THE TALE OF GENJI, written in the early eleventh century by a woman known as Murasaki Shikibu, has become a world classic and is still regarded as Japan’s finest work of literature. Since the early twentieth century, The Tale of Genji has been called the world’s first novel, giving us distinctive and memorable characters, realistic settings, and a deep interior view of the life of the nobility, particularly that of women of the middle ranks, in the heyday of Heian court society. The tale, which eventually grew to the fifty-four chapters that we have now, attracted notice from Murasaki Shikibu’s male contemporaries. The Tale of Genji Illustrated Scrolls (Genji monogatari emaki, twelfth century), containing the earliest extant text of The Tale of Genji, were probably commissioned by a retired emperor or empress, revealing that within a century and a half of its appearance, The Tale of Genji had become a text prestigious enough to be associated with the apex of court culture.
In subsequent centuries, The Tale of Genji was read, commented on, illustrated, dramatized, rewritten, and translated in so many ways and by so many different poets, dramatists, and painters that the history of its reception represents no less than a cultural history of Japan. Over the centuries, The Tale of Genji passed from the hands of aristocrats to those of Buddhist monks and educated samurai and then to urban commoners; from poets of waka (classical poetry) to those of renga (classical linked verse) in the late medieval period to poets of haikai (popular linked verse) in the Edo period. Genji has had a particular fascination owing to its own poetry (795 waka “composed” by characters in the story), its narrative of imperial politics, and its focus on the roles of women and the traditional arts. Most major texts enjoy a certain popularity among a particular group of readers, but The Tale of Genji has had the capacity to be many things to many different communities over a thousand-year span and continues to underpin what can be called a Genji industry, which extends far beyond the borders of Japan. This book brings to an anglophone audience for the first time many of the textual landmarks in the reception of The Tale of Genji over the past millennium. These texts, which have been chosen from thousands that exist, tell us not only about how the tale was read and interpreted but also about the ever-changing cultural contexts that altered the significance of The Tale of Genji for a wide range of readers. Each translation is preceded by an introduction that provides a historical frame for understanding the selection.
The book begins with a chapter on early discussions of fiction (monogatari), providing a broad context for understanding the genre to which The Tale of Genji originally belonged and which it would alter irreversibly. The second chapter, “Genji Gossip,” reveals the early responses, probably in large part by women readers, to The Tale of Genji and includes a variety of what could be called Genji contests, which compare characters and scenes in Genji. The next chapter, on the early canonization of The Tale of Genji, demonstrates the ways in which the prose and poetry of this work of fiction were read in relation to classical Japanese poetry and how poetry was involved in the canonization of The Tale of Genji. The fourth chapter, “Obsequies for Genji,” looks at the Buddhist-inflected reception of The Tale of Genji as attested by various medieval texts based on the belief that the author had been condemned to hell for writing the tale. These texts are connected primarily with rites meant to offer posthumous salvation to the author and, by implication, redemption of The Tale of Genji itself. The fifth chapter is devoted to Genji apocrypha, a sub-genre of texts that attempted to fill perceived gaps in the tale, including that left by what appeared to some readers to be an unfinished story. The sixth chapter introduces medieval commentaries, which appeared as early as the thirteenth century and became the most influential mode of Genji’s reception in the medieval period. Originating in interlinear glosses, these commentaries trace and explicate literary sources, historical references, social customs, poetic allusions, and obscure words. They also address the complex position that The Tale of Genji held in relation to its literary predecessors and to contemporary secular and religious discourses, including the larger issue of fictional versus historical discourse. The seventh chapter discusses translations of major Edo-period treatises on The Tale of Genji by such prominent Confucian and kokugaku (nativist studies) scholars as Kumazawa Banzan (1619–1691), Andō Tameakira (1659–1716), and Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801). Here The Tale of Genji becomes a battleground for differing views of the role of literature; debates over aesthetics, morality, and politics; and the controversial role of The Tale of Genji in women’s education. The final chapter brings us to the modern period, with particular attention to the pre–World War II years, when The Tale of Genji was inextricably linked to the emergence of the modern novel and was translated repeatedly into contemporary Japanese.
Poetry and Issues of Fiction
The Tale of Genji was first canonized not merely as a monogatari, a genre held in low regard for most of the premodern period, but also as a source of and inspiration for waka, which had become the premier literary genre by the mid-Heian period. By the late twelfth century, Genji had become an important source for poetic diction and topics. Equally significant, it had become one foundation for allusive variation, a major poetic device from the thirteenth century onward. Poets such as Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241) were interested not only in the 795 waka contained in Genji but also in its often lyrical prose and poetically evocative scenes. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, digest versions of Genji were compiled by renga poets who relied on poetic associations derived from the text. The Great Mirror of Genji (Genji ōkagami, ca. early fifteenth century), one of the most popular digests, had the alternative title Poetic Words in the Genji (Genji utakotoba) and enabled its readers to become familiar with the poems in Genji without having to read the entire fifty-four chapters.
For many centuries, Japanese literature consisted of a body of selected, authoritative texts and hon’i, essential lexical associations, which made up the heart of the literary canon. Renju gappekishū (Gathered Gems, ca. 1476), a handbook for renga poets composed by Ichijō Kanera (1402–1481), lists 886 key poetic words, divided into forty-one categories, that are followed by lists of associated words (yoriai) used to link verses in renga. An example is “For mountain person (woodcutter): Suma, hedge, pink, and ‘to lose favor’ (The Tale of Genji).”1 If the previous verse (maeku) included the word “mountain person” (yamagatsu), one could create a link in the next verse by using the word “Suma,” “hedge,” “pink,” or “to lose favor,” each of which was associated in the collective poetic memory with “mountain person.” All these associated words derive from specific scenes and poems in The Tale of Genji, related to either Genji’s exile in Suma and Akashi or the “Yūgao” chapter.
Even kokugaku scholars like Motoori Norinaga, who attempted to eliminate Buddhist and Confucian discourse from discussion of The Tale of Genji and asserted its value as prose fiction, regarded waka and monogatari as of identical essence. As Norinaga notes in Shibun yōryō (Essence of Murasaki Shikibu’s Writings, 1763), “Apart from this monogatari, there is no Way of Poetry, and apart from the Way of Poetry this monogatari would not exist. The Way of Poetry and this monogatari are of quite the same essence.”2 A full poetics of prose fiction did not develop until the early nineteenth century, with Takizawa Bakin (1767–1848) and Hagiwara Hiromichi (1815–1863) under the influence of Chinese vernacular fiction theory. Even modern literary scholarship on The Tale of Genji can be seen as an extended attempt to escape from this long tradition of defining literature as poetry—from the hegemony of waka—and to reread Genji purely as a monogatari or a psychological novel.
Gender and Reception
In the words of the modern scholar Tamagami Takuya (1915–1996), The Tale of Genji was originally written by a woman, for women, and about women. Indeed, the initial readers and consumers of Genji were women of the imperial court, and the primary readers of Genji during the first century after its appearance were aristocratic women. Nonetheless, few traces of women’s reception remain, in contrast to the subsequent flood of male commentary on the text. This book, however, provides a rare example of female reception that survives in the Mumyōzōshi (A Nameless Notebook), thought to have been written in 1200/1201, which describes a women’s literary tradition beginning in the ninth century with Ono no Komachi and argues for the elevation of the literary status of fictional tales over that of diaries and nonfiction. Other glimpses of female reception are visible in the texts in the “Genji Gossip” chapter and in the late medieval commentaries by Kaoku Gyokuei (b. 1526).
The practice of Genji obsequies (Genji kuyō)—rites for the salvation of the author of The Tale of Genji—suggests that by the late twelfth century the position of aristocratic women readers vis-à-vis The Tale of Genji was much more ambivalent than the relationship of men to Genji. There is a stark contrast between the poet Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204), who was responsible (along with his son Teika) for the early canonization of The Tale of Genji, and his wife, Bifukumon’in Kaga (d. 1193), who also loved The Tale of Genji but feared that it would have a negative impact on her afterlife and thus was involved in Genji kuyō rituals. In contrast to the medieval commentaries on Genji written by men, which focus on diction or textual sources, both poetic and historical, women’s writings on Genji such as Sarashina Diary (Sarashina nikki, ca. 1059) and A Nameless Notebook (Mumyōzōshi, ca. 1200) focus on the fate of the female characters. For women readers, Genji appears to have been a vehicle for exploring and understanding their own lives. Indeed, The Tale of Genji may well have been written by Murasaki Shikibu, at least in part, as a guide for women on how to survive at court and in aristocratic society, and later women readers saw Genji as representing various models of living and coping. Many versions of Genji gossip or games were lists of judgments on the “superlative female character,” “superlative nun,” and so on in The Tale of Genji. Although the dating and authorship of these texts are uncertain, they bear a strong resemblance to The Pillow Book (Makura no sōshi, 997) and its entertaining lists of superior or inferior things. A Nameless Notebook also compares the male and female characters in Genji with each other according to varying criteria.
Tale of Genji Variations and Apocrypha
Another major stream of medieval reception is the fictional reincarnations of The Tale of Genji. From the late Heian period through the Kamakura era, The Tale of Genji became the object of constant reinvention, with prominent borrowings of plots, scenes, and characters from Genji. Before The Tale of Genji, Heian tales drew on narrative archetypes such as the courtship narrative or the exile of the young noble, but after The Tale of Genji, the tale itself became an archetype for subsequent fictions. Late-eleventh-, twelfth-, and thirteenth-century readers took pleasure in finding small differences between similar scenes, much as waka poets took pleasure in allusive variation. Even in the Muromachi period, otogizōshi (short fictional tales) like Kachō fūgetsu (Flowers and Birds, Wind and Moon) use characters from The Tale of Genji or create new variations on the plot.
Due to space limitations, these narrative reincarnations cannot be included here, but the volume does present a number of apocrypha that attempted to fill in what were perceived to be gaps in the existing Tale of Genji.
Linked Verse, Nō Drama, and Painting
The powerful warlords of the late medieval period, faced with constant battle and social and political chaos, were drawn to the world of The Tale of Genji, as is manifest in their deep interest in renga, which frequently alluded to the Heian court tale, and through their patronage of nō drama, which often depicted characters from The Tale of Genji. Nijō Yoshimoto (1320–1388), a waka scholar and renga poet, was probably the individual most responsible for making a knowledge of Genji indispensable to renga. As Yoshimoto notes in Kyūshū mondō (Dialogue at Kyushu), “If the poet uses the Man’yōshū all the time, the appearance [sugata] of renga will become rough,” but if renga relied solely on “the first three imperial anthologies, beginning with the Kokinshū, one would feel that the language was weak.”3 In Yoshimoto’s view, Genji was perfectly positioned between those two extremes. One consequence was that Yoshimoto brought Genji into late medieval renga in the same way that Shunzei had brought Genji into waka in the late twelfth century.
For warrior leaders, who typically had far less education than members of the aristocracy, The Tale of Genji represented a connection to a heritage of court culture that they did not possess. One result was that powerful warlords and shoguns repeatedly commissioned Genji paintings in a variety of genres (scroll paintings, albums, and large illustrated screens), which became a major form of Genji reception in the late medieval and Edo periods. Powerful warriors also took lessons on The Tale of Genji from learned nobles such as Sanjōnishi Sanetaka (1455–1537), the author of an influential commentary on Genji. In this situation, renga masters, who often were Buddhist priests and/or commoners, formed a key link between the new warrior class and the classical tradition. Renga masters like Sōgi (1421–1502), the author of Notes on the Rainy Night’s Discussion (Amayo danshō, ca. 1485), became influential teachers of The Tale of Genji. The renga manuals and Genji digests written by renga poets in turn provided the foundation for the Tale of Genji nō plays, particularly the genre of women’s plays, based mainly on female figures (such as Utsusemi, Yūgao, Rokujō, and Ukifune) from The Tale of Genji. Owing to considerations of space, Genji nō plays and Genji paintings cannot be included here, but anyone interested in the cultural history of The Tale of Genji must consider these two major streams of Genji reception. In fact, the phenomenon of Genji painting expands in the Edo period in the form of ukiyo-e (literally, “pictures of the floating world”) and new visual genres.4
Edo Treatises, Imperial Transgression, and Women’s Education
Roughly speaking, Genji commentary passed from the hands of waka scholars to renga masters (Muromachi period) to haikai masters (Edo period), exemplified by Kitamura Kigin (1624–1705), to Confucian and kokugaku scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The publication of Kigin’s Kogetsushō (Moonlit Lake Commentary, 1673), with its headnotes and interlinear commentary, enabled a new and expanded audience of commoners to gain access to Genji. The Kogetsushō was printed, thereby permitting mass distribution, as opposed to the manuscript transmission of the preceding period. One result of this new print culture was that Genji was adapted into the vernacular, parodied, and reconstructed for popular consumption, in versions ranging from Ihara Saikaku’s (1642–1693) Kōshoku ichidai otoko (Life of an Amorous Man, 1682) to Ryūtei Tanehiko’s (1783–1842) Nise Murasaki inaka Genji (Fraudulent Murasaki’s Bumpkin Genji, 1829–1842), both of which presented contemporary versions of the Shining Genji. At the same time, Genji scholarship also passed into the hands of kokugaku scholars like Motoori Norinaga, who attempted to bring new techniques of philological analysis to Genji and criticized Buddhist and Confucian readings that had permeated earlier views of Genji.
Throughout the early modern and modern periods, The Tale of Genji was attacked as a form of imperial betrayal, owing to the secret liaison between Genji and his stepmother (the Fujitsubo Empress), which results in the ascent of their illegitimate son to the throne. Some commentators, such as Andō Tameakira, found ways to defend this by arguing that The Tale of Genji was intended to show the negative consequences of such acts. The most famous defense, however, was that of Motoori Norinaga, who stressed that The Tale of Genji was not intended to demonstrate the consequences of good or evil acts, as Buddhist and Confucian commentators had argued. Instead, Murasaki Shikibu described these painful love affairs and transgressions in order to reveal the depths of human emotion, so that readers could “know mono no aware” or “sensitivity to emotion.”
By looking at the Edo-period commentaries of both Confucian and kokugaku scholars and by placing them alongside the proliferation of Genji-related prose fiction and the emergence of women’s educational texts, which included passages from Genji as models of elegant writing, we get a much more complex picture than that of the standard literary histories, which place Norinaga’s theory of mono no aware at the apex of Edo-period Genji reception. As the proliferation of women’s educational textbooks indicates, The Tale of Genji had attractions that made it useful for women’s education and a suitable part of an upper-class daughter’s trousseau, but it also had aspects, particularly its eroticism and episodes of adultery, that made it a precarious subject for its advocates.
Modern Reception and the Modern Novel
In the early Meiji period, The Tale of Genji was overshadowed by the new literary genres imported from the West. However, with the importation of the nineteenth-century European notion of “literature,” which valued prose fiction, Genji was soon recanonized as a “novel,” which, in the Spencerian evolutionary scheme, was considered the most advanced literary form. In Shōsetsu shinzui (Essence of the Novel, 1885–1886), an influential statement of the value of the novel as “art,” Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935) defined The Tale of Genji as a “realistic novel” (shajitsu shōsetsu) that depicts contemporary upper-class society.
The fate of The Tale of Genji was also closely tied to the rise of nationalism, through the institutional establishment of the new fields of national literature (kokubungaku) and national language (kokugo), which were thought to embody national character and were set, particularly after the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), in opposition to Chinese, which had been an integral part of Japanese literature for more than a thousand years. Fujioka Sakutarō’s (1870–1910) Kokubungaku zenshi: Heianchō-hen (Complete History of National Literature: Heian Literature, 1905), which marks the beginning of modern scholarship on Heian literature, defines Genji in the context of both the novel and the nation: “Not only is The Tale of Genji the most important Heian novel, it is our nation’s number-one novel of all time.” Thus by the turn of the century, The Tale of Genji had been recanonized as a predecessor of the modern “realistic novel,” placed in government-approved textbooks, and made a central part of the national language and literature curriculum. By the 1920s, Genji was being viewed and read in Japan as a part of “world literature.”
Starting in the mid-Meiji period, The Tale of Genji also became the source of inspiration for novels and short stories by such writers as Ozaki Kōyō (1867–1903), Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896), and Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939). A major literary turning point was the modern Japanese translation of The Tale of Genji by the noted tanka poet Yosano Akiko (1878–1942). Her first modern translation, Shin’yaku Genji monogatari (New Translation of The Tale of Genji, 1912–1913), which radically abbreviated the original text, transformed Genji into a modern novel, thus making it part of modern Japanese literature. Her second translation, Shin-shin’yaku Genji monogatari (New New Translation of The Tale of Genji, 1938–1939), was a translation of the entire text (except for the waka, which were left in the original). It was succeeded by a series of twentieth-century translations by major novelists—such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), Enchi Fumiko (1905–1986), and Setouchi Jakuchō (b. 1922)—a phenomenon that was followed in the 1980s and 1990s by full manga translations, notably Asaki yume mishi (Fleeting Dreams, 1979–1993) by Yamato Waki (b. 1948).
In the Shōwa period, The Tale of Genji continued to inspire such noted novelists as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972), and Mishima Yukio (1925–1970). As Tanizaki’s postwar novella Yume no ukihashi (The Bridge of Dreams, 1960) suggests, The Tale of Genji contains themes and plot patterns—such as a young man’s search for the image of a lost mother (Genji / Fujitsubo), death as a result of forbidden or unattainable love (Kashiwagi / Third Princess), a man and a woman unable to unite as a result of excessive self-consciousness (Kaoru / Ōigimi)—that continue to appeal to the interests of modern Japanese writers, dramatists, and filmmakers.
HARUO SHIRANE
Notes
