demons and spirits to be moved with emotion” [
],93 which also appears in the Chinese preface to the Kokinshū. And when translated into Japanese in the Japanese preface, it is rendered as “to cause the demons and spirits to feel aware,” from which we know that aware means to be moved to emotion. From the foregoing one can grasp in a general way the origins of the word aware and the development of some of its extended usages.
The expression mono no aware, then, means much the same thing. The mono is the mono that is added in order to generalize the reference of a word—as when iu [speak] becomes mono iu [discuss], kataru [tell] becomes monogatari [tale], or, in monomōde [pilgrimage], monomi [observation], monoimi [abstinence].
Now when a person is confronted with a situation of any sort whatever that might be expected to move him to emotion, and he apprehends the emotional quality of this situation and is indeed moved to emotion, this is described as being “sensitive to emotion” [mna o shiru]. But when a person’s heart remains unmoved and he experiences no emotion, even in a situation that by all rights should move him, this person is described as “insensitive to emotion” [mna o shirazu] or “heartless” [kokoro naki hito]. By their very nature, persons of discernment cannot help but be moved by that which is moving, whereas when people are not so moved, it is precisely because they lack discernment and are insensitive to things that by rights should move them. Thus in the Gosenshū:
At a certain person’s house, outside the bamboo blinds, I was chatting about this and that when I heard from inside the voice of a woman who had been listening, and she said, “My, what extraordinary airs of sensibility [mna shirigao] this old gentleman affects.”
TSURAYUKI
aware chō koto ni shirushi wa nakeredomo / iwade wa e koso aranu mono nare
That little word aware may produce no discernable effect,
yet never to utter it can in no wise be endured. [Gosenshū 1272]
The sense of this poem is that to exclaim aa hare may avail one nothing, yet when one experiences something that is by rights moving, one can hardly bear not to exclaim so. Thus is it in any situation whatever for a person of sensibility [mna o shireru hito].
Now, as I have said, people’s emotional reactions to things are of many sorts, and this tale is notable for its depiction of every variety of moving situation and its demonstration of its emotional qualities [aware o misetaru]. To begin with, it depicts public and private life in all its fascination, splendor, and magnificence, and it describes in the most exquisite manner the changing scenes of spring, summer, autumn, and winter—the blossoms, the birds, the moon, the snow—all of them things that move the heart and inspire emotions [aware to omowaseru]. And when cares weigh heavily upon one’s mind, the appearance of the sky and the tints of plants and trees work with particular effect to arouse emotion [aware o moyōsu]. Thus, for example, in “Kiritsubo” [12:111], it says: “At the sound of the wind or the cry of an insect, he would be plunged into melancholy….” In “Hahakigi” [12:180]: “Whether the patterning of the heartless heavens appears gorgeous or threatening depends solely upon the viewer.” In “Aoi” [13:44–45]: “In the pale light of dawn, when all was shrouded in mist…[she wrote], ‘the sky as it looks just now moves me to grieve…the brevity of her life.’” And again [13:48–50]: “As the wind blew ferociously, driving the autumn rains…he was inclined to imagine that even the Asagao Princess, despite all, must understand how he felt today [kyō no aware]….” In “Matsukaze” [13:393]: “Now that autumn had come, her feelings [mna] seemed to weigh more heavily upon her mind.” In “Asagao” [13:465]: “The rustling of the leaves brought back touching memories of times past [suginishi mna], and they recalled how charming and moving [okashiku mo aware ni mo] had been the concern he had time and again shown for her.” In “Kagerō” [17:208]: “When something is troubling me, be it only the slightest little thing, even the cry of a bird flying across the sky is enough to move me to grief.”
Then, too, there are occasions when one is moved by a person’s good looks. In “Kiritsubo” [12:114–15], it says: “Such was the figure he cut that not even the fiercest of warriors or the bitterest of enemies could look at him without breaking into a smile….” In “Hahakigi” [12:175]: “Even a demon would hardly have taken offense at his manner; much less could she [Utsusemi] be so crude as to raise the alarm that someone was here [in her room].” In “Yūgao” [12:223]: “Much less could those in a position to exchange poems with him and look upon his beauty with their own eyes, if they were possessed of the least sensibility, have any but the highest regard for him.” In “Momiji no ga” [12:385]: “Had she perhaps found it impossible to overlook such dazzling beauty?” And further on [12:387]: “The glittering beauty of his ‘Waves upon the Ocean Blue’…even the heavens seemed to appreciate.” And again [12:387]: “Even ignorant menials, if possessed of the slightest sensibility, shed a tear.”94 In “Suma” [13:161]: “His elegance and his beauty as he pondered his fate, only the more apparent in the bright clear light of the setting moon, would have moved even a tiger or a wolf to tears.” In “Yūgiri” [15:457]: “He was approaching the peak of his manhood and had grown remarkably handsome of late. Even if he were guilty of some such dalliance, surely no one could criticize him; indeed, the gods and demons themselves would be moved to forgive his transgression….” In “Ukifune” [17:182–83]: “So handsome was he that even if he had been a bitter foe transformed into a demon, she could not have taken her eyes from him.” As the foregoing examples suggest, not to be moved by human beauty is to be more insensitive than a tiger or a wolf.
One also finds numerous instances, in chapter after chapter, of being moved by a person’s rank or position. This is something different from calculated obsequiousness or sycophancy toward the powerful and the rich; it is a natural and ineluctable sense of awe before a person of exalted station, of the sort when Utsusemi [“Hahakigi,” 12:187] “forced herself to feign indifference and ignore [his tenderness], though it pained her to think how pretentious he must consider her.” Her feelings are an emotional response to Genji’s rank and position. In “Suma” [13:195]: “When they heard the music of his koto carried from afar on the wind, the beauty of the place, the exalted station of the player, and the sadness of the tune combined to move all those of any sensibility to tears.” This combination of several moving things causes them to weep. The mention of “those of any sensibility,” however, suggests that those who are insensitive and impervious to emotion [kokoro naku mna o shiranu hito] remain oblivious even to this combination of touching things and are not moved. Compare this, for example, with the quotations from other chapters cited earlier, referring to “those possessed of the slightest sensibility.”
Apropos of the fact that insensitivity [mna o shiranu] was considered bad, it says in “Kiritsubo” [12:111–12]:
At the sound of the wind or the cry of an insect, he would be plunged into melancholy. But the moon was beautiful, and from the quarters of the Kokiden lady, who had not waited upon His Majesty in his chamber for some time now, there came the strains of music far into the night. She was terribly haughty, a lady with an abrasive side to her, and determined, apparently, to behave as if nothing at all were amiss. His Privy Gentlemen and Gentlewomen, who were witness to his condition of late, listened to this in horror.
Such then is the manner of a person who is impervious to emotion [mna o shiranu hito]. At a time when the Emperor “at the sound of the wind or the cry of an insect would be plunged into melancholy,” could any person of sensibility [kokoro aramu hito] find beauty in the moon, much less make music? After all, as has been said, whether the moon “appears gorgeous or threatening depends solely on the viewer.” In this passage, “the moon was beautiful” is a description based upon Kokiden’s feelings. Her behaving “as if nothing at all were amiss” describes her lack of concern for the Emperor’s sorrow. “His condition of late” refers to the sorrow of the Emperor.
In “Sakaki” [13:94], it says: “As long as the old Emperor was still alive, she behaved with restraint; but the Empress Mother had a vile temper, and now she seemed bent upon avenging all the grudges she had been suppressing.” And again: “As she grew older, she grew steadily more disagreeable, until even the [Suzaku] Emperor found her company more than he could endure” [“Otome,” 14:69]. This passage, too, refers to the Kokiden Empress Mother. In the same chapter where the Empress Mother and her father the Minister denounce so bitterly the affair between Genji and Oborozukiyo [“Sakaki,” 13:138–39], her father, “a quick-tempered and disagreeable” man, is described thus:
Even though she was his own child, he should have known that this would embarrass her, for a man of his standing really ought to exercise some discretion. But the Minister was a quick-tempered, intolerant man and not guided by good sense…. It was not in his nature to hold back anything that was on his mind, added to which he had grown quite crotchety in his old age.
And the stepmother of Lady Murasaki is described in “Makibashira” [14:368] as “that lady, who was most disagreeable,” and in the latter “Wakana” chapter [15:155] as “that most disagreeable lady.”
For the most part, then, this tale tends not to dwell upon Genji’s amorous indiscretions, nor does it speak of them in particularly unfavorable terms. Rather, as in the foregoing citations, it condemns those who bear ill will toward Genji and his friends and treat him badly. As shown, all these people are depicted as insensitive [mna o shirazu] and evil. This is because Genji, being sensitive [mna o shirite], is considered a good person. If judged by the standards of Confucianism such as prevail in our own time, the Fujitsubo Empress would have to be considered worse than the Kokiden Empress Mother, yet she is depicted as the very model of the supremely good person, whereas someone like Kokiden, who carried on no illicit affairs, is depicted as an extraordinarily evil person. This is precisely because the tale is chiefly concerned with sensibility to what is moving [mna o shireru kata] and considers this quality a virtue. In depicting the affair between Yūgiri and Kumoinokari, her father the Minister’s harsh restrictions and admonitions are treated as excessively heartless, whereas Yūgiri and Kumoinokari are never described in unfavorable terms. Yet here, too, if judged by currently prevailing standards, the admonitions of her father the Minister are quite correct, and Yūgiri and Kumoinokari are culpable. As one reads through the several chapters, one cannot but realize that good and evil are distinguished according to whether a person is sensitive or insensitive to what is moving [mna o shiru to shirazaru to o mote]. It is never stated explicitly that this is good or this is evil, but the distinction between what is regarded as good and what is regarded as evil is clear from the manner in which things are described.
Now then, monks are often described as creatures insensitive to what is moving [mna o shiranu mono]. In “Kashiwagi” [15:312], it says:
“I beg you to take pity on me” [aware to obose], he said. “I have heard,” she replied, “that those in my condition are insensitive creatures [mna mo shiranu mono], and it is only the more so for one who has always been that way.”
This scene takes place after the Third Princess has cut her hair and taken vows. Genji says: “Even though you have become a nun, pray do have some consideration for my feelings,” to which the Princess replies, “I have heard that everyone who has forsaken the world as I have is insensitive to what is moving, but it is only the more so for someone as hopeless as myself, who has always been insensitive. So what can I say to you?” This remark is based on the fact that monks were commonly said to be insensitive to all that is moving.
Now, the reason monks are described as insensitive is, first of all, because, in the Way of the Buddha, one must forsake utterly the bonds of affection with those to whom one is most attached—father, mother, wife, and children; mortify one’s own cherished flesh; abandon home and possessions and seclude oneself in a mountain forest; renounce the savor of fish and meat, the delights of song and women—all of which are among the most difficult things for the human heart to endure. If one is frail of spirit and susceptible to emotion [kokoro yowakute mna o shirite wa], they are not easily accomplished. To practice this Way, therefore, one must force oneself to become a creature firm of spirit and insensitive to all that is moving [aware shiranu mono ni narite]. In addition, it is difficult to guide others in the Way when one’s own thoughts are on the emotions of this life [kono yo no mna o omoi] and one’s resolve is weak. Thus [the monk] may, on the face of it, appear insensitive to emotion [aware shiranu yō], but his doctrines urge compassion for those who wander in the long darkness of delusion. By the standards of the Way, he is in fact deeply sensitive [mna o fukaku shireru]. In “Shii ga moto” [16:181], it is written, “They found the stubborn devotion of the Preceptor distastefully painful.” When the Eighth Prince dies and his daughters are beside themselves with grief, the Preceptor, with never a thought for the tender feelings between parent and child, preaches sternly to them to abandon their feelings of attachment in accordance with the spirit of the Way of the Buddha. This they find excessively resolute and distastefully painful. In most cases, it is for reasons of this sort that monks are described as insensitive to feeling [mna o shiranu]. Of course, a deeply devout monk is very much a stranger to worldly concerns and may quite genuinely be unmoved.
Now, then, to affect a sensibility to what is moving [mna no shirigao o tsukurite] and make a show of feeling is considered highly reprehensible. For this sort of thing is not genuine sensitivity, but only the affectation of its outward appearances, and is most irritating. In “Hahakigi” [12:165, 166], it says:
It is a pity, but a general rule, that the worst people, men and women alike, will try to show off every last scrap of what little they happen to know…. In any situation, any moment of doubt whatever, it is always more seemly for the undiscriminating not to affect airs of refinement. Indeed, one should always pretend not to know what one may know perfectly well and omit a thing or two that one might wish to say.
This is what is meant in “Kochō” [14:170] where it says:
As a rule, when a woman fails to exercise discretion and surrenders to the impulse to affect airs of emotional sensitivity [mna mo shirigao tsukuri] and aesthetic discernment, this—if she persists in it—can grow tiresome.
Among frivolous people, such as the “Winter Winds” woman,95 there are many of this sort. Usually such expressions as “affected” [keshikidatsu], “with an air of refinement” [yoshibamu], and “sensitive seeming” [nasakedatsu] describe those who put on outward airs and make a show of feeling.
Now, then, the fact that “an excess of susceptibility to emotion” [mna o shirisugusu] is deemed a bad thing is not to say that profound sensitivity to emotion [mna o shiru koto no fukaki] is excessive. “Exceed” here means that it is excessive to behave with seeming sensitivity [aware o shirigao naru] toward all things, even those hardly deserving of it, or to be so readily acquiescent to others as to seem frivolous. Thus the expression “with moderation” [yoki hodo ni], too, signifies that an excess of feigned sensitivity [shirigao no sugitaru] is bad, and not that profound sensitivity [fukaku shiru] is bad. In “Usugumo” [13:454], it says: “The Dame of Honor felt a twinge of shame that she had replied with such airs of sensitivity [mna o shirigao ni] to the emotions of autumn.” The “Dame of Honor” is the Akikonomu Empress. Here she has in mind her reply when Genji asks whether she prefers spring or autumn [13:452]: “There’s really no saying which, but one does hear about the ‘strange beauty’ of autumn evenings.” In the same chapter [13:433–34], it says:
“I knew it was hardly likely I should escape this year, but I was not that frightfully ill, and so I was reluctant to carry on as if I knew my life were coming to an end, for people would have thought that appallingly exaggerated.”
This, too, is in the same spirit. These are the words of Lady Murasaki, who is ashamed even to speak as if she knew this were the end of her own life.96 In “Minori” [15:487], it says: “There were many matters that occupied the lady’s thoughts, but she was not one to make knowing pronouncements about ‘after she was gone.’” Here, too, the same lady would be ashamed to speak so knowingly of this or that “after she is gone.”
Considering all this, then, it seems that women of the best sort regard even such behavior as this shameful. How much more so the affectation of sensibility and the display of it [aware shirigao o tsukurite, misemu]! And as we reflect on the attitude of Lady Murasaki, who is described here as the very model of excellence among women, [we recall] the passage in “Hotaru” [14:207] concerning illustrated romances in which “the lady [said], ‘It is painful even to read of such simpleminded behavior.’”97 “The lady” is Lady Murasaki, and these are the words she speaks. “Behavior” refers to that in tales. It says this because they are written in imitation of the lives of people in this world. “Simpleminded” describes the behavior of frivolous women. “Painful” denotes what in colloquial speech we would describe as “excruciating.” When she says “even to read,” we realize how much more painful she would find such women in real life.
“The daughter of Lord Fujiwara in The Hollow Tree98 is a very prudent and capable person and seems never to make a mistake Yet her very firmness, and the want of anything womanly in the way she speaks, do seems excessive,”99 she [Murasaki] said.
“Firm” here means lacking in tender and winning qualities. “Womanly” means as a woman should be. “Excessive” means tending to one extreme. This refers to a character in The Tale of the Hollow Tree; she is succinctly described in Kachō yosei.100 For further details, one should read the tale. This person stands in contrast to those described as “simpleminded.” She is cold and pays no heed to the pleas of her many suitors, some of whom die of their bitter disappointment, yet she is not at all moved [aware to mo omowazu]. Such a woman, who by the prevailing standards of the Confucianists would be praised as “fervently chaste,” is here described as “excessive.” Of the same sort are those described in “Suetsumuhana” [12:339–40]:
“The cold, resolute ones, so incomparably unfeeling in their earnestness, seem to lack all sense of proportion.”
In response to what Lady Murasaki said, Genji says [“Hotaru,” 14:207]:
“There would appear to be just such people in real life. Each persists in her own predilection, and none exercises any moderation.”
“People in real life” refers to living people, as opposed to characters in the old romances. “Just such” means “of just that sort.” “Each” refers to those such as the daughter of Lord Fujiwara who, in making such a point of their own personal chastity, differ from the ordinary run of people. His casual mention that “none exercises moderation” carries the implication that, in agreement with what the Lady Murasaki said, this is indeed “excessive.” In “Hahakigi” [12:166–67], it says:
Through it all His Lordship was thinking to himself of that one person. “She lacks nothing, she is guilty of no excess.” Her very rarity…
Genji goes on to say [“Hotaru,” 14:207–8]:
“When parents who are themselves not lacking in qualities endeavor to raise a daughter who has at least some childlike charm about her, and despite their pains she turns out deficient in any number of ways, then even the parents’ efforts come into question. ‘What sort of upbringing can they have given her?’ people ask, and that is a great pity.”
“Deficient in any number of ways” may also extend to her accomplishments in the polite arts, but following as it does the foregoing reference to deficiencies in emotional sensitivity [mna o shiru koto], it would refer principally to these. This we may also ascertain from the passage in “Yūgiri,” cited further on.
“That said, however, when she gives the impression that ‘she is the very image of those people,’ that is rewarding and certainly something to be proud of.” [“Hotaru,” 14:208]
“That said, however” means, in colloquial speech, “Indeed, she is in every way all that one would expect of a daughter of those people.” “Rewarding” means rewarding of the parents’ endeavors to raise her properly. “Be proud of” refers to the rightful pride of the parents.
In “Yūgiri” [15:442], when Genji hears about the affair between Commandant Yūgiri and the Second Princess, and he tells Lady Murasaki that he worries how she will feel after he is gone, Lady Murasaki’s thoughts are described thus: “There is nothing so constricting, so afflicting as the self-restraint a woman must exercise.” This means that nothing could be more trying, more fraught with emotion [mna naru koto no arubeki] than the self-restraint a woman must exercise. The reason this is so is that if she acts as compassion [mna o mishiritaru kokoro] dictates, she will inevitably be the object of criticism, and her cares will tend to weigh upon her mind, thus increasing extraordinarily the burden on her emotions [mna naru koto]. These words merit close attention.
Those affecting things, those fascinating moments—if she just ignores or suppresses them as if she had no knowledge of them, how is she to savor the joys of living in this world or beguile the tedium of this ephemeral life?101 [15:442]
Concerning “ignores or suppresses them as if she had no knowledge of them”: when something works on a woman’s feelings and she finds it poignantly touching [sechi ni aware naru], she will shrink from letting her feelings show openly, lest she seem guilty of feigned emotion [shirigao o tsukuri] or an excess of susceptibility to emotion [mna o shirisugusu]. In the course of which, unable to let her feelings show, she will repress and contain them, as though she did not feel what she does indeed feel [shiritemo shiranu sama ni], with the result that they weigh heavily on her mind with intense emotion [musubōrete aware wa fukaki]. It is precisely the exercise of this self-restraint that is “so constricting, so afflicting.” This being the case, then, “how is she to savor the joys of living in this world or beguile the tedium of this ephemeral life?” The very mention of “this ephemeral life” would seem to imply that, life in this world being insubstantial and of no great duration, it would be a pity not to have some source of comfort to the feelings. If this were not the case, the word “ephemeral” would be superfluous.
Now, as to letting one’s feelings show openly, in “Suetsumuhana” [12:348–49], it says:
When a person who leads such a life from time to time lets her feelings show in clever references to the ever changing plants and trees and to the patterns of the sky and thus affords one an inkling of her character, that is touching [aware naru].
As this suggests, in moments of emotion [mna naru toki], it is consoling to compose a poem or write a letter referring to the plants and the trees and such and send it to someone, thus revealing to him the feelings in one’s heart [kokoro no aware]. Further, in “Yomogiu” [13:320–21]:
Quite undeliberately, but just as a natural thing, at times when no urgent concerns were pressing upon them, they would carry on a casual exchange of notes and poems with others of like mind, and in these references to the plants and trees, her young people were able to amuse themselves.
Here again she speaks of young women living in dismal circumstances with no means of support. “Quite undeliberately” is to say that the deliberate exchange of notes and poems referring to the plants and trees is to affect airs of emotional sensitivity [mna shirigao tsukuru suji] and is unattractive. For this reason, it is described as “just a natural thing.” This means “They do so without premeditation, but….” In “Yūgiri” [15:442], Lady Murasaki continues to muse:
Yet if she should turn out to be one of those utterly hopeless creatures, with no sense at all of the significance of things, then are not the parents who raised her, too, greatly to be pitied?
A “sense of the significance of things” means to be possessed of emotional sensitivity [mna o shiru]. The insensitive are described as “utterly hopeless creatures.” Note this carefully. It should be considered in conjunction with what I said about the passage from “Hotaru” quoted earlier, that “deficient in any number of ways” refers principally to deficiencies in emotional sensitivity [mna o shiru koto]. Lady Murasaki continues [15:442]:
How dispiriting it is to shut things away in one’s heart, like the mute prince of those old homilies that our monks relate so mournfully, who, though he knew full well what was bad and what was good, buried it all in himself.
The mute prince is annotated in Kakaishō.102 “What is bad and what is good” is the good and evil discussed previously in detail. To see this and comprehend its meaning is to have some sense of the significance of things [mono no kokoro o shiru] and to apprehend their emotional quality [mna o shireru]. “How dispiriting it is…to bury it all” is what is meant in the preceding passage by “she ignores or suppresses them as if she had no knowledge of them.” In this passage, Murasaki Shikibu surely suggests some of her own intentions in writing this tale. This tale is something she wrote because she found it dispiriting to bury and shut away in her heart all that she knew about the good and the evil in this world. Again [15:442]:
“How then is one to maintain a proper balance, even within one’s own heart?” Her musings now were only on behalf of the First Princess.
“A proper balance” should be considered in conjunction with the phrase in “Hotaru” [14:207] quoted earlier: “none exercises any moderation.” “How is one to maintain…” is her musing on the difficulty of maintaining such a proper balance. This is why “there is nothing so constricting, so afflicting as the self-restraint that a woman must exercise.” “Her musings now were only on behalf of the First Princess”: the lot in life of Lady Murasaki herself had long since been determined; she had passed the prime of life and now was in every way at peace with herself. Yet her concern for the upbringing of the First Princess was still a matter of great importance to her.
Studying the foregoing passages, we learn, of course, that people who are inconstant are bad; and, apart from that, so are those who make an excessive display of feigned emotion [mna shirigao no sugitaru] bad. The inconstancy of a person who is easily swayed by the blandishments of others may appear sensitive [mna o shirite] and feeling, but in fact it is not. In the final analysis, inconstancy is actually unfeeling [mna shirazaru]. Such people shift their affections from this person to that person precisely because they are fond [aware to omou] of neither the one nor the other. If one is fond of one particular person, one is not likely to shift one’s affections to another. And yet Genji becomes enamored of a great many women, one after another, not through inconstancy, but because he cannot resist feeling affection [mna o sugushigataki] for each of them. His feelings can best be appreciated by reading the tale. It is difficult to generalize.
For there are some surpassingly fine people [yoki hito] who fall prey to their own emotions [mna shinobigataki], like the Fujitsubo Empress, who, against her own better judgment, enters into an affair with Genji. In a seemingly similar situation, the Oborozukiyo lady is deemed a frivolous and inconstant person, whereas the [Fujitsubo] Empress is deemed in every way to be a fine, indeed superior, person. Consider this distinction and you will grasp the essence of the tale. Then, in “Hahakigi” [12:184–85], describing the character of the Utsusemi lady, it says:
It was not that she did not recall how extraordinary she had thought his manner and mien, which she had so faintly perceived, “but even if I were to show an interest in him,” she thought anew, “what could come of it?”
In her mind she knew that if she had never been consigned to such a horrid station in life as this but still was in her old home, filled with the memory of her dead parents, and could await his visits there, however rare they might be, this would be such a delight. Now she must force herself to feign ignorance and ignore him; how presumptuous he must think her. It was her own choice, but a painful one. Her thoughts were in turmoil.
And again [12:187]: “Of course the woman, too, lay sleepless.” In “Utsusemi” [12:191–92]:
There were no more letters from him. He has thought better of it, she thought; but should he be so heartless as to break with me, here and now, how that would hurt. Yet if this impetuous, albeit winsome, behavior of his were not to stop, that too would be distressing. I must put an end to it while the opportunity yet remains, she thought; but still it was no easy matter, and she continued to agonize over it.
From “impetuous” to “she thought, but still” must be understood as a continuous whole. The thought appears to end with “that too would be distressing,” but it does not. It continues, meaning “because that would be distressing, I must put an end to this….” And further [12:204–5]:
Only thus did this coldhearted lady manage to maintain a calm exterior, but his attentions, which certainly did not seem shallow, made her long to be as she had been in days past. But there is no turning back time, and bearing up as best she could, she wrote on a corner of that paper:
utsusemi no ha ni oku tsuyu no kogakurete / shinobi shinobi ni nururu sode kana
Like dew on the wings of the cicada’s shell, hidden amid the trees,
wet, so wet are my sleeves with secret, the most secret, tears.
In “Yūgao” [12:220], in a similar vein, it says:
Of course, she thought that if he were to forget her entirely, that would be unspeakably hurtful, and in her replies, as this occasion or that demanded, she spoke amiably….
This woman’s character is such that she is extremely sensitive [mna o yoku shirite], and she exercises due moderation.
Another woman who is described as the model of a certain sort of superiority is the Asagao Princess, about whom it says in “Aoi” [13:13]:
When she heard about these things, the Asagao Princess resolved that she would never end up like the others; and never was there even the most casual sort of reply. Yet neither did she treat him in an offhand manner that might make him think ill of her, while he, for his part, continued to regard her as an exceptional woman indeed.
“Never end up like the others”: Of all the women at court, there are hardly any who do not submit to Genji, but she is determined she will not be like these ordinary women. In this, the Princess is superior to the others. But then, the passage “Yet neither…” shows how emotionally sensitive [mna o shiritamaeru] she is. As it says in “Suetsumuhana” [12:339–40] about “the cold, resolute ones, so incomparably unfeeling,” a woman who insists that she “shall not be like the others” invariably, like the daughter of Lord Fujiwara in The Hollow Tree, turns out to be somehow warped. But this Princess does not, and because she is of such rare character, even Genji considers her to be “exceptional.” In “Asagao” [13:477], it says:
She was by no means unaware how grand and sensitive a gentleman he was, but, she thought, “If I ever let on that I appreciated these qualities, I would then be thought but another of that common throng who have only admiration and praise for him. And then he would suppose that he had seen through me and knew how frivolous my intentions really were, which would shame me in the eyes of so fine a gentleman as he is.” It made no sense whatever, she decided, to show any sort of feeling that might encourage intimacy. She would not cease to reply to his other communications; she would go on answering him properly, through an intermediary, saying nothing that might be misinterpreted.103
This, too, describes the feelings of the same Princess as she decides what she will do with regard to Genji; her attitude here is precisely the same as that in the “Aoi” chapter just cited. “How grand…a gentleman” refers to Genji’s high rank and surpassing good looks and manner; “sensitive” refers to the sensitivity of his compassion. “She was by no means unaware” means that her feelings were touched by his rank and his looks and his manner and touched by the sensitivity of his compassion. “Let on that I appreciate these qualities” means that “if she were to reveal her own feelings, so as to show Genji the extent to which they are touched…” “Common throng”: Genji being a person whom no one at court does not admire, she too might be thought but another of that common throng of women. Here, again, she is thinking “never shall she end up like the others.” The phrase “and then he” [katsu wa] merits particular attention. Although Genji deeply resents her coldness, he would then look down on her as frivolous. Most occurrences of katsu are of this same sort. Present-day people use the word where one should say mata, which is incorrect. “Shame me”: Genji, being a gentleman of deep feeling who in every way puts one to shame, to be regarded as frivolous by him would be shameful. “Feeling that might encourage intimacy” refers to any display of feeling on her part that might encourage him to feel attracted to her. The -te of uchitaete [cease] is unvoiced, and the phrase continues from there: “not in such a manner that she would cease and there would be misunderstanding.” As we see, then, this Princess is a person of extreme sensitivity to matters emotional [mna o yoku shirite], in which she yet exercises moderation to the very end—a true rarity, well worthy of regard as a model for women. And precisely because she is so, Genji finds her exceptionally charming and is only the more attracted to her.
And so, from our study of the several passages from the chapters just cited, we know that Murasaki Shikibu, in one way and another, is concerned principally with emotional sensitivity [mna o shiru]; that the lack of sensitivity is, needless to say, unfortunate; and that even behavior that smacks too much of sensitivity can be tediously distasteful and, depending upon the situation, may well verge on indecency. It thus is important that one be deeply mindful of this and behave in such a way that [one’s feelings] are expressed with duly considered moderation. Such is the larger concern of this tale.
Now, the author, observing carefully with her own profoundly sensitive faculties [fukaku mna o shireru kokoro ni] the nature of all there is in this world—the good people and the bad, their thoughts and their deeds—and being moved by much that she sees and hears and experiences, has found it difficult to confine this to the secret musings of her own heart. And so, she writes it all down in minute detail, presenting it as the lives of the characters she creates. Those things she herself thinks good or bad, those things she herself wants to say, she causes her characters to think and say, thus giving vent to her own smoldering anxieties. Of the entire range of emotions [mna no kagiri] in this world, there are none not to be found in this tale; and in order to impress deeply on the reader’s mind that “this is how it really is,” she describes everything in painstaking depth and with remarkable skill. To read this tale, therefore, is just as if one were to meet Murasaki Shikibu and in her presence one were to hear her relate in full detail all that she thinks about things. And when one studies carefully the deeds and thoughts of the people, both good and bad, that appear in the tale, one comes to know that when they see or hear of such-and-such a thing, it will be regarded thus; that their feelings when faced with such-and-such a situation will be thus; that the deeds and thoughts of a good person will be thus; and a bad person thus—and in this way one comes to understand well all such situations in this world, as well as the feelings in the deepest recesses of the minds of all people. As a means of acquiring a thorough knowledge of what Chinese books describe as “human feeling and the ways of the world [ninjō setai],” I doubt there is anything to equal reading this tale.
Of all those things that move the human heart, there is none to surpass love [koi].104 Thus it is that those emotions that are the most deeply affecting and difficult to bear occur most frequently in love. And in poetry, ever since the age of the gods and through age upon age thereafter, poems expressing these feelings have been the most numerous, and many of the most deeply felt and finest of poems are love poems. Likewise, the fact that even the songs sung by lowly mountain rustics of the present day are mostly on the subject of love is entirely natural and true to the human heart.
Love, then, is a state in which, depending upon the circumstances, there are moments of anguish and sorrow, moments of spite and anger, moments of amusement and elation—virtually every sort of emotion experienced by the human heart is to be found in love. And so, this tale having been created in order to inventory the full range of life’s emotional experiences [mna no kagiri o kakiatsumete], thereby moving the reader deeply, the manifold nuances of feeling in the human heart, the savor of the extreme depths of emotion, could hardly be expressed without touching on the subject of love. For this reason, episodes treating principally this subject occur with particular frequency, while the divers thoughts and deeds of those who love, as well as the manifold aspects of their feelings [toridori ni aware naru omomuki], are described with extraordinary precision, illustrating the entire range of human emotion [mna o tsukushite misetari]. This matter will come up again later, but the following poem by Shunzei of the Third Rank expresses precisely the essence of this tale.
koi sezu wa hito wa kokoro mo nakaramashi / mono no aware mo kore yori zo shiru
Were one never to love, neither could such a one possess a heart,
for only through love can we comprehend human feeling. [Chōshū eisō 351]
Concerning this state in which the emotions of love are particularly profound and unendurable, it says in “Kiritsubo” [12:107]:
“I can’t imagine even the slightest thing I might have done to hurt another’s feelings, but on this particular person’s account, I am the object of considerable undeserved resentment….”
These are thoughts the Emperor deigns to think. “This person” is the Kiritsubo Mistress of the Wardrobe. Again [12:93, 94]:
His treatment of her—for he could no longer heed the reproof of his people—was certain to set a bad example for the world…. Eventually it became a cause of distress for people throughout the land.
And [12:113]:
When it reached the point where, heedless of the reproof and resentment of so many of his people, he seemed to have lost all reason with regard to this matter and now had even forsaken his responsibility for governance of the realm….
In the same chapter [12:113–14]:
Come the spring of the following year, when a Crown Prince was to be named, he wanted to pass over [his eldest son in favor of Genji], but there was no one who might serve as his backer, nor was the court likely to accept this. On the contrary, it would be dangerous, and he eschewed the thought, giving no hint of it whatever.
As we see in the foregoing passage, this Emperor is a circumspect and unusually astute sovereign, but when it comes to love, he breaks down and goes astray. In “Aoi” [13:66, 68]:
“My [Genji’s] feelings of fondness for her [Murasaki] in years past were not even a fragment [of what I now feel]….” Thereafter, even on his shortest calls at court or at the palace of the Retired Emperor, he found himself longing for her so restlessly that her face seemed to appear before him. “How strange that I feel this way,” he thought, to his own chagrin.
These events refer to the time when Genji first sleeps with Lady Murasaki. In “Usugumo” [13:454]:
“Yes, that old recklessness, that wild obsession is still there,” he had to admit, despite himself.
After the Reizei Emperor learns about Genji and the Fujitsubo Empress, Genji, though frightened, is unrepentant, and this time makes advances toward the Akikonomu Empress. These are his own reflections on this. In “Kochō” [14:168], it says: “On the mountain [road] of love, even Confucius may stumble.”105 This is a popular saying to the effect that there is no one who, when in love, will never go astray. The Kakaishō gives as a source poem:
ika bakari koi no yamaji no fukakereba / iri to irinuru hito mayouramu
How deep into the mountains winds the road of love;
he who follows it, ever onward, must surely go astray.106
In “Yūgiri” [15:440–41], it says:
Whenever he had seen or heard of others who were the thralls of such passions, he found it irritating and thought they must have lost their minds, but now that it was happening to him, he found that it was indeed quite an unbearable experience. “How strange!” he thought in retrospect. “Whatever could have made me feel this way?” But there was nothing he could do about it.
These are Yūgiri’s thoughts. When he had seen or heard of others who were the thralls of love, he could hardly believe they were in their right minds. He found it irritating and highly improper, but now that he himself is in love, he realizes that it is “indeed quite an unbearable experience.” This should be considered in conjunction with the poem by Shunzei quoted earlier. When experiencing the unbearable passions of love, one naturally comes to feel compassion for the feelings of others in myriad matters not of this magnitude and thus to comprehend human emotion. And again: “Indeed, in matters of this sort, it appears to be impossible to heed either the admonitions of others or the promptings of one’s own heart” [15:455]. These are the words of the same gentleman. On the road of love at least, they say, one “heeds neither the admonitions of others nor the promptings of one’s own heart,” and now that he finds himself in that situation, he says, he realizes that so it is indeed. Even to as earnest a man as he, this can happen. I wonder whether something is missing after “the admonishments of others”?
From such phrases in the foregoing passage as “‘How strange that I feel this way,’ he thought, to his own chagrin” and “…he thought in retrospect. But there was nothing he could do about it,” we see how profound and insuperable are the emotions of this Way [of love (kono michi no mna)]. And thus it is that such situations give rise to unthinkable transgressions, in the natural course of which things are done that defy all reason. In Genji’s case, there are the Utsusemi affair, the Oborozukiyo affair, the Fujitsubo Empress affair, and their ilk. For in love, the emotions of such rash and reckless behavior are only the more profound, and thus [the author] purposely writes about illicit love, showing us the depth of emotion in such relationships. This we know from what it says in “Sakaki” [13:104] about the affair between Genji and the Empress:
Even the most ordinary affairs, to those as close as this, are fraught with emotion, they say, and it was only the more so in so unparalleled a situation.
Even in the most ordinary, casual relationships between people of no great emotional depth, it is normal that such escapades will be particularly affecting; but how much more is this so of the liaison between these two, both possessed of such extraordinary emotional depth. So utterly overwhelmed is the man, she is saying, that their passion is without parallel.
Again, in “Kashiwagi” [15:281], in the poem composed by the Gate Guards Commander when, on account of the Third Princess, he falls ill, grows steadily worse, and is on the verge of death:
ima wa tote moemu keburi mo musubōre / taenu omoi no nao ya nokoran
Even then when the end is come and smoke rises from my burning pyre,
these unquenchable flames of yearning surely shall remain.
The Princess’s reply [15:286]:
tachisoite kie ya shinamashi uki koto o / omoimidaruru keburikurabe ni
How I wish I too might die, that my smoke might rise together with yours;
then could we compare whose flames of sorrow burn the brighter.
Of all the many loves in this tale, and of all the emotions of the Gate Guards Commander that are so particularly moving, this scene when he is on the verge of death, this exchange of poems, is one of the most profoundly moving. When I read that passage in which he says, “This smoke, this will be the sole memento of my life” [15:286], I feel I could break down in tears. Ultimately he does pass away, concerning which it says in the same chapter [15:314]:
That so proud and fine a figure should bring about his own ruination, leaving behind only this secret little keepsake that he could never reveal to his parents, despite their lamentation that there might “at least be a child”—this he found so sadly affecting that he quite forgot how mortified he had felt and could not help but heave a sigh of sorrow.
These are thoughts Genji thinks about Kashiwagi when he sees Kaoru. As it says, “He quite forgot how mortified he had felt and could not help but heave a sigh of sorrow.” So it was with people of emotional sensitivity [mna o shiru hito]. And again [15:330]: “At the Rokujō mansion, with every passing day and month, fond memories of him recurred only the more often.” And [15:330]:
There was no one, high or low, who did not lament his loss, for apart from all that one takes for granted in such a person, he was a man of uncanny sensitivity. Even court officials and elderly gentlewomen, of whom one would hardly expect it, spoke of him with fondness and sorrow. And above all, whenever there was music, the Emperor would immediately recall him and think of times past. “Ah, the Gate Guards Commander…!” Such a set phrase was it that never was there no one who said it.
In “Yokobue” [15:333], it says:
Many mourned the late Acting Grand Counselor as though their grief at his sudden passing would never cease. All the more so was this of Rokujō-in [Genji], whose nature it was to sorrow over the deaths of good people he had known in even the most casual way, for in this case he had been constantly close to him and had been fonder of him than anyone else. To be sure, there was that matter that he recalled with displeasure, yet so much was there to be fond of that he was often in his thoughts. On the anniversary of his death, he went to great trouble to arrange a chanting of the scriptures. And as he looked at the guileless child, its face so utterly innocent, he was so strongly affected that he determined secretly he would give yet another hundredweight of gold.
The “Acting Grand Counselor” is Kashiwagi. The “guileless child” refers to Kaoru. The “hundredweight of gold” he gives as Kaoru’s contribution to the chanting of additional scriptures for the benefit of Kashiwagi. In “Suzumushi” [15:371–72], it says:
As they played together, the strains of their kotos blending beautifully, he said, “An evening of moon viewing, whatever the season, is never unaffecting; but truly, the beauty of this evening’s new moon in so many ways sends my thoughts flying beyond this world of ours. Now that the late Acting Grand Counselor is gone, I find myself missing him again and again; no matter what the occasion, public or private, it feels as if its radiance has been lost. He was so perceptive of the song of the birds and the beauty of the blossoms and spoke so discerningly of such things; but now….” The strains of the koto he himself was playing [brought tears to his eyes sufficient to] wet his sleeves. Though with one corner of his mind he was wondering if this had caught the ear of her within the blinds and made her listen, yet above all else it was the man himself he missed on such musical evenings as this, as did His Majesty as well.
From “an evening of moon viewing” are Genji’s words. “Her within the blinds” is the Third Princess. “With one corner of his mind” refers to his feelings of spite. “Above all he misses him” is Genji [thinking] of Kashiwagi.
What the Gate Guards Commander does, then, comes down to this: having committed an act of immorality, he proceeds to do away with himself. No matter how fine a gentleman he may be, when judged by the prevailing standards of the world, this is not something deserving of sympathy; and yet [Murasaki Shikibu] describes it here in the most moving terms. Again and again, she speaks of how he is missed at court and how even Genji misses and pities him, which is to say that on the road of love, emotions run deep, and that among the best people, deep are their feelings of sensitivity [aware o shiru kokoro]. We see here the degree to which the essence of this tale lies in its depiction of emotions of one sort or another.
In “Hashihime” [16:151], it says: “‘Truly, even were I to hear it told of a complete stranger, it would seem a touching old story [aware narubeki furukotodomo].’” These are Kaoru’s thoughts when at Uji he first hears Ben no Kimi tell of Kashiwagi. These words merit attention. Anyone who reads this tale yet fails to be moved by the story of Kashiwagi is simply a person without a heart. Again, in “Umegae” [14:416]:
“In matters of this sort, I was not much inclined to follow even his august advice, so I am loath to lecture you, but…”
These are among Genji’s words of admonition to Yūgiri. “Matters of this sort” refers to matters of love. “His august advice” is the august admonition given to Genji long ago by his father the Emperor. “I was not much inclined to follow” means not that he purposely determined not to follow it, but that he found it difficult to behave in accordance with the august advice. As it happens, this admonishment of Yūgiri is very long and is entirely a warning against lust. That a parent should counsel his child is entirely natural. In saying, “Now in the past I, too, felt I could not abide by his august advice, and so now I am loath to lecture you one way or another on matters of this sort, but…,” he is saying that everyone, when young, is impatient in matters of this sort and errs in untoward ways, but this is nothing that we who feel we’ve grown old and wise should reproach. Such are the feelings of persons of sensibility [mna o shireru hito no kokoro], who are lenient and not intolerant. In “Yūgiri” [15:457]:
He had heard of this matter, but thinking “why should I appear to have heard?” he kept his peace and looked straight at him. Wonderfully handsome he was, and, lately in particular, it seemed to him, quite grown up and in his prime. Though he had committed that indiscretion, he showed no sign that it was something people might hold against him; indeed, so radiant was he in the freshness and beauty of the prime of youth that even the demons and deities must forgive his transgression. Why, these things are only to be expected, for he is no callow youth, after all, but perfectly grown up and with no glaring faults. “Were I a woman, could I fail to love him? When he looks in the mirror, could he fail to feel a little proud of himself?” His own child though this was, such were his thoughts.
“That indiscretion” refers to the matter between Yūgiri and the Ochiba Princess. From “wonderfully handsome” forward are the thoughts Genji’s thinks as he looks at Yūgiri. Although in his previous admonitions, he warns him severely against lust, in his heart he thinks it “only natural.” In “Usugumo” [13:454]:
“This is most unseemly. I’m sure I’ve committed many far more frightfully grievous sins, but those lusts of the past I trust the buddhas and gods will have forgiven as the errors of a thoughtless time of life.”
These are Genji’s thoughts. “This” refers to his own advances toward the Akikonomu Empress. “Frightfully grievous sins” are what he now considers his past trysts with the Fujitsubo Empress. As one grows older, in myriad ways one grows more deeply thoughtful, so now, upon reflection, he thinks his advances toward the Akikonomu Empress “unseemly.” And yet, in this respect, there remains a part of him that he is unable to restrain, for even after this, he does not cease trysting secretly with the Oborozukiyo lady. As the text says [“Wakana, jō,” 15:83]: “Though on reflection he felt strongly how improper this was, he was powerless to act accordingly.” Such are the passions of love. In “Sakaki” [13:115–16]:
He had heard word to the effect that the affair with Kan no Kimi [Oborozukiyo] was not yet at an end, and on occasion had himself seen signs of it. “But what of it?” he said to himself. “If this had only just begun, well yes, but in a relationship of some standing, surely it is nothing unseemly that they should still be fond of each other.” He did not hold this against them.
“The affair with Kan no Kimi” is Genji’s trysting with the Oborozukiyo lady. It is the Suzaku Emperor who “hears” about this. His attitude is the same as Genji’s when he shows pity for Kashiwagi.
Then, too, the way that Ukifune gives in so easily to Niou, while keeping Kaoru in reserve, is just too frivolous and faithless, even a bit despicable, one feels. Yet when one reads that long description of the emotions she experiences thereafter, one cannot help but be touched. The way she feels is described in “Ukifune” [17:134–36]:
“How can I possibly receive him?” she thought, so stricken with fright that even the skies seemed to reproach her. Then, as the sight of that man who had been so dashing suddenly manifested itself to her memory and she imagined meeting this man again, she grew desolate in the extreme. “You know,” he had said, “I feel as if I’ve lost interest in all the other women I’ve been seeing these past years.” And indeed, she had heard that thereafter it was said that he was unwell, that there had been no sign of his usual activities anywhere at all, and that a great fuss was being made with chants and prayers and whatnot for him, which made the thought of what he might think if he were to hear of this extremely painful. This man, too, cut an attractive figure, having an air of considerable thoughtfulness about him. Of that long period of neglect he said but a few words and nothing at all to suggest that he had missed her or had suffered. Yet he was that sort of person whose genteel professions of the pain of loving someone he cannot often see were such that anyone would have to find them more affecting than some more ardent outburst. Quite apart from his good looks, his was a disposition in which one might place far greater trust over the long run. “If ever anyone should let on what a strange turn my feelings have taken, that would be simply dreadful. That I should be attracted to someone so obsessed that he hardly seems in his right mind—how very wrong this is and how frivolous! Were I to be thought despicable by this man and he were to forget all about me, I know full well how desolate I should be….” He had said he was thinking that “sometime this spring, if it is convenient, I’d like to move you there,” which called to mind that only yesterday that man had told her, “I’ve made plans for a place where you can live quietly.” “All of which he must be thinking while quite unaware of these developments,” she thought, and attractive though he was to her, she determined that she “mustn’t be drawn any further in that direction.” Yet no sooner had she thought that than the image of him as he had been appeared to her thoughts, and despite herself she thought, “Oh, what a wretched predicament,” and she broke down crying.
“How can I possibly receive him?” refers to Kaoru. “That man who had been so dashing,” “someone so obsessed,” “that man,” and such refer to Niou. “This man” always refers to Kaoru. It is Niou who spoke of “these past years.” And again [17:148–49]:
Though in her own mind she knew that “this is just as I’ve wished it, just what I’ve been hoping for from the very start,” still whenever she recalled that impetuous man, in that instant there would appear some image of him—the sight of him reproaching her, his words as he spoke to her. And should she doze off even for a moment, he would appear to her in a dream. All in all, it made her feel quite miserable.
And again [17:149–50]:
In the feelings of one so young and not particularly mature, this sort of thing was bound to arouse still greater passion. And yet he who had loved her from the start—he, after all, was a man of great depth and estimable character, and was it not precisely because he was her first love that he should seem so? “What would my life be if he were to hear of this sordid business and lose interest in me?” she thought. “And Mother, too, as worried as she is about when all this will come good—I’d surely be rejected by her as someone shockingly awful. And this man—obsessed with me as he is, I only hear how faithless he is….” “If for the delinquency of my own affections, I were to be rejected by that man, that would be dreadful,” she thought, her mind in a turmoil.
And again [17:178–79]:
“But if he comes looking like that, I won’t be able to speak to him again, and they’ll send him away without my even seeing him. What chance would I have then to invite him in, even for just a moment? And the sight of him leaving, having come all this way for nothing, and so angry with me!” Whenever she imagined the scene, his image would again appear to her. Hopelessly forlorn, she pressed his letter to her face, and although for a moment she tried to hold back, she wept uncontrollably.
And again [17:184–85]:
“Pray forgive my sin of preceding my parents in death” was her only thought. She took out the pictures from that time and looked at them, and the flow of his hand and the glow of the faces made her feel as if he were there with her. “Yes, it’s even worse, not saying a single word to him on the last night,” she thought. “And that man who was always talking about how we would live a quiet life together, for ever and ever—what is he going to think?” she thought pityingly…. She missed her mother; she even missed her rather unattractive brothers and sisters, whom normally she never even thought of. And then she recalled the Princess [Nakanokimi], whereupon she found herself wishing she could see any number of people just one more time.
The degree of emotion in such passages as these is truly so affecting as to make even a tiger or a wolf weep.
To say that the main aim of this tale is to encourage virtue and castigate vice [kanzen chōaku], that above all it is an admonition against lust, is a grave error. The author’s intentions are nothing of the sort. Neither is the reader at all likely to take it as such an admonition. The reason, in the first place, is that Genji is depicted as in all things peerless, the very model of the superior person. The reader, therefore, is bound to perceive every deed and thought of this gentleman as superior. And yet, this man is guilty of frequent misconduct, particularly in matters of the heart [koi no midare], and even commits an act of unparalleled immorality. The reader, however, is most likely to be struck by the thought that if even so superior a person does such things, how can they be wrong? As for women, the Fujitsubo Empress is praised as a particularly fine person. Any woman who reads about her is likely to find her character attractive and wish to emulate her, but what then is she to make of the passages describing her affair with Genji? Common sense tells us that this might actually arouse feelings of lust. How is this to serve as an admonition?
Now, the depiction of people who do good as having good fortune and people who do evil as meeting with ill fortune—this, to be sure, is “encouraging virtue and castigating vice.” One may well consider Kashiwagi and Ukifune to be examples of this, for both, through the passions of love, bring ruin upon themselves. But what can one say about Genji? Here is a man guilty of frequent misconduct in affairs of the passions, who has sullied even the august imperial line of succession. Judged by prevailing principles, the gods themselves should utterly abominate him and he should meet with horrendous misfortune, yet he prospers splendidly throughout his life. He has children who become Emperor, Empress, and Minister of State, and he himself attains the title of Honorary Emperor in Retirement. Who, seeing how nothing in this world is denied this man and how even his progeny prosper, will be inspired to abstain from lust? The fact that he suffers a temporary setback in midlife107 is attributed to a sinister plot on the part of the Kokiden Empress Mother, and the episode is described as one in which all the world grieves for him and even the gods and buddhas condemn her.108 This hardly qualifies as an admonition against lust, and in no sense whatever does it “castigate vice.” Indeed, pushing this argument to its logical extreme, is it not the case that he becomes Honorary Emperor in Retirement precisely by means of lust? Can even this be called “castigating vice”?
Speaking further of how unlikely this is to serve as an admonishment against lust, in “Yūgao” [12:218] it says:
He had never paid much attention to these ordinary sorts of women, but since the discussion on that rainy night, his interest in all those other varieties that had piqued his curiosity seemed to burgeon.
This describes how after listening to that discussion, Genji’s thoughts grew even more lustful. Just reading this, one realizes that it could never serve as an admonition. In “Suetsumuhana” [12:343]:
“It is in just such places as this that those touching scenes in the old romances are set,” he was thinking. “Shall I say something and perhaps make a move on her?” he wondered, but….
In “Agemaki” [16:294]:
Looking at the picture depicting the scene in Tales of Zaigo in which the man gives his younger sister a koto lesson and says, “Were another to bind them…,”109 he said, “for people of the past who were properly related as we are, it was quite normal that no barriers should separate them.”
Consider these examples! This, by and large, is the spirit in which people of the past read the old romances. One sees no sign here of anyone inspired with an urge to abstain from the passions of love. We may assume that the attitudes of present-day readers will be much the same. Thus, in “Hotaru” [14:207]:
“Pray don’t read any of these love stories to our young lady. She’s hardly likely to find scheming girls of that sort attractive, but it would be dreadful if she should come to think such affairs commonplace,” he said.
Present-day readers of The Tale of Genji, seeing so many passages describing the passions of love, are likely to think such affairs abundantly commonplace. If this tale were really intended as an admonition against lust, would it relate such things as this? There are, in its several chapters, numerous instances of instruction and admonition against lust, for the work discusses a vast variety of subjects. It stands to reason, therefore, that in the midst of all this, such instances will quite naturally occur. In the latter “Wakana” [15:243]:
There were points of style that were clear and unmistakable. The words with which he described how he had longed for her for years, how his hopes were realized so unexpectedly, and his apprehension thereafter, were quite eloquent and touching. “But must one write everything out so clearly? That such a fine man should write so thoughtless a letter! In the past, I myself was well aware what can happen when letters go astray, and even when I might well have been this explicit, I was terse and evasive. But it is difficult for people to exercise due discretion,” he thought, somewhat contemptuous of the man.
These are Genji’s thoughts as he contemplates the letter he has found that Kashiwagi sent to the Third Princess. If one regards [Genji] as entirely a work of moral instruction, then here we have a lesson in how to write love letters, which thus could serve to encourage the conduct of love affairs.
Scholars down through the ages, no matter what texts they might be annotating, have neglected to study carefully the overall import of those texts, but have succumbed totally to the teachings of Confucianism or Buddhism, which they then have attempted to apply forcibly to the texts they are explicating, thus distorting their meaning. This has been a habitual failing of scholars of this land since times long past, and not one of them is there who has not succumbed to Confucianism or Buddhism. And thus, in the same forcible manner, this tale too is dragged within the ken of Confucian and Buddhist doctrines.
And so, even events that, with an understanding of human emotion [mna o shirite], are described as good but do not conform to the spirit of those doctrines, are forcibly misinterpreted and construed as bad. This is a lesson in such-and-such; this is an admonition against such-and-such, they insist. When passages of this sort are interpreted as castigating vice, their depth of feeling [mna no fukaki] vanishes, which of course means that in most cases the author’s original sense is entirely lost. To interpret tales entirely in terms of Confucianism and Buddhism is but envious pandering to the moral pretensions of those texts and the sagaciously grandiloquent fine phrases of their sharply argued disquisitions on good and evil, right and wrong. It is all mere sophistry.
Each and every text, of any sort whatever, has its own individual purport [omomuki]. So what does it matter that some, inevitably, should be at odds with the spirit of Confucianism or Buddhism? To take a tale that was written in order to exhibit the varieties of human emotion [mna o misemu] and make a moral homily of it is like cutting down a cherry tree planted for the beauty of its blossoms and breaking it up it for firewood. We could not live without firewood, even for a single day; it is a valuable substance and there is nothing wrong with it. But there are many other trees that make perfectly good firewood. To cut down a treasured cherry tree can only be deemed a heartless deed.
Furthermore, although sensitivity to human emotion [mna o shiru to iu koto] differs in nature from the doctrines of Confucianism and Buddhism, in the broadest sense it embraces even the Way of regulating oneself, managing one’s household, and governing the state.110 Were they to empathize with [aware to omoishiraba] all the thoughts and deeds that constitute a parent’s love for a child, surely there would be no unfilial children in this world. And were they to empathize with all the labors of the peasantry and the travails of their servants, surely there would be no inhumane lords in this world. But the fact that there are inhumane lords and unfilial children in this world, in the final analysis, is because they are insensitive to human emotion [mna o shiraneba]. Thus when we understand that tales are texts that exhibit the varieties of human feeling and we read them principally for that purpose, they may often serve naturally as moral instruction in all manner of ways; but when we read them, having decided from the start that they are moral homilies, we can go terribly wrong. Consider what it says at the end of The Tale of Sumiyoshi:
In the past as in the present, this is what malicious people are like. Anyone who has seen or heard of such things should be at pains to be kind to others.111
These words are critical of the insensitive [mna o shirazarishi] behavior of the stepmother of the Sumiyoshi lady. [The story] shows how the stepmother comes to a bad end and describes the young lady in splendid terms—how she meets Shōshō and, though guilty of an affair of passion, in the end prospers. This is clearly intended as an admonition that “encourages virtue and castigates vice,” but it admonishes only against insensitivity to human emotion [mna o shirazaru], which is quite a different matter from the usual Confucian and Buddhist admonishments. The Tale of Genji should be understood in like manner.
As I said at the outset, tales have a nature of their own that is unique to tales; they should not be discussed in terms of Confucian and Buddhist texts, which are quite irrelevant and unrelated, all the while ignoring evidence that is close at hand. One argument of this sort, however—that tales illustrate the principle that “those who rise must inevitably fall and those who meet must invariably part”—often seems to make sense, and there is some justice to this claim. In the first place, the Way of the Buddha, as we term it, is a Way that categorically renounces human emotion [mna oba sutsuru michi]. Its doctrines are far more rigorous than those of the Confucian Way, and it is a Way meant, in every respect, to be far removed from human feeling. Yet despite this, it is readily attractive to the human mind. Even ignorant mountain folk, even women and children, strange to say, are deeply moved by it; and in any predicament whatever, their thoughts turn habitually to this Way. In fact, neither the affairs of this world nor the events of this life are of the slightest concern to that Way. But it is a Way that propounds its principles attractively and powerfully, so that people far and wide will be persuaded to alter their garb and look to the afterlife. And so the minds of everyone everywhere, accustomed as they are to hearing such things, be they high or low, wise or foolish, are permeated with these doctrines. Thus it is that someone in the prime of life, struck by the insubstantiality of this world or overwhelmed by the anguish of his own life, may mortify himself in the black garb of a monk, seclude himself deep in the mountains far from all civilization, and devote himself to the practice of austerities.
And since such scenes are so replete with deep emotion [mna no fukaki koto], this tale describes every person of profound sensibilities, from Genji on down, as in one way or another attracted to the Way of the Buddha. This is just the way things were in that world, and these are the varieties of feeling experienced by people [hito no nasake no mna] who lived in a world in which such customs prevailed. Thus the many references to the Way of the Buddha, in chapter after chapter, are in no way meant to propagate its doctrines; they simply depict the emotions [aware o misetaru] that arise in such a milieu. If they were for the purpose of propagating the principles of the Way of the Buddha, they would, without fail, depict the decrepitude of Genji in old age, and they would surely depict his death as well. But they depict neither the decrepitude nor the death of this gentleman; they stop short of that and depict only the full panoply of his virtues. From which we know that this is not a lesson in the principle that “those who rise must inevitably fall.” Though the commentaries maintain that such is the case, who could read this tale and thereby be persuaded of this principle? Reading those scenes here and there that depict someone entering the Way of the Buddha, someone of a Confucian turn of mind may conclude that Murasaki Shikibu is of the Buddhist persuasion, or some monk may maintain that she writes in order to turn us to the Way. But readers of this sort are merely indulging the prejudices of their own chosen Way. This tale does not participate in any such prejudices. The Way of the Buddha occupied the minds of everyone who lived in that world; the innumerable scenes of this sort are simply descriptions of the world as it was then. How then can one attribute [Buddhist] motives to the author?
Moreover, Mr. Kumazawa, whom I mentioned previously, states at the beginning of his Discursive Commentary on this tale:112
The Tale of Genji on the surface would appear to describe lascivious matters [kōshoku], but in fact, it is not a lascivious work. Thus it is that even among readers who delight in this tale, there are those who are overly fastidious. What motivated the author to write this tale was her grief that, in every way, as the end of the age drew nigh, the beauteous ways of times past should decline and lapse into vulgarity. Yet people would shun and shy away from an overtly proper work, so that it would have few readers and thus would not circulate widely. There are many works written to set forth certain doctrines, but because their language is stiff and people find them off-putting, they do not last for long. Or if they do survive, they will have no readers and thus might as well not exist. And so, judging that it would be useless to write such a work, she [Murasaki] took great pains not to write in a didactic style. She simply fashioned an amorous amusement, in the course of which she has left us a detailed description of the fine manners and thoughtful ways of the ranking aristocracy of long ago. People who, having no idea of its true nature, describe it as a mere fiction, albeit well told and well written, or consider it just another story, written down exactly as it came from the author’s mouth—such people only display the paucity of their knowledge of Japanese and Chinese literature…. Only in this tale do the means survive to observe the rites, music, and fine writing of times past. Therefore, what one should first of all attend to in this tale are the beauteous ways of antiquity. That is, rites performed properly and placidly, music played with harmony and grace, the courtliness of both men and women, the way they constantly delight in courtly music, their caring manners so free of meanness. Second is the detail with which human feelings are depicted in this work. For ignorance of human feeling frequently results in a loss of harmony in the five human relations…. In short, this tale was written with the basic aim of moral reform. In particular, it describes in great detail the Way of Music…. It is said that for the modification of manners and the improvement of customs, there is nothing better than music. This is why, in this tale, the Way of Music is described with such particular attention.
I, Norinaga, will now discuss these points. First of all, [Kumazawa] says that “even among readers who delight in this tale, there are those who are overly fastidious.” This is something that will depend entirely on the person in question. Of course, this may well be true of a pure-minded person who believes deeply that lasciviousness is evil, but then, might not a deeply lascivious reader just as well be incited to become even more so?
And then [Kumazawa] says: “What motivated the author to write this tale was her grief that, in every way, as the end of the age drew nigh, the beauteous ways of times past should decline and lapse into vulgarity.” Since by comparison with the crude customs of later ages, the manners and attitudes of people of the past are elegant indeed, one might well come to such a conclusion, but the author’s intentions have nothing to do with this. It takes a Confucian mentality to think that in that age she should be minded to do such a thing. This tale does indeed afford us a glimpse of the courtly ways of the past, but that is for readers of later times to say; the book was not from the very start written in order to illustrate such things.
And then [Kumazawa] says that “people would shun and shy away from an overtly proper work…[and so] she simply fashioned an amorous amusement.” Such an attitude is indeed in evidence, but it is mistaken to consider her [Murasaki’s] description of amorous matters a “mere amusement.” As I have said time and again, her principal concern in writing is the varieties of human feeling [mna]; and since for depth of feeling, nothing surpasses the passions of love, she writes giving prime importance to these matters with particular frequency. Thus the degree to which her depiction of the condition and feelings of those who love is anything but mere amusement should be perfectly plain; to insist that it is otherwise is the same old Confucian mentality.
And then [Kumazawa] speaks of “the detail with which human feelings are described in this work.” This is indeed the case. There is nothing to compare with it in the literature of either Japan or China. But when he says that “this tale was written with the basic aim of moral reform,” once again this is the same old Confucian mentality. Neither is it true that “in particular, it describes in great detail the Way of Music.” The musical performances that one frequently encounters are much the same as when present-day people enjoy playing the shamisen, chanting jōruri, or the like; they are simply descriptions of the way things were in ages past and what they enjoyed. To say that “for the modification of manners and the improvement of customs, there is nothing better than music” is a typically twisted Confucian notion that has nothing whatever to do with tales.
In short, harsh pronouncements and misinformed interpretations of this sort are precisely the same as those of the buddistically inclined when they go on about how “those who rise must inevitably fall” and the like. Neither have any thought for any ideas other than those in the texts that they themselves are accustomed to, and both are ignorant of the fact that tales have a different nature entirely their own. This Discursive Commentary extracts short fragments of text, one after another from chapter after chapter of the tale, and interprets them in whatever manner the author, as a Confucianist, wishes to, with no regard for what that text might mean. Occasionally an interesting idea turns up among them, but for the most part, they are utterly outrageous. Again, in the Seven Essays it says:
Just as in China, Sima Qian and others, in consequence of their own suffering, gave vent to their rage in writing and, in doing so, created a unique voice of their own. Shikibu, too, having lost her father, Tametoki, and having been widowed by her husband, Nobutaka, and having no means of support with which to raise her two daughters, in this time of privation wrote this tale, describing each and every aspect of her world, setting them down as satire and as homilies and, in doing, so dispelled her melancholy.113
This, too, is but speculation of a Confucian bent and cannot be considered the essence of the tale. And when he [Tameakira] takes the Reizei Emperor’s taint to the imperial line [Reizei no In no mono no magire]114 to be a moral allegory, claims that it is the “crux of the entire work” [ichibu daiji], and discusses his reasons for doing so, this too is Confucian thinking, totally obsessed with precedents in the literature of China and ignorant of the basic nature of tales. In his discussion of the clandestine affair between Genji and the Fujitsubo Empress, he says: “Observe that at first this is described in a most graceful manner and in the end as a most frightful and improper transgression.” He insists upon making a moral allegory of this, but even if Genji does later come to feel that it was “most frightful and improper,” what is one to say about his subsequent clandestine trysting with the Oborozukiyo lady, such as we see in the previous citation from “Usugumo” [13:454]?115 Were it the author’s [Murasaki’s] intent to assert that his affair with the Fujitsubo Empress was a “most frightful transgression,” would she really describe such goings-on again later? If this was meant as a moral allegory, having once warned against it, surely she would then back away and move on.
Again, in “Miotsukushi” [13:276], it says: “With the accession of the present Emperor, he was delighted that all was just as he wished.” These are Genji’s thoughts. “The present Emperor” refers to the Reizei Emperor. If all were as argued in [Tameakira’s] essay, then when the Reizei Emperor acceded to the throne, should she [Murasaki] not have described Genji as feeling even more fearful and as deploring his defilement of the imperial line [kōin no magirenuru koto], rather than as she does here, “delighted that all was just as he wished”? There is much more that misses the mark in this discussion of the secret of the Emperor’s birth [mono no magire], but since it is such a delicate subject, I shall refrain from discussing it further. In any case, this is not something that can be singled out as a moral allegory.
After all, defilement of the imperial line [mono no magire] is now, and long has been, a matter of unparalleled importance. But tales being tales, they do not depict matters of such magnitude in the real world as the “crux of the entire work.” [Genji], too, being a tale, this is but a single episode in a story. What, then, one may ask, was [the author’s] intention in depicting such an affair? As stated earlier, she did so above all in order that through this affair with the Fujitsubo Empress, she might exhibit in their fullest possible depth all the emotions of passionate love [mna…o misemu]. For here we have a man and a woman, both possessed of all the finest qualities, a couple superior to all others in their sensitivity to emotion [mna o shiritamaeru]; and since the emotions of love aroused in an illicit relationship of this intensity are even deeper than usual, [the author] purposefully depicts these people involved in a love affair of the most thoroughly improper sort, thus gathering together a full array of the very deepest emotions.
Then, too, the Reizei Emperor’s taint to the imperial line [Reizei no In no mono no magire] is depicted as a means of furthering Genji’s rise to success. For in every tale, there is a main character who is described in the most favorable terms and to whom are attributed all the best things in life. Since personal success is the ultimate human good, as a rule most tales depict this character as fortunate in all things, ultimately rising to the highest station in life. This tale, too, describes Genji’s rise to success, yet since the pinnacle of human success is to become Emperor, even a Minister of State, as a commoner, must still harbor some lingering dissatisfaction, and thus [the author] decides to bestow upon him the title of Honorary Emperor in Retirement. Yet without some plausible reason for doing so, this would only seem unnatural, in fact shallow and contrived. This is why this disruption [mono no magire] is described, in order to make [Genji] the father of an Emperor. Thus it is that this gentleman can become Honorary Emperor in Retirement, for he is the son of an Emperor, he has as children an Empress and a Minister, and in addition to all this, he is even the father of an Emperor. It is in this manner that he rises to the peak of honor, splendor, and personal success.
Further evidence for claiming that this was done in order to facilitate the bestowal of the honorary title is found in “Usugumo” [13:440–41], in the words of the monk on night duty, who has long known about the tainted succession [mono no magire] and decides to inform the <<Reizei>> Emperor secretly:
“This is a matter of great importance, as much so to the future as it was in the past, but that might well leak out and instead prove detrimental to all concerned—the late Emperor and Empress, as well as the Minister who currently governs the land. But what has an old monk like myself to regret, no matter what misfortune may be my lot? What has been vouchsafed to me in a revelation from the Buddha I humbly relate to you….”
The “matter of great importance, as much so to the future as it was in the past” refers to the fact that the Reizei Emperor does not know who his true father is. Now, to inform him of this, so that he does know his true father and can perform his filial duties, is a very fine thing indeed. And yet [the monk] speaks of how it might “instead prove detrimental” to the Kiritsubo Emperor, the Fujitsubo Empress, and Genji were word of it to leak out. If, then, we take this to mean that he describes the tainted succession [mono no magire] as a matter of great importance, it does not jibe with his statement that it might “instead prove detrimental.” If he refers to the tainted succession [mono no magire], then of course it is detrimental to all these people, so why would he say “instead” [kaerite]? By paying close attention to this word “instead,” we can grasp the correct meaning of this passage. The [objective] particle o in the phrase haberu koto o connects to the clause beginning “from the Buddha.” This matter of great importance, vouchsafed to me in a revelation from the Buddha, he says, I humbly relate to you.
Upon hearing what is humbly told him, the Emperor says in reply to the monk [13:442]: “Had I gone on in ignorance of this, I would have carried the guilt into my next life….” Had he gone on in ignorance of the fact that Genji was his real father, this means. With these words, the meaning of the foregoing passage becomes clearer. If the matter in question were the tainted succession [mono no magire], the Reizei Emperor would bear no guilt whatever, even if he knew nothing about it. And then the monk says [13:442]:
“The repeated omens that appear in the heavens and the unrest that pervades the realm are all manifestations of this. It was one thing when you were young and could not have reached the age of discretion, but now, as you’ve grown steadily more mature and become fully cognizant of everything, they are making their displeasure known. All things begin in the days of one’s parents….”
“A revelation from the Buddha,” “I would have carried the guilt into my next life,” “the repeated omens that appear in the heavens…are manifestations of this,” and “they are making their displeasure known”—all these result from his ignorance of who his true father is. If they were due to the tainted succession [mono no magire], then guilt would fall, for the most part, on Genji, but note that it is described as falling entirely upon the Reizei Emperor. In “Hashihime” [16:154], when Kaoru, in Uji, first learns from Ben no Kimi that his real father is Kashiwagi, he says: “If we had not had this conversation, I would have gone through life bearing a heavy burden of sin.” Comparison with what is said here, too, should make this clear. “All things begin in the days of one’s parents” means that the fate of a child, whether for good or for ill, is in recompense for the good and evil done by its parents. In saying this, [the monk] means that Reizei’s rise to his current position as Emperor, ruler of all under heaven, has come to pass in recompense of the myriad virtuous deeds of his father, Genji; and thus it is all the more imperative that he know that Genji is his father. But if one takes his guilt to be the guilt of the tainted succession, then the text should read, “All things are repaid in the days of the child.” One must pay careful heed to the text. By the same token, as we know from the foregoing text, it makes quite a difference whether it refers to the parent or the child. And in the text that follows [“Usugumo,” 13:445–46], it says:
He pursued his studies even more assiduously…and found several instances of those who within their lifetime had been [of the] Genji [clan] and then, after becoming Counselors and Ministers of State, had gone on to become Imperial Princes and had even succeeded to the throne. Should he perhaps, giving as his reason [Genji’s] personal acumen, abdicate in his favor? the Emperor mused in the course of his myriad meditations. In the autumn promotions, he certainly must be made Grand Minister [daijō daijin].
“He pursued his studies even more assiduously” because he wished to find some precedent that would allow him to make Genji the Emperor. This we know because he “found several instances.” Finally, thinking to relinquish the throne to him, he first of all will make him Grand Minister of State.
One must consider carefully the process by which the taint [mono no magire] in this tale, beginning several chapters before this, has been mentioned repeatedly and, having come this far, concludes with the Emperor deciding that he will make Genji the Emperor. So if we assume that the author is intent on describing this gentleman’s rise to success, then the fact that she might have gone one step further and raised him to the rank of Emperor, but instead stopped short at Honorary Emperor in Retirement, is an example of her profound attention to detail. The Commandant in The Tale of Sagoromo, who is ultimately made Emperor,116 is patterned after Genji in this tale and then is raised even further [than Genji], but raising the Commandant to the rank of Emperor with no good reason for doing so actually seems rather contrived, indeed silly. But Murasaki Shikibu is well aware of this and so refrains from making [Genji] the Emperor, and since even Honorary Emperor in Retirement would seem too abrupt if there were no good reason, she begins laying the groundwork from the very start, with the words of the Korean physiognomist in “Kiritsubo” [12:116]:
“He has the signs of one destined to become a father to his nation and rise to the supreme rank of Emperor; yet when I read them as such, I somehow fear unrest and affliction.”
Then in depicting the taint to the succession [mono no magire], she proceeds to describe him as one who ought to be given an honorary title. When we come to “Usugumo” [13:446], at the point where [the Emperor] wants to appoint him to the throne, she has this gentleman [Genji] say:
“Though the late Emperor was disposed to favor me over his many other sons, never did he consider relinquishing the throne to me. How could I betray his wishes and rise to a rank to which I am not entitled?”
Although he ought to rise to the rank of Emperor, she says, that last step is purposely omitted. These words signal the author’s underlying intentions, as well as the extraordinary depth of care that went into the creation of this work. Careful consideration of the thrust of the foregoing quotations should make it clear that, throughout, her depiction of the tainted succession [mono no magire] was for the purpose of advancing the rise to success of this gentleman.
Furthermore, Sagoromo is in every way patterned on this tale. Among many things that have been altered only slightly is the Commandant who carries on a clandestine affair with the Second Princess, and the child whom she bears is falsely passed off as the son of the Saga Emperor. When it is decided that this “Prince” will be appointed Crown Prince, the Commandant, in consequence of a revelation from Amaterasu Ōmikami, is raised to the rank of Emperor.117 This is patterned totally on the Reizei Emperor’s taint on the succession, and the author has done so for the same reason as in this tale, in order to advance the rise to success of the Commandant by appointing him to this rank. Thus the intentions of the former are made clear by comparison with the latter.
MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS
Among the multitude of tales, this tale [The Tale of Genji] is one of particular excellence and magnificence. Neither before it nor after it are there any at all to compare with it. In the first place, the old romances that precede it are in no sense profound, nor do they seem to have been written with any care. They are utterly prosaic, filled with outlandish goings-on, mainly with the aim of astonishing the reader. Not one of them has any depth or detail in matters of human feeling [mna naru suji]. Of those that follow [Genji], the [Tale of] Sagoromo seems to be modeled entirely on this tale; yet despite the effort expended, it is utterly inferior. None of the others is any different. It need hardly be said that this tale [Genji] alone is of surpassing excellence, a work of particular depth, and written with every possible care, so that the language is in every way magnificent. The panorama of people as they go through life; the passing scenes of nature, even the very plants and trees in spring, summer, autumn, and winter; everything is splendidly described. But in particular it is the differentiation of the people, the distinct manner and character of each and every one, be they men or women. Even the terms in which they are praised are not uniform but in every case are distinguished according to the manner and character of this person or that, so one can picture them as if one were meeting real people. This is nothing any ordinary writer could hope to achieve.
But more magnificent than all else is this: first of all, Chinese writings, even those regarded as the finest of them all, although they do depict in cursory fashion the feelings of people as they go through life, are but crude and shallow works. This thing we call the human heart is by no means as utterly uncomplicated as it is made out to be in Chinese writings. Faced with a problem that engages the feelings deeply, [the human heart] wavers this way and that, tediously and effeminately, confusion vying with confusion in so many different gradations that it can hardly come to any firm conclusion. And in this tale, these divers gradations, none excepted, are depicted in minute detail and particularity; it is like gazing into a mirror in which all is reflected with total clarity. I doubt there is another work, in either Japan or China, past or present or future, that can match the manner in which it delineates human feeling. Moreover, in none of its several chapters is there anything of a sort to astound, horrify, or shock. From beginning to end, it treats but the selfsame theme, the uneventful flow of ordinary life. Though it is a very long book, one neither grows impatient nor wearies of reading it but, rather, wishes only to know what comes next. From early on, I have several times explicated this tale for the benefit of my students. With lesser books, even those that are not very long, there are moments when one wearies of teaching them. But with this book, long though it is, years and months may pass and still one never wearies of it, not even slightly. Every time it seems so fresh and wonderful that I feel as if I were reading it for the first time and realize anew how superior it is, how truly magnificent!
Someone asked: “I must say that the conciseness with which Tales of Ise is written, the way it packs its meaning into just a phrase or two, and the overall economy of words, is truly superb. But isn’t this tale, by comparison, extraordinarily wordy and long, tending far too much to excess of detail? How do you explain this?”
I answered: “In the first place, the standards of stylistic criticism as practiced by the Chinese, which as a rule value linguistic economy and concision in writing, are entirely correct, and the very same holds true for the writings of this land. Tales of Ise is indeed splendidly economical of words, and in this it surpasses other tales. But to consider this tale [Genji] inferior to Tales of Ise because its sentences are long and complex is to judge it without reference to the quality of the text, but only according to the length or brevity of its periods, which is but blind adherence to the standards of Chinese style. That the wordiness of bad writing is bad goes without saying. Conversely, one cannot conclude categorically that length is bad. Be it ever so short, bad writing is bad; be it ever so long, good writing is good. The writing in this tale is wordy, but not a word is wasted; its lengths are appropriately so and, even when it goes on at great length, is only the more splendid for its length. Tales of Ise is written in an entirely different style. It must not be held up as a standard by which to judge the merits and demerits of a text that makes no attempt at economy and concision but strives instead to write in meticulous detail.”
Concerning the poems in tales: since many of those in Tales of Ise are old poems, many are good; but those that appear to be newly written by the author are not good; and among them are some that are indescribably bad. In most other old works of fiction, all the poems are bad. But in The Tale of Genji, since all of them are written by the author, one seldom finds a bad poem, and mixed in among the good ones are some that are superb. There are those who say that when it comes to poems, those in Sagoromo are better than those in Genji, but this is not so. Compared with the poems in other old romances, those in Sagoromo are very good indeed, but they do not surpass those in Genji.
In this tale, everything about everyone who is deemed a good person, from Genji on down, is praised in glowing terms, except only that the poems they compose are never once praised, and here and there, one notes that, in contrast to a person’s excellence in other ways, his or her poems may be described as bad. This is because all the poems by the characters in the tale are composed by Murasaki Shikibu herself; for her to praise them would be to praise herself.
In “Kiritsubo” [12:110], she says of “harsh winds…”:
“Such a shambles it was, but considering how upset she was at the time, the Emperor surely will overlook that.”
In “Yūgao” [12:233], of “lives past…”:
“In matters of this sort, too, she seems, in fact, rather ill at ease.” “Ill at ease” refers to her [Yūgao’s] incompetence in the composition of poetry.118
In “Sakaki” [13:81–82]:
“Was it perhaps because of the tumult of confusion in her mind that words failed her? ‘Though even an ordinary autumnal farewell….’”
And again [13:92], of “broad being the shadow…”:
“It was nothing at all special, but given the occasion, the Commandant found it touching, and his sleeves grew positively damp with tears.”
And again [13:92], of “the glistening expanse…”:
“…he said, which was only what chanced to come to his mind. Too juvenile, really.”
In “Asagao” [13:466], of “autumn ends…”:
“It was in no way interesting, but….”
In “Hatsune” [14:140], of “after parting…”:
“It was just a jumble of words, whatever came into her child’s mind.”
In “Kochō” [14:164–65], of “in the flower garden…” and “by the butterflies…”:
“This was what they wrote. It would appear that even the most worthy and practiced sometimes found this sort of thing more than they could manage, for these compositions certainly bear no resemblance to what we would expect of them.”
In “Nowaki” [14:275], of “winds rage…”:
“Yet he produced a strangely stiff, indeed dreadful, composition.”
In “Makibashira” [14:379], of “deep within the palace…”:
“It was nothing out of the ordinary, but it seemed splendid, I suppose, while they were gazing at the fine face and figure of the Emperor.”
In “Yūgiri” [15:437], of “wisteria robes…”:
“It was not good, but the occasion and the suppressed emotion in her voice made it sound good to him.”
In “Hashihime” [16:115], of “how is that…”:
“It was not good, but given the occasion it was touching.”
In “Agemaki” [16:265], of “no barrier between…”:
“It was very ordinary, but the man who had awaited it was genuinely touched by the unaffected feeling he saw in it.”
In “Yadorigi” [16:471–72], of “him most high…,” “through ages eternal…,” “for the sake of my lord…,” and “of common sort…”:
“As you see, there were none of any particular interest.”
In “Azumaya” [17:77], of “how utterly…” and “in this dismal world…”:
“They expressed their feelings in this exchange of perfectly commonplace poems.”
In “Tenarai” [17:306], of “late in the night…”:
“Of this lame string of words….”
Passages like these are all expressions of self-deprecation on the part of the author. How is it that, from of old, no one has ever noticed this and these poems were annotated as if they were indeed bad?
With regard to Murasaki Shikibu’s own character, when one studies this tale and her diary, one notes here and there how thoroughly she deplored women who pride themselves on their learning and affect airs of intelligence and intellect and that she herself was profoundly cautious lest she be thought by others to do so. The passage in “Hahakigi” [12:165–66] beginning with “As a rule, the foolish ones, whether men or women…” and continuing to “and even of those matters one might particularly wish to mention it may be best to omit one or two” demonstrates her disdain for any pretension to learning and her determination to do no such thing herself. In the same chapter [12:165], it says: “Why should not even a woman…in the natural course of things see and hear a great deal?” This is to say that since anyone, even a woman, should know at least this much, it is nothing to take pride in. This shows the lack of any sense of pride in [Murasaki Shikibu] herself. Again, in the same chapter [12:161–64], she describes how, when Shikibu no Jō tells the story of the professor’s daughter, the young gentlemen snap their fingers in disgust at such unpleasantness. When we consider this woman’s manners, we see no reason to speak so ill of her; but in order to show her own repugnance for the affectation of learning, Murasaki Shikibu goes out of her way to describe her deeds as most disagreeable. And again, in “Otome” [14:17–20] where she describes the behavior, the attitudes, and the speech of the Academy people as exceedingly vulgar, entertaining though it is, she makes a particular point of deriding the inelegance of those who purposely pride themselves on their learning. Although it is normal that people lavish praise on anything and everything that they themselves esteem, [Murasaki Shikibu], despite her own particular partiality to learning, nonetheless describes it as though it were unworthy. In this there is a profound discretion that sets her apart from others.
Someone asked: “Whenever one reads descriptions of the thoughts of Genji and others in this tale who are considered ‘good people,’ they never seem to be manly and forthright, nor are they able to decide matters resolutely. They vacillate this way and that; they are feminine, weak willed, and faltering. What about this?”
I replied: “When you probe the innermost depths of people’s true feelings, you find that everyone, quite frequently, is feminine and faltering. What may seem to be masculine wisdom is often the result of conscious reflection and pretense, affected in order to preserve appearances. For when one converses with another person, one chooses [one’s words] carefully so as to present the best possible exterior; things do not come pouring out just as they are. For example, a stalwart warrior, in time of battle, dies bravely for the sake of his lord and his domain. When one describes such an act in writing, one depicts his deeds and thoughts as truly dauntless [daijōbu], for one imagines that within his own heart the man was indeed gallant. And yet if one were to describe in full detail his innermost feelings at the time, surely he would also have yearned for his father and mother in his ancestral home; and surely he would have wished to see, just once more, the faces of his wife and children. How could he not, in some small measure, regret the loss of his life? These are the ineluctable true feelings that all human beings invariably possess, and if they say that a man, by virtue of his dauntlessness, is not the slightest bit subject to such feminine feelings, then he must be more akin to a heartless rock or log. Yet the usual run of books in the Chinese mold—both in relating the author’s feelings and even in praising others—describe only those outer manifestations of feeling, the pretense of which we are careful to preserve, and omit to mention any unseemly inner recesses. And so, at first glance, one is impressed with their wisdom, manliness, and integrity. And under the preconceptions that come with a familiarity with books of this sort, fictional tales will seem, by comparison, frivolous and feminine. Tales, after all, are not written to teach moral principles; they describe people’s feelings just as they are so as to illustrate the workings of their emotions [mna naru suji o misemu tame ni]. And of all tales, this one is particularly meticulous; it depicts the state of people’s feelings in the most scrupulous detail. And since the best of these people tend to be profoundly sensitive [mna o shiru kata fukakereba], descriptions of the emotions that they experience will often sound feminine and fainthearted.”
Another question: “The initiation of relations between men and women [in Genji] is not proper and orderly, as in China, but somehow indecent—and not merely in their clandestine affairs but even when they marry with the permission of their parents. What about this?”
I answer: “This is something in which the past differs from the present, and when you view the matter from the standpoint of modern Chinese custom, the past may well seem indecorous. In all things, whatever they may be, China is China, and our realm is our realm; the present is the present, and the past is the past. But the Confucianists and their ilk judge things entirely on the basis of Chinese custom, and present-day people, being accustomed to present-day practice, look askance at the past. This is, in every way, unfair. In the past, after all, when men and women met, a stranger would not so much as approach a woman’s blinds, and even fairly close acquaintances would be separated by blinds as well as a curtained screen. Even brother and sister would often be separated by a curtained screen, and she would not show her face openly. As a rule, a woman would be reluctant even to let a man hear her voice. Viewed in the light of these customs, present-day customs, as well as the customs of China are indecorous in the extreme. Likewise with the etiquette of the initiation of marital relations. In the past, it was the man who went daily to the home of the woman, whereas now we have adopted the Chinese custom, in which the woman goes to the home of the man. Strictly speaking, then, when the proper way was for the man to go, one may well wonder why the woman should now go first. If the tables could be turned and people of the past could observe the customs of the present day, they would probably describe them as indecent and improper.”
Another question: “In the tale, at the mere mention of illness, they say, ‘It’s a malign spirit, a malign spirit,’ and frantically offer prayers and incantations. Even in the case of a severe affliction, they rely entirely on monks and appear never to consult a physician or take medicine. Isn’t this foolish?”
I answer: “This, too, is just the way things were in those days. It is a mistake, however, to assume that they did not take medicine in earlier times just because one finds no mention of medicine. From of old, there occur mentions of medicine in ancient texts, and illness is referred to as a ‘medicinal matter’ [kusuri no koto]. In ‘Wakana’ [15:98], [the old nun] is described as ‘looking just as if you were a doctor [kusushi],’ and in ‘Yadorigi’ [16:432] [Kaoru suggests to Nakanokimi that he might be allowed to] ‘wait upon her as one of her doctors,’ from which we know that both medicines and physicians were employed. Yet in writing they make no mention of physicians, but instead speak often of summoning wonder workers [genza]—because faith in the miracles of the gods and buddhas and reliance on the power of wonder workers rings touchingly frail and trusting, whereas calling a physician and taking medicine somehow seem pretentious, a bit distasteful, and not at all touching. Thus we see in A Tale of Flowering Fortunes that when Lord Higashi Sanjō no In [Fujiwara no Michinaga] was ill, they did not consult a physician.119 Given the ways of times past, when anything and everything had to be elegant and lofty, it was only natural that such a man would not be permitted to approach a woman of high rank. Consider, for example, how the woman in ‘Hahakigi’ [12:163] who ‘imbibes a potion of garlic’ is deplored as being dreadfully repellent. This is why medicine is not called ‘medicine,’ but simply ‘hot water.’ In passages describing the ill, the mention of ‘hot water’ would seem in most cases to refer to medicine. But even though the word is the same, it must not have sounded so bad to refer to illness as a ‘medicinal matter,’ whereas to speak of ‘taking medicine’ would have sounded vulgar. Throughout this tale, there are countless cases in which great importance is attached to such fine distinctions. Thinking as we do in the present day, we may well wonder what could possibly be vulgar about the mention of taking medicine, but these are things that change with the times. For example, words like kashiratsuki [the look of a person’s head] and tsuratsuki [the look of a person’s face; countenance] are nowadays extremely vulgar words. In the past, however, they must not have been, for in tales they are often used when praising the looks of people of high station. Here again, one must realize that every successive age has its own ways. As always, a good knowledge of the ways of the age is a prerequisite to the reading of tales.”
The usual question: “If this tale describes anything and everything that exists in this world, then it ought to describe in some detail the lives of people of the lower orders, but it describes only the upper classes and hardly mentions the lives of the humble. What is the significance of this?”
I answer: “Such is the world we live in that every age, every rank of persons, every region, every group is a world unto itself. In antiquity, there was the world of antiquity; in the present, the world of the present. Those of high rank have their world of the high. Humble people have their world of the humble. Warriors have their world of warriors, farmers their world of farmers, merchants their world of merchants; and the thoughts that normally occupy their minds are for the most part thoughts of their own individual worlds. Now tales, whatever they may be in the present day, in the past were not normally read by humble people of the lower classes. They were for the amusement of upper-class people, and thus they dealt mainly with goings-on in the world of the upper classes. This is simply because anything that does not directly concern us, that we do not constantly see and hear of, is unfamiliar to us, and our interest in it is slight. When you think how coarse a creature Tsukushi no Gen is and how rough and boorish Ukifune’s stepfather Hitachi no Suke is, how could those of yet lower station possibly possess qualities attractive to the upper classes?120 In ‘Yūgao’ [12:222], they speak of the ‘unfeeling mountain folk,’ and in ‘Momiji no ga’ [12:387], of the ‘uncomprehending menials and their ilk.’ In the ‘Ongaku no maki’ chapter of A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, in describing the construction of the Hōjōji, it says of the old moat digger who composed a poem, ‘it was touching that such a creature should be so sensitive.’121 In ‘Suma’ [13:205–6], Genji hears the fisher-folk lamenting the condition of their lives and looks on them with pity, thinking ‘of their unintelligible chatter that “the vicissitudes of their feelings must be much the same as mine.” ’ From such passages as these, we can see just how alien to them the lower orders were. Moreover, since the author Murasaki Shikibu herself was by no means a person of hopelessly humble station, the things she habitually saw, heard, and thought of would seem to be entirely of the upper classes and not at all of the lower.”
If you would know something about those states of mind conducive to the composition of poetry, you should read this tale regularly and carefully. The matters described in this tale, the deeds and feelings of the people in it, are one and all the very stuff of poetry. Why do I say this? In the first place, it is said that human feelings [hito no kokoro] never change, whether past or present, high or low; yet they are not without slight differences among them, resulting from differences in the worlds that each and every individual inhabits, such as the customs of their age and their station in life. And likewise with poems: as works composed in response to the feelings that things arouse, by rights they too should never change, whether past or present, high or low. Yet, while such may well have been so in antiquity [kamitsuyo], poems from the Heian period [naka-mukashi] onward by no means describe only the feelings of the moment, exactly as they were felt. This being an art learned by emulating the poems of the past and composing after their manner, it is an art that cannot be practiced without knowing well the ways of the world of the past and the feelings and deeds of those who lived then. Still, in the process of learning from the past, we leave out of consideration the poems of the Man’yōshū and earlier, for their subject matter is unfamiliar and their style extremely antiquated. For the most part, therefore, we imitate [the poems] of the Kokinshū and later. Yet none of the poems of these successive ages was composed by hopelessly humble mountain folk. And so, emulating the poems of the past is not something one can do without knowing something about the feelings and deeds of people of middling court rank and above and of the world in which people of those ranks lived. In the present day, there is no better way to attain a detailed knowledge of these than to read this tale. And even with these old poems, if one reads only the poem itself, one still knows none of the details of the original feelings from which that poem arose, and thus there remain aspects of it too unfamiliar to imitate. Yet if one makes a practice of reading this tale night and day, it is just as if one could mingle with courtly people possessed of all the finest qualities—foremost among them Genji himself—observe with one’s own eyes their manners and their appearance, and listen to their conversations, so that one grows familiar with all their activities and learns every detail of their innermost feelings. It is as if one could observe before one’s very eyes, as in present reality, every conceivable courtly thing—that world above the clouds in times past, the round of ceremonies at court, and even the private goings-on in the houses of the highest nobility. In this way, you see, one acquires a thorough knowledge of the circumstances and feelings that originally gave rise to these poems by people of the past; one comes to know precisely that a poem of this particular sort arises from such-and-such a moment and that the writer’s feelings on that occasion were of such-and-such a sort. It is for this reason I say that everything described in this tale, the deeds and feelings of the people in it, one and all, conduce to the composition of poetry.
Now if I might discuss in yet more detail this matter of composing present-day poems in imitation of those of the past: in the first place, this thing we call poetry originally was simply the act of expressing in words something felt in one’s own heart, and not an imitation of thoughts and words expressed by someone else. Yet although this may well have been so in antiquity, since the Heian period this has not been the only way [the art was practiced]. Moreover, since all poetry is meant to reveal one’s feelings, either to the gods or to other people, the desire to compose as well as one can is genuinely felt and not false affectation after the fact; but you will never be able to compose good poems if you do not learn to imitate the best poems of the past.
Now, in learning from the past, you will find many things that differ from the present day. Matters of little consequence in the present day were often taken very seriously in the past and were made the subject of a great many poems. And just as often, matters that present-day people make much of were never even mentioned in poems of the past. In such cases, we usually ignore present-day practice and concentrate on following the example of the past. In both the depth of their admiration for the moon and the blossoms and the intensity of the emotions that these feelings could arouse in them, people of the past far surpassed people of the present day. Present-day people do, in a general way, regard the blossoms as beautiful and the moon as affecting [aware nari], but not to the extent that it deeply permeates their feelings. In poetry, however, one must compose as if one were just as deeply touched as were people of the past. To describe the feelings of a present-day person just as they are would only be deficient in feeling [aware asakarubeshi]. After all, when people who never travel write travel poems and people who have never loved write love poems, are not they, too, simply imitating the past?
As in all things, of course, sometimes the poet’s actual feelings, even those of a person of the past, were nowhere near as intense as those described in the poem, for in attempting to describe accurately something that is felt poignantly, there is a natural urge to exaggerate the truth. As [Genji] says [“Hotaru,” 14:204], “Should one decide to describe someone favorably, one may select every good quality imaginable.” Poetry, too, is an art that describes deep emotions [mna o fukaku iite] and attempts to move deeply those who read and those who hear it. Thus even if poems of the past do exaggerate the truth, this is nothing to quibble about. Simply learn from the feelings they express and the situations that gave rise to them.
So then, if regularly you read this tale and transport your mind to the world of the people in the tale, then when you compose poetry, your feelings will naturally be imbued with the courtliness of the past and will far surpass the feelings of people in this mundane world, and your experience of viewing the same moon and blossoms will be infinitely more deeply moving. Be that as it may, people of recent times, even though they may study the poems of the past, know nothing of the world of the ancients and are unfamiliar with their feelings; they simply write whatever occurs to their modern minds, and thus, in most cases, end up producing something quite crude and unlike anything of the past. Nor is this true only of poems. In reading the introductory notes [kotobagaki] in the old anthologies, a person who is unfamiliar with this tale, since he has no precise knowledge of that world, will feel himself to be in terra incognita and will find many passages incomprehensible. Yet when one reads this tale with care and becomes familiar with the way things were in the world of the past, then not only the old poems but also the introductory notes, which one reads off in only a line or two, will come to feel intimately familiar, like something one sees or hears in the world of the present day, in one’s own native village. Then, of course, their emotional quality [mna] will be that much greater. As I have said again and again, the person who composes poetry, as well as the person who harbors a yearning for the courtly world of the past, should make a particular point of reading this tale with great care.
TRANSLATED BY T. HARPER
(Kagetsu zōshi)
Matsudaira Sadanobu (1758–1829) is a name associated principally with the political history of Japan. Born a grandson of the eighth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684–1751; r. 1716–1745), he was at one time himself a potential candidate for the office of shogun, but was thwarted in that ambition through the machinations of his archenemy, Tanuma Okitsugu (1719–1788). Subsequently, however, as lord of the northern domain of Shirakawa, presiding officer of the shogun’s Council of Elders, and author of the Kansei Reforms, Sadanobu earned a distinguished reputation as a statesman of great intellect and high integrity. After resigning from the Council of Elders in 1793, he devoted much of his time to artistic and literary pursuits, in the course of which he copied the entire Tale of Genji seven times in his own hand.122 Not surprisingly, Sadanobu’s reading of Genji is profoundly political, but the acuteness of observation and depth of knowledge that he displays in these two short excerpts from his miscellany, From Blossoms to Moonlight,123 make it seem only the more unfortunate that he wrote no more about Genji. Sadanobu’s last paragraph, in particular, is a salutary reminder that beneath the emotional sensitivity and aesthetic sensibility, which Norinaga so rightly focuses upon, there is also a strong current of ruthless political ambition that runs throughout the tale.
T. HARPER
The Profundity of The Tale of Genji
Of the many meticulously crafted episodes in The Tale of Genji, some are particularly impressive. One of these is Genji’s sojourn in Suma. This is an event of major importance in his life, but its origins trace back to the “Hana no en” chapter. How mysterious are the workings of the human mind! Just as one is wondering, “How can he possibly not realize what he is doing?” —Ah, she tells us: “There seemed to be hardly anyone around. The inner door, too, was open and there were no sounds of people. ‘This is just the way one gets into trouble,’ he thought as he stepped up and peered inside.”124 This, I must say, is magnificent writing.
A Critique of The Tale of Genji
In The Tale of Genji, Genji is first attracted to the Usugumo Empress [Fujitsubo] when he hears that she resembles his mother, and thus from an early age begins to feel an indefinable fondness for her. The way this is drawn is simply superb.
And then there is the way that his indiscretion, committed that night of the Cherry Blossom Festival while tipsy from saké, leads ultimately to his fall from power. At first, all heaven and earth tremble before his might, but by the time we reach “Sakaki,” he is in decline. Everything he does goes wrong and only hastens his downfall. And this, too, is set down in a manner that makes it all seem inevitable. Even as he departs for Suma, he still speaks as if he were blameless and behaves as if he were somehow wronged; but the punishing wind and waves of that shore make it clear that the heavens are unforgiving. He is distracted momentarily when messengers bring news of torrential rains in the capital, but then lightning strikes his kitchens. It is quite ingenious the way he is made to see that this [the wrath of the heavens] is directed solely at Suma.125
And again, when Genji returns [to the capital] once more, and we reach “Eawase,” she [Murasaki] relates how he flaunts his power as Ministers of State vie with one another for supremacy. Subsequently, he rises to the very highest rank, and we think, “What misfortune could possibly befall him now?” Then comes the business of his guardianship of the Third Princess, and he ends up failing to achieve perfection. This I find particularly impressive.
The spirit that attacks the Third Princess might better have been identified as the living spirit of Kashiwagi, but since people were unaware of this affair, the author does not name him but shows how, because memories of the Rokujō lady remain, people think “ah yes” and take this to be her.126 This is simply superb.
At a time when the Fujiwara were at the peak of their power, she describes, fearlessly, the contempt with which the mighty treat the Emperor. Genji, a Minamoto, is made a Minister of State; he quells his Fujiwara opponents; Yūgiri is enrolled in the Academy; and in depicting these events, the author suggests that she herself thinks that such is as all things ought to be. This is highly admirable.
It is truly an incomparable tale. Every time I read it, I am struck by the author’s profundity. Yet although she is well versed in the Way of the Buddha, she knows little of the True Way [Confucianism]; and in her ignorance of the Way, she errs in her depiction of the scene in which the Reizei Emperor first learns that he is the son of the Shining Genji.127 This one episode, it seems to me, is dangerous, for if women and children should read it, it might well lead them astray. That Usugumo [Fujitsubo] and Oborozukiyo violate the Way of Humanity should be obvious even to children; I cannot imagine that [these episodes] would mislead anyone. It is superb, too, the way that the author, who treats all matters relating to the Buddha with the utmost awe and respect, nonetheless mentions no fewer than three times the gratuitous tattling of the monk on night duty.
Motoori’s thesis is interesting—that this tale is but an exposition of the varieties of human feeling and is not meant to exemplify any philosophical principle. But there can be no doubt that here and there she writes with some more particular purpose in mind.
TRANSLATED BY T. HARPER
(Genji monogatari hyōshaku)
In 1845, Hagiwara Hiromichi (1815–1863) resigned his position as a low-ranking samurai in the service of the Ikeda daimyo house and moved from Okayama to Osaka to devote his full attention to the study of literature. After establishing himself as a poet and critic, he next embarked upon an extremely ambitious project. He would compile a new treatise and commentary on The Tale of Genji, to be published in combination with a revised text of all fifty-four chapters of the tale. In 1854, Hiromichi published the first installment of A Critical Appraisal of Genji (Genji monogatari hyōshaku), which includes an overview of previous Genji scholarship and a comprehensive analysis of the tale, followed by the text and detailed commentary on the first four chapters.128 Soon thereafter, palsy affecting the right side of Hiromachi’s body became so severe that he was forced to write with his left hand. An acquaintance wrote about this period that despite the obstacles of ill health and financial difficulty, Hiromichi continued to work on his magnum opus “with the devotion of a Buddhist ascetic.”129 By 1861, he had managed to publish the second installment of A Critical Appraisal, covering up to the eighth chapter of Genji. Two years later, aged forty-nine, he died, leaving his revisions to the text and his commentary on the rest of the tale incomplete.
Clearly, it was Hiromichi’s aim to build on the success of Kitamura Kigin’s Kogetsushō. In doing so, he not only emulates the format of commentary and analysis combined with a complete text of Genji, but also provides an even greater array of interpretive aids than Kigin did, including commentary gleaned both from the distant past and from the “New Commentaries” by Keichū, Mabuchi, and Norinaga, as well as interlinear notations to indicate structural breaks, shifts in narrative voice, syntactic flow, and even the widely separated components of kakari-musubi constructions.
Hiromichi’s primary emphasis on literary style and internal textual evidence, however, reveals a profound analytical shift that sets his work apart from Kigin’s hugely successful edition of Genji. Hiromichi avoids reproducing annotation that is contradictory or extraneous to a thoroughly literary reading of the text. In particular, he mediates long-standing ideological disputes by integrating interpretive theory from both national studies (kokugaku) and Confucian studies in an attempt to resolve issues of interpretation rather than perpetuate ideological dispute. Concerning the question of Murasaki Shikibu’s intentions in writing Genji, he cites both Tameakira and Norinaga, but rather than take the side of either, he notes that both made positive contributions to the debate. The result is a complex and completely constructive critical analysis that transcends many of the limitations of previous scholarship.
Hiromichi brought a wide-ranging knowledge of literary styles and genres to the task of compiling A Critical Appraisal of Genji. In his own day, he was best known as a poet and judge of poetic composition. After Takizawa Bakin’s death in 1848, Hiromichi was commissioned to produce a conclusion to Bakin’s unfinished but highly successful novel, Daring Adventures of Chivalrous Men (Kaikan kyōki kyōkakuden, 1832–1835). Typically, so that he could compose a conclusion faithful to the original, Hiromichi undertook a detailed study of the vernacular prose fiction in Chinese that had inspired Bakin’s novel. This study was also to form the basis of one of the most innovative aspects of A Critical Appraisal.
In a section of his comprehensive analysis, “Principles of Composition,” Hiromichi develops what might be called a “rhetoric of fiction,” designed to help the reader distinguish the universal constants of literary composition at all levels of Genji and thus better appreciate both the beauties of the text and the consummate skill of its creator. In arguing the benefits of such an interpretive strategy, Hiromichi cites both Tameakira’s and Mabuchi’s earlier resort to Chinese concepts and techniques. Hiromichi, however, had access to the more sophisticated scholarship of Jin Shengtan (1608–1661), and his own experience as the writer chosen to complete Bakin’s unfinished novel had made him a master of this newer mode of textual analysis. This enabled Hiromichi to provide a map to guide readers in exploring and comprehending the complexities of Murasaki’s narrative, rather than reduce the entire Genji to a single meaning, as so many earlier commentators had done.
Hiromichi rightly anticipated that the application of his eclectic interests in Chinese vernacular fiction and Confucian studies to the interpretation of Genji would invite the criticism of scholars dedicated to promoting the superiority of Japanese literature. In his introductory remarks, he moves to deflect such attacks by emphasizing the superior sophistication of the tale’s elegant prose over that of its Chinese antecedents. He also confronts the issue head-on by informing readers that “zealous scholars of our country [kokugakusha] are apt to be displeased that I even suggest that Genji is in some way similar to Chinese literature. There are those who would accuse me of a crime for saying as much, but I must emphasize that this is simply a working theory.” Hiromichi’s confidence in the persuasive power of this generous, all-embracing approach seems to have been misplaced, as scholarship for many decades thereafter favored Motoori Norinaga’s ideologically driven treatise, Tama no ogushi, over Hiromichi’s more systematic and comprehensive literary analysis.
A Critical Appraisal of Genji was widely reprinted immediately after its first publication in the mid-nineteenth century. However, with the opening of Japan to Western influence only a few years later, this attempt by an Edo-period scholar to promote a classical text received only sporadic scholarly attention in the Meiji and Taishō periods. Studies of the history of Genji commentary may go so far as to describe A Critical Appraisal as a work of finely detailed analysis and innovative interpretive theory, but they fail to delineate Hiromichi’s accomplishments other than in such generalities.130 Not until the 1980s, when Noguchi Takehiko published his laudatory reappraisal of Genji monogatari hyōshaku, was Hiromichi’s accomplishment given its due by modern scholarship.131 Nonetheless, the 1909 Kokugakuin edition of Hyōshaku remains the most recent recension of his work. Yet despite these years of unwarranted neglect, Hiromichi has left an indelible mark on the way we talk about Genji commentary, for it was he who first distinguished between pre- and post-Kogetsushō commentaries, calling the former kyūchū (Old Commentaries) and the latter shinchū (New Commentaries).
PATRICK CADDEAU
Principles of Composition
Praise for this tale requires no exaggeration on my part. The more one reads Genji, the more difficult it becomes to express how exceptional it is. I believe that this tale was not written in an ordinary manner, but that it was thought out and composed with various “principles of composition” in mind from the very beginning. I have yet to find anything in Japanese literature that I could say corresponds exactly to these “principles of composition.” Where these principles might originate, I cannot say, but they do speak of “principles of composition” in the literature of China, and these, for the most part, are not so different from those in Genji. So, initially, might we say that these principles are based on Chinese models? The practice of identifying “principles of composition” in Chinese literature dates from a much later period, however, than the composition of Genji. No one is going to maintain that what we find in Genji can be attributed to Chinese techniques alone. But then, even in China the first people to write things down did not discuss such principles. Rather, later generations saw the remarkable qualities of those early works and attached provisional names to the more noteworthy passages so they might learn from the way they had been composed. “Principles of Composition” evolved from this process. The identification of particular principles was simply a means to an end. Texts of ancient times were not originally composed with these principles in mind; rather, passages were labeled as such at a later date to facilitate their appreciation and interpretation. These principles make it possible to specify the remarkable qualities of a text. To claim that such principles exist is not mere conjecture.
The author of the Genji did not deliberately apply these principles of composition to her writing. She was an extraordinarily learned woman and had read widely in Chinese texts, and thus could not have failed to absorb these principles, indeed from early on. Nor can it be said that Sima Qian’s [b. 145 B.C.E.] Records of the Historian [Shiji; J. Shiki] also contains such principles of composition. However, Genji and Records of the Historian are vastly different in both language and content, so I do not assert that the author of this tale modeled her story on the Records of the Historian.
While I say that we cannot assume Murasaki Shikibu emulated the work of Sima Qian, zealous scholars of our country [kokugakusha] are apt to be displeased that I even suggest that Genji is similar in any way to Chinese literature. There are those who would accuse me of a crime for saying as much, but I must emphasize that this is simply a working theory. In ancient times, as everyone knows, there was no written language of our land, so classical Chinese was used to record everything except only sacred Shintō prayers [norito] and certain imperial decrees [semmyō]. Elegant prose [bunshō] written in Japanese appeared for the first time with the composition of Genji. Tales before Genji told stories merely by stringing together words. More precisely, they were not worthy of being called elegant prose. Genji marks the birth of elegant prose written in Japanese.
Originally, bunshō corresponded to what was called “elegant words” [aya kotoba], indicating a technique by which the material being recorded was embellished so as to cause the reader to experience an exceptional sense of satisfaction. This is different from writing in which things are expressed just as they would be in conversation. The character bun in bunshō means to have a sense of beauty or design. The character shō means to possess elegance. One should keep this in mind.
Our country has never followed the Chinese practice of attaching exaggerated names of this sort to language. However, the sacred prayers and imperial decrees composed in Japanese that I mentioned earlier do contain elegantly composed expressions with a unique vitality. They are unlike the words we utter in conversation. It is said that excessive adornment of language is not a good thing, but if a sentence isn’t constructed with care and lacks the quality to move the reader, it cannot be called elegant prose. Although the term “elegant prose” is borrowed from the Chinese, a similar concept has always existed in Japan. Sacred prayers and imperial decrees have such qualities. The elegant prose found in Genji probably is not a direct imitation of Records of the Historian, but we can say that it was written by someone who had read such elegant prose, and in trying to write an interesting story, she would naturally have been influenced by it.
When one compares Records of the Historian and Genji, one discovers great differences in subject and style, so it is clearly a mistake to say that Genji was written in imitation of Records of the Historian. But who would deny that Genji is the first work written in Japanese worthy of being called elegant prose? In any case, when one sets out to evaluate the prose in Genji and to describe its wonders, one naturally assigns names to those principles, for if one does not name those wonders, by what other means is one to describe them? It would be a simple matter, of course, to create a whole new terminology; but since the Chinese terms have already been transmitted to Japan, even if one does change the wording, who could say we have nothing to learn from them? And so, rather than dwell on pointless matters that lead only to misunderstanding, I have simply appropriated those principles, as delineated in recent Chinese treatises, that can help one interpret the text. Dear reader, please keep this in mind and do not hold it against me.
I am not the first person to suggest that such principles of composition can be found in Genji. Andō Tameakira noticed it early on and made the following remarks in his Shika shichiron:
The work as a whole has that air of gentility possessed by those of wealth and rank and is written in the refined language of the court. And yet throughout it we encounter those who have taken Buddhist vows and retreated to mountain temples, and we are shown the marketplace and the countryside as well as poverty and sorrow. Every chapter depicts the myriad emotions of women. Such is the portrayal of human feeling and the description of scenery that we feel as if we are face to face with that very person and as if we were visiting that very place.
In overall form, the tale constitutes a Narrative [
], and thus, naturally, an Introductory style [
], a Conclusive [
], a Descriptive [
], an Analytical [
], [and] an Epistolary [
] style; one can find in Genji these various different styles. In particular, the Ranking of Women scene in “Hahakigi” is uncannily well done. In the past, when I was examining the several divisions of this passage, [I found that] it employs a number of Chinese narrative devices. Following an Introduction, there is Refutation [
], Acquiescence [
], Discussion of Essentials [
], [and] Discussion of Tangentials [
]. It moves from the coarse to the detailed and ranges from the mundane to the refined; from the complex it reverts to the simple, with “great changes and sudden obstacles” [
] and “[retroactive] reflection and foreshadowings” [
].132 The flow of the text is measured and magnanimous, its force smooth and tactful. These qualities are found not only in the Ranking of Women passage but also throughout the entire text. It is similar to Records of the Historian, the Zhuangzi, and works by Han Yu [768–824], Liu Congyuan [773–819], Ou Yangxiu [1007–1070], and Su Shi [1037–1101]. For something written by a woman, it is extraordinary and wondrous; Shikibu must truly be deemed a brilliant woman, without peer, past or present.
It has long been the custom to speak of Murasaki and Sei Shōnagon as two of a kind. But Sei Shōnagon’s talent is so narrow and slight, and her intellectual pretensions so obvious, that her work is often distasteful. These two women can hardly even be compared. [Hiromichi notes that these comments are from Tameakira’s introduction to the “Rainy Night Ranking.”]
Kamo no Mabuchi also interpreted Genji based on such teachings in his Genji monogatari shinshaku. As with Tameakira, I believe Mabuchi tried to write an interpretation based on certain “principles of composition.” I will now quote from passages in his interpretation in which he attempts to explain his application of that technique:
To explain the meaning of “elegant prose,” one needs to consider the following terms: To bring up in advance things that are not yet finished is called “foreshadowing.” There is a slight difference between the two terms used for “foreshadowing” [chōhon and fukuan], but in general they mean the same thing. There are also cases where an event that happens early on in the story and a later event correspond to each other. This is called “retroactive reflection” [shōō]. In some instances, things are suddenly cut off in the telling of the story. And then, quite apart from those instances in which two characters address each other, there are those in which the author intervenes to criticize events in the story. This is called “authorial speech” [kisha no go]. [Hiromichi notes that in common terminology, this is called “authorial intrusion” (sōshiji).] There are also passages in which it isn’t clear who is being addressed. In my comments I note who is being addressed in such passages, indicating Genji or Murasaki, for example. I mark where to end sentences with a period to the side of the text and where to break sentences in the middle with commas. The comma mark [tō] indicates a phrase. I indicate the division between distinct portions of text with a small square. To distinguish breaks of greater significance, I add an L-shaped box. By “breaks of greater significance,” I mean the conclusion of a larger event in the story. Although there is no precedent for this practice in Japanese texts, I’ve done it here simply to make it easier to understand the tale. There are other techniques that I have employed, but you should be able to understand them as they appear in the main text, so I will limit myself to these representative examples. For the most part, these are things that differ from the practice of recent commentaries; the reader should pay close attention to them.
This partially covers what Mabuchi wrote on the subject. In Norinaga’s Tama no ogushi as well, it says that in reading Genji, “one must examine the details of the text in depth [Hiromichi’s gloss for the term shaku (commentary)] and savor the author’s scrupulous care in the construction of the tale” [Hiromichi’s gloss for the term hyō (criticism)]. I took Norinaga’s oft-stated principle regarding criticism and commentary [hyō and shaku] and embraced it fully. Having pored over the text with this in mind, I have discovered things I never expected to find. I noted with surprise the great importance of these principles of composition [nori] found in the text. I added to the principles first applied by Mabuchi and put together this commentary that I call a “critical appraisal” [hyōshaku].
Let me then describe these principles of composition. Some principles apply to the entire tale, and others concern individual chapters. Some apply to a specific section or scene in the text, and others are relevant only to a particular passage or phrase. Even minute details can be governed by principles of composition.
An example of the type of compositional principle that applies to the tale as a whole would be the pattern that emerges to form the overall design of the narrative through the lengthwise threads of the passage of time and the crosswise threads of events in the lives of the characters. These two elements intersect and overlap to form the grand design of the tale. In terms of the passage of generations and the times, as I mentioned briefly before, we have the passage of imperial reigns from the Kiritsubo Emperor to the Suzaku Emperor to the Reizei Emperor and on to the present Emperor in the tale. Within this pattern, there are always spans of time that remain blank. This type of ellipsis is a principle of the tale. The approximately fifty years of Genji’s life from the time of his birth are described in the fifty-four chapters of the tale. The correspondence between divisions in the rise and fall of Genji’s fortunes and the passage of imperial reigns just mentioned is a principle of composition. The passage of time in the tale is such that the lives of various characters can generally be compared and their relative ages calculated. This, too, is a principle of composition. In the Uji chapters, one can determine Niou’s age based on what one knows about Kaoru’s age. This also is a principle of composition. The narrative strands intertwined with the base threads of the passage of time are embellished in ways that add to the design of the story, again following certain principles of composition.
The main character of the tale, Genji, is referred to as the Shining Genji [Hikaru Genji], and his counterpart, Lady Fujitsubo, is called Her Radiant Highness [Kagayaku hi no Miya]. This establishes these two, one shining and one radiant, as corresponding characters in the story. However, Murasaki, Fujitsubo’s niece, is introduced because the relationship between Genji and Fujitsubo is based on a secret incident. Murasaki thus serves as a substitute for Fujitsubo. This is why Murasaki always appears with Genji but Fujitsubo does not. This is a brilliant pairing. Establishing a connection between the shining one and the radiant one in this way is ingenious. It is probably the finest example of the deliberately composed quality of the tale.
In the later chapters, the names of the characters Kaoru [the Fragrant Commandant] and Niou [His Perfumed Highness] convey physical beauty, indicating that they are vestiges [nagori] of Genji’s enduring presence in the tale. Kaoru and Niou complement each other as principal and supporting characters [seifuku]. In combination they appear as Genji’s shadow in the tale, thus serving as a pair corresponding with him. Similarly, Tō no Chūjō serves as a foil to Genji, and this type of relationship, too, is that of principal and supporting characters [seifuku], as is that of the Minister of the Right [Udaijin] and the Kokiden Empress Mother as they relate to Genji. Genji’s family, associated with the Minister of the Left [Sadaijin], has strained relations with the family of the Minister of the Right. This animus between left and right works as a seed [kusawai] of the tale’s plot. This relationship between left and right is also one of oppositional pairs [shukaku/hantai].
Lady Murasaki is described as the story’s most attractive central female character. Conversely, Suetsumuhana is somewhat backward and not good looking. Their contrasting colors of purple, for Murasaki, and red, for Suetsumuhana, set them apart as well. Together they illustrate the compositional principle of oppositional pairs.
Individuals in the tale are distinctively portrayed without stock characterizations. Among them the description of Lady Rokujō is particularly noteworthy. The narrative of the “Yūgao” chapter begins when “Genji had been secretly visiting the Sixth Ward [Rokujō]….” This description of his going to visit the woman in the Sixth Ward [Lady Rokujō] leads the reader to imagine that there must be some connection with the subsequent scene in which an apparition [henge] appears, [causing Yūgao’s death], but it is impossible to specify what that connection might be. Much later, in the “Aoi” chapter, we learn for the first time that this apparition [responsible for both Yūgao’s and Aoi’s deaths] is the widow of the former Crown Prince, Lady Rokujō, who now resides in the Sixth Ward. This description is completely unexpected and provides a most delightful narrative flourish. It is an excellent example of the compositional principle known as “foreshadowing” [fukusen]. Another example of foreshadowing is the reference to Asagao in the “Hahakigi” chapter. As with the foreshadowing of Lady Rokujō, Asagao is mentioned only briefly in passing, when the maids at the home of Utsusemi discuss Genji’s reputation. Additional details are gradually revealed. In the case of Lady Rokujō, we learn that she is accompanying her daughter, who is to become the High Priestess of the Ise Shrine. Asagao herself, however, is the one who becomes the High Priestess of the Kamo Shrine. In both cases, the foreshadowing is implemented in a way that connects these characters with two opposing but affiliated shrines. Furthermore, in the “Aoi” chapter, the shrines of Kamo and Ise continue to be relevant. Lady Aoi is the victim of Rokujō’s jealous spirit because she was in attendance at the Kamo Shrine carriage fracas [kuruma arasoi] in which Rokujō’s dignity was offended. This fracas arouses Lady Rokujō’s angry spirit, causing Lady Aoi’s death. Genji’s aversion to Rokujō stems from this, and she, feeling rejected, ends up retreating to the Ise Shrine in the “Sakaki” chapter. Thus the locations of Ise and Kamo as well as the events of the “Aoi” and “Sakaki” chapters, correspond to each other.
I also believe it is possible to see the author’s careful design in the case of the illicit affair between Genji and Fujitsubo, which she depicts despite the extreme delicacy of the incident. It is due to these events that Genji is accorded the rank of Honorary Retired Emperor [Daijō Tennō] and is described as attaining glory unsurpassed in this world. As a result of Genji’s earlier indiscretion in the story, the Third Princess, Genji’s wife in later chapters, is unfaithful to him and has an affair with Kashiwagi. Her betrayal exemplifies both the compositional principle of analogous events [shōtai] and the principle of retribution [hōō/mukui] for Genji’s actions earlier in the tale. The Prelate on night duty, therefore, intimates to the Reizei Emperor that he is the child of Genji and Fujitsubo’s illicit relationship. And likewise, the lady-in-waiting known as Ben no Omoto informs Kaoru that he was conceived as a result of the Third Princess’s betrayal of Genji. The way that the corresponding relationship between these two events is revealed is evidence of this tale’s meticulous composition. Kashiwagi is deeply troubled by the illicit affair and eventually dies as a consequence. After his death, Kashiwagi’s wife, Princess Ochiba, has an affair with Yūgiri [Genji’s son by his first wife], and Kōbai, descended from Tō no Chūjō, is appointed Minister of the Right. All these events are vestiges of the retribution following from Genji’s actions.
Other examples of the tale’s deliberate composition include Yūgao and Ukifune, who correspond to each other [shōtai] in that neither had anyone on whom she could rely. The “certain estate” [nanigashi no in] where Yūgao is taken by Genji and the house at Uji where Ukifune is hidden by Kaoru are parallel settings. On the one hand, Yūgao is caught between two characters: Genji and Tō no Chūjō. On the other, Ukifune is caught between Kaoru and Niou. In terms of timing, Yūgao is taken by Genji from Gojō on the fifteenth night of the Eighth Month [which is inauspicious according to the lunar calendar], while Ukifune is taken by Kaoru from the house in Sanjō on the evening of the thirteenth day of the Ninth Month [also inauspicious]. In both cases, the women are taken by carriage. These details are a clear indication that they are structurally parallel. And then one of them is fatally possessed by a malign spirit [henge], and the other is abducted by a tree spirit [kodama], making them parallel characters on this account as well. By employing the same narrative technique, the author implies that an unsavory fate awaits women without firm moral fiber. Tamakazura [daughter of Yūgao and Tō no Chūjō] inherits Yūgao’s disposition and also serves as a character corresponding to Ukifune. Tamakazura is from the west and Ukifune is from the east; the two men who pursue them are parallel characters; and the locations to which they retreat, the temple in Hatsuse and the hermitage in Ono, can also be seen as structurally parallel.
Another example is Genji’s move to Suma, which serves to depict his brief fall from power. Genji’s exile is foreshadowed early on in the “Wakamurasaki” chapter, when at Kitayama, Yoshikiyo is made to mention the Akashi lady in preparation for writing the “Suma” and “Akashi” chapters further on. Seeing how the author had foreshadowed these events in the earlier “Wakamurasaki” chapter, one cannot help but laugh at how foolish the old theory must be that Murasaki Shikibu began the tale by composing the “Suma” and “Akashi” chapters at Ishiyamadera. And in the “Hana no en” chapter, Genji reaches the peak of his youthful rise to power during the reign of the Kiritsubo Emperor. Under the misty moon and the radiant cherry blossoms of spring, Genji begins an illicit affair with the Oborozukiyo Chief Palace Attendant. There [in Suma], the Akashi Novice comes to fetch him and cares for him most graciously. In the third year of his exile, Genji returns to the capital under the autumn moon and presents himself at the palace under the full moon of the fifteenth night of the Eighth Month. Readers are thus made to realize that this incident, which begins with the flowers of spring and reaches its conclusion with the moon of autumn, portrays the inevitability of Genji’s rise and fall by employing the compositional principle of symmetry between cause and effect [shubi sōō].133
Other examples include the lascivious old woman Gen no Naishi and that rather coarse chatterbox the lady from Ōmi, who stand in contrast with the daughter of the professor whose academic pretensions reflect those of the Confucian scholars in the Academy. Even these comic scenes are informed by the principles of composition. Specific examples are addressed in the commentary as they appear in the main text of the tale, so I will mention only a few of the principal instances here.
An outstanding example of compositional principles is the “Kumogakure” chapter, of which only the chapter title appears and the text of the chapter is omitted. There is no other example of such a rare and wonderful technique being put to use in all of Japanese or Chinese literature, past or present. This is a most remarkable example of the principle of ellipsis [shōhitsu]. Nonetheless, several earlier commentaries cite totally irrelevant Buddhist doctrine to support their groundless theories, which unfortunately contribute nothing whatever that would explain the “Kumogakure” chapter. Those who cobbled together a worthless chapter of their own in place of the missing “Kumogakure” show even less understanding of the author’s intentions than a single drop of water in the ocean, which I find quite painful to endure.
The tale begins in the “Kiritsubo” chapter with the Emperor lamenting the death of Kiritsubo, following which he composes a poem alluding to the legend of Yang Gueifei:
tazuneyuku maboroshi mogana tsute nite mo / tama no arika o soko to shirubeku
Would that there were a wizard to go and seek her out that I might know,
if only by report, the place where her spirit resides. [12:111]
Genji’s rise to prominence ensues and continues until the death of Murasaki in the “Minori” chapter. Her death marks the passing of a main character in the tale and prepares the reader for the moment when Genji himself will be “Hidden in Cloud” [Kumogakure]. The following chapter, “Maboroshi,” spans an entire year, during which Genji’s anguished recollections are poignantly depicted in terms of the changing seasons, from the First Month to the Twelfth, suggesting that Genji himself will soon die. In the course of this, Genji sees the wild geese flying through the clouds and composes a poem
ōzora o kayou maboroshi yume ni dani / miekonu tama no yukue tazuneyo
O wizard, you who course the heavens, pray find where she has gone,
whose spirit never appears to me, even in my dreams. [15:531]
In giving the title “Maboroshi” to this chapter, she brings to a close the story begun in “Kiritsubo.”
Even if this theory is not correct, the author’s construction of this sequence of events leaves no doubt that she had no intention of depicting Genji’s death. At the end of the “Maboroshi” chapter, Genji recites a poem:
mono omou to suguru tsukihi mo shiranu ma ni / toshi mo waga yo mo kyō ya tsukinuru
In my sorrow I’ve lost count of the passing days and months. Can it be
that today is the end of the year and my own life, too? [15:536]
indicating that this is his parting poem and that he soon will be “Hidden in Cloud.”
The “Kumogakure” chapter marks the passage of some years, after which the “Niou Miya” chapter begins, “His radiance was gone, and none among his progeny could compare…,” succinctly explaining the connection of Genji to his offspring. This is an inexpressibly wonderful passage, the likes of which cannot be found anywhere else. In all the fictional tales of the world, whether in Japan or China or elsewhere, the main character achieves unlimited fortune and success and there the story ends. Such a pattern is quite artless and contrived, yet it is what one usually finds in tales.
In the case of Genji, however, the pinnacle of Genji’s fortunes is described in the “Fuji no uraba” chapter, and thereafter follows a description of the inevitable consequences of his earlier actions. Yet because the ending is concealed or omitted, it doesn’t seem at all contrived. It seems to be something that really happened, which is indescribably wonderful. And again, as the older commentaries say, if a description of Genji’s death were included, it would be extremely overwrought to describe all the grief of all the other characters at Genji’s passing, and so such a scene was omitted. The “Maboroshi” chapter depicts Genji’s grief at Murasaki’s death. This is a wonderful use of a principle of composition. Dear reader, please take this into consideration and savor the great depth of the tale.
The end of the last chapter, “Yume no ukihashi,” when the narrative abruptly ends, is also indescribably wonderful. The Uji chapters begin with the tale of Kaoru and Niou followed by the “Hashihime” chapter and then the story of the Eighth Prince. The narrative here is somewhat different from the earlier chapters describing Genji’s life. It is extremely subdued and moving. Inescapably human feelings are described with passion and extreme skill in these chapters. There is the case of the Eighth Prince, who has grown weary of society and removes himself to Uji. This is followed by the death of his wife, leaving his daughters without a guardian. As a result, he cares for them, and his appreciation for the Way of the Buddha deepens. And then there is the case of Kaoru, who learns the unhappy fate of his father, Kashiwagi, grows weary of his place in society, and ends up becoming deeply involved in the Way of Buddhism. He travels to Uji on the pretext of devoting himself to the Way of the Buddha. We also have the story of the Prince’s eldest daughter, Ōigimi, who somehow tries to make her sister Nakanokimi happy and, in doing so, forsakes her own happiness. All these are very sad cases that are very moving. Reading these stories makes one’s eyes brim with tears….
In general, Genji’s character is described as tending to be somewhat self-centered, but he [nonetheless] is very sensitive to the feelings of others, a figure both captivating and substantial. He is the mainstay of this tale, and his progeny are depicted as two vestiges of his character. Kaoru is depicted as more serious and sensitive than Genji, while Niou is more frivolous and sensual. The characters’ names—Shining Genji, Fragrant Kaoru, and Perfumed Niou—all indicate something different about their characters. The author entered deeply into the minds of the characters and wrote from their perspectives, and because of this, her description is rare and indescribably wonderful.
At the end of the tale, Ukifune becomes a nun and secludes herself in Ono. Kaoru hears of this and uses the son of Hitachi no Suke, Kogimi, as his messenger and sends him to Ono. Ukifune, being a nun and feeling humiliated, cannot bring herself to meet him. Kogimi, unable to deliver his message from Kaoru, returns to Kaoru, whereupon Kaoru considers several possible outcomes, and there the tale ends. The narrative expertise of this episode would dazzle even a demon. Precisely because of this, Genji is something that one simply cannot forget, even after reading the whole thing. There are so many things that remain to ponder and appreciate even after one finishes reading. One can read it over and over again and never tire of it. There is no limit to the fascination one finds in this tale. It is no wonder that the person who wrote and appended “Dew upon the Mountain Path” [Yamaji no tsuyu] should have felt dissatisfied and wished to know more, but it betrays a lack of comprehension of the author’s wisdom to have added this chapter.
The author has used the technique of omitting details, but not because it would have been troublesome to have written them. Instead, she has consciously omitted passages because she felt they were best left out. The text of this tale is very detailed and complete. To put it more simply, it is written in a way that allows the reader to scratch in all the places that itch. While the tale is quite long, the ending is succinct, and the omission of further detail is surprisingly resolute. The way the “Kumogakure” and “Yume no ukihashi” chapters end is unique even among the abundant works from China. From the beginning, the story is crafted with care and in great detail, and its being cut off in the middle in this way may seem perplexing. As I mentioned previously, however, the tale includes a description of Genji’s ascent to the height of his fortunes, and the “Kumogakure” chapter marks the conclusion of his life. The Uji chapters then mark Genji’s absence from the tale, providing a complete description of the lives of his progeny, so there is no reason to feel the story lacks a conclusion. It goes without saying that a text this sublimely evocative [yojō no kagiri naki] is without precedent….
Among the many aspects of narrative excellence in this tale, five noteworthy points tend to go unnoticed by less experienced readers. Two of these have been mentioned earlier. One is that the “Kumogakure” chapter is not missing but, rather, was omitted by design, and the other is that the “Yume no ukihashi” chapter is perfect as it is. The remaining three points are as follows:
1. Many characters lack a fixed name, and so readers often don’t appreciate that there is no confusion among them whatever.
2. Readers often fail to realize that Lady Rokujō is implicated in the death of Yūgao because although the text in the “Yūgao” chapter indicates that Genji is visiting the Sixth Ward [Rokujō], it does not specify that he is going to see Lady Rokujō. This is revealed only many chapters later.
3. There is an ellipsis between the “Fujibakama” chapter and the “Makibashira” chapter.
The first two points have been explained elsewhere, but I should elaborate on the third. The “Makibashira” chapter begins in a particularly wonderful way. Among the many suitors to pursue Tamakazura, Prince Hotaru stands out for his sincerity. Accordingly, Tamakazura becomes well disposed toward him. In the “Fujibakama” chapter, Tamakazura becomes a Chief Palace Attendant, and in the next month, when she enters the palace, she receives many letters of proposal. She responds only to the letter from Prince Hotaru, and there the “Fujibakama” chapter ends. However, the story resumes in a different way at the beginning of the next chapter, “Makibashira.” Commandant Higekuro, whom she seemed greatly to dislike in the previous chapter, has already taken Tamakazura as his wife. Without any explanation, the chapter begins “Genji warned Higekuro that ‘I would not like His Majesty to hear of this. It is best that you keep this to yourself for now.’” Readers are stunned by this very unusual way to begin a chapter. At first, they have no idea what has happened. But as they read on, it becomes clear what Higekuro has managed to do. The technique is clever and wonderful. Without revealing anything specific, the narrative proceeds to the Eleventh Month, whereupon it is noted that “Tamakazura was assigned to serve in the Hall of the Sacred Mirror, and Higekuro, much to her dismay, was always nearby.” This is an extremely adroit way of revealing what has happened between Tamakazura and Higekuro.134 This is an excellent example of the compositional principle of narrative reversal [hanpuku]. It demonstrates how an attractive and gentle woman managed to create a narrative powerful enough to scare away tigers and wolves and dazzle the fiercest spirits. Many similar examples can be found in my commentary on the main text. For the most part, however, the foregoing are the most exceptional examples.
Commentaries of the past contain a great deal of useless information and fail to call attention to the matters I have mentioned. I have found this quite disappointing. While I hardly need to mention it again, I would like to emphasize that clearly there are principles of composition in this text. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I must emphasize this point to my readers. There is much more to be said about the text. I will limit myself to the preceding examples of the principles of composition, since I include more detailed information in my commentary. Please use these points as a guide to what follows. Some principles of composition are peculiar to an individual chapter or section. I include commentary in the relevant passage in the main text and omit such examples from the foregoing discussion.
Examples of Compositional Principles
Virtually no critical analysis of elegance in prose style can be found in works written in Japanese. Most of the interpretive points that I raise are found here for the first time, for which reason I follow the Chinese practice just described. I have given provisional names to these critical terms and described them in a general way. These terms are only for beginning students of Genji. Some terms are taken directly from the Chinese, some from previous Genji commentaries. Some are developed by me and are used here for the first time. All of them are designed to make it easier to understand the text and are not conceived in slavish imitation of the Chinese. Dear reader, please keep this in mind, and do not be suspicious of my methods.
“Major and minor” characters [shukaku 
]: When there are two characters [who regularly appear together or in corresponding circumstances in the story], the more important character is referred to as the host [shu], and the secondary character is called the guest [kaku]. The importance of this principle varies from one section of the text to another. Chapters and paragraphs sometimes correspond to each other in accordance with this principle as well. One should be aware of this when reading the text.
“Lead and secondary character” [seifuku 
]: This is analogous to the military ranks of general and vice general. The main character is considered to be the general [sei]. The one who is subordinate to the general is the vice general [fuku]. The prominence of this principle varies from one example to the next.
“Corresponding” or “contrasting” characters [seitai 
]: Characters or objects of equivalent importance in the narrative, without one being superior to the other, are called corresponding or contrasting characters. This pairing is distinct from the next category, “opposing characters,” in which characters stand in opposition to each other rather than being equivalent or parallel in nature.
“Opposing characters” or “character foils” [hantai 
]: This relationship is defined by the oppositional quality of the characters or events in relation to each other. For example, one scene in which it is raining versus another in which it is fine, or daylight versus nighttime. While they are not equals, the two characters or elements are related to each other as are the front and back sides of the same object.
“Retroactive parallel” and “retroactive reflection” [shōtai 
and shōō 
]: These two are largely the same, but retroactive parallel denotes the appearance of analogous events. These events are similar just as the light of the sun and the moon are similar, yet they are rivals just as the light of the sun comes from the east and the light of the moon appears in the west. Retroactive reflection, in contrast, denotes the conclusion of a matter that appeared earlier but for some reason lingers on in the story or has not yet come to a resolution. The narrative thread of this matter reappears and can be understood as corresponding to the meaning or significance of a previous event. This is similar to the way the moon and stars reflect light from the sun.
“Narrative interlude” [kankaku 
]: Sometimes the uninterrupted description of a single point would be too long and distracting to the reader. To avoid irritating the reader, other details are inserted into the narrative using the device of an interlude in the narration. One might think of this technique as similar to the effect produced by inserting clouds or mist into a scene of distant seas or mountains so that the view becomes even more magnificent. This technique is often used in the middle of chapters.
“Foreshadowing” [fukuan 
and fukusen 
]: These two are largely the same. The technique of fukuan takes into consideration the outcome of something while quietly revealing parts of it, but hiding the general facts of the matter. Fukusen is written with a character with the radical for thread, and as such, the thread is buried up to a distant point while revealing itself from time to time. When you reach the outcome, it is as if you have pulled on the end of the thread to reveal how all the different stitches are connected. This technique is also called “plotting” [shitamae, alternatively read as kekkō]. Plotting more broadly refers to the placement of details that the author has planned in advance.
“Narrative modulation” or “diminuendo and crescendo” [yokuyō 
]: Diminuendo [yoku] is a technique of modulated description that is used to suppress details, and crescendo [yō] is the use of this technique to emphasize details. This principle imbues the text with dynamism. One might think of this technique in terms of the operation of a rice husker: to make the mallet head go up, the pedal is pressed firmly so that when one aspect of the story is to be emphasized, a different component is deliberately suppressed.
“Narrative tempo” [kankyū 
]: The technique of narrative tempo involves making things go quickly or slowly. That is, calm passages rely on a slow narrative tempo. For example, a slow narrative tempo is used to depict a maiden walking through a field on a warm spring day, whereas a fast narrative tempo suits the description of treetops violently swaying in the wind of a gathering typhoon. The technique of setting a narrative tempo changes according to the nature of the passage.
“Reversal” [hanpuku/uchikae 
]: This technique is used to surprise the reader. A reversal in the narrative comes unexpectedly like a sudden shower in the middle of a calm evening. Circumstances change drastically, causing the story to suddenly change direction. The author does this specifically to surprise the reader with something unanticipated. One might think of this technique as producing something similar to the experience of a calm, clear evening when the light of the moon is abruptly obscured, it begins to thunder loudly, and a rain shower suddenly begins.
“Ellipsis” [shōhitsu 
]: In some cases a full description of events would be too long, so the description is shortened, and only the beginning and the end are told, thereby making the reader guess at what happened in the interval. A second type of ellipsis is having a character talk about something that has already happened in order to inform the reader of an event. In another case, the author may wish to avoid discussing something disturbing. These all are examples of ellipsis.
“Lingering presence” or “resonance” [yoha 
]: Following the description of a major event in the story, lesser remnants of that event linger in a way that conveys a reluctance to let it fade from the narrative. After writing the description of a grand scene, the author regrets allowing the scene to disappear, so she extends the description. One might think of this technique as similar to the small, shallow waves and bits of foam that linger after a great wave has come crashing ashore.
“Narrative device” or “seed” [shushi or kusawai 
]: A narrative device or seed is sometimes employed when there is a gap between stories that is difficult to bridge. Examples of the use of this narrative device include the appearance of Wakamurasaki’s sparrow [in the “Wakamurasaki” chapter when the perspectives of Genji’s and Wakamurasaki’s attendants are integrated as they both observe her crying over a lost sparrow], and the Third Princess’s Chinese cat [which connects unrelated events in the “Wakana, jō” and “Wakana, ge” chapters].
“Retribution” [hōō 
]: This technique introduces retribution or punishment that arises from certain actions. The events described are the consequences following from a character’s behavior. The resulting event is the logical outcome of the earlier action.
“Parable” [fūyu 
]: A parable allows real events to be inserted into the fictional narrative. By including such an event in the story, the author can show readers the consequences of an action. Retribution and parable allow us to speculate about the intentions of the author.
“Context” [bunmyaku 
and gomyaku 
]: Context is the narrative fiber or thread that joins one sentence [bun] or one word [go] with the next. The meaning of the story flows through these narrative veins in the same way that blood circulates throughout the human body. The term “fiber” or “thread” also is used in reference to foreshadowing but refers to a different type of connection.
“Narrative symmetry” or “beginning and end” [shubi 
]: This term indicates a place in the text where the beginning and end of an event or story are symmetrical, so it should really be called “symmetry between cause and effect” [shubi sōō]. But it has always been referred to in Genji commentary simply as shubi [literally, “beginning and end”] so that is how I refer to it here.
The names for the following terms are given just as they appear in Old Commentaries.
“Textual parallelism” or “intertextuality” [ruirei 
]: Textual parallelism refers to events or words for which similar or parallel instances can be found in another work or works. This can also refer to quotations from poems. All such instances are referred to as textual parallelism. Textual parallelism constitutes an entire category of commentary on Genji.
“Planning” or “narrative design” [yōi 
]: This is when the author’s thoughtful planning of events or details in the story makes the narrative work well. In general, this is what constitutes narrative design. An example of narrative design is the scene in the “Utsusemi” chapter in which Utsusemi [quietly leaves as Genji enters her room in the dark, leaving Nokiba no Ogi to be seduced by Genji in her stead], which one can say was a masterful planning of events.
“Authorial intrusion” [sōshiji 
]: [This is] a thought or utterance that originates outside the narrative. Because the language is that of the person narrating the tale, the narrator is considered to be the author herself. However, bear in mind that even though it represents the author’s utterance, it represents temporarily the language or feeling of the narrator as if she were also a character in the story. Close attention should be paid to these passages.
“Aesthetic aftereffect” and “aesthetic satisfaction” [yokō/nioi 
and yojō 
]: The term “aesthetic aftereffect” [yokō] should be read according to the Japanese pronunciation for the word “fragrance” [nioi]. It is a term used to express praise for a passage that defies appreciation in words. The term “aesthetic satisfaction” [yojō] refers to the conclusion of an event in the story in which a sublime sense of poignancy is evoked by the text and is felt by the reader. It is not possible to pinpoint the source of such evocative power in the text, but in some places I indicate that an abundance of this type of expression, which cannot be explained in words, is to be found in the story.
TRANSLATED BY PATRICK CADDEAU
Notes
sashinagara mukashi o ima ni tsutaureba / tama no ogushi zo kamisabinikeru
As I wear it in my hair, it brings back times past, just as once they were,
this little bejeweled comb, now so very worn and old.
uchi wakami neyoge ni miyuru wakakusa o / hito no musubamu koto o shi zo omou
These new sprouts, so very young and so inviting a place to sleep;
yet if another were to bind them to make a traveler’s bed….
