Search Results

This chapter examines Abutsu's activities as a poet and scholar of The Tale of Genji, skills that brought her to the attention of Fujiwara no Tameie and enabled her to flourish within his household. Drawing from her knowledge of Tameie's poetic teachings and the practices of his family, Abutsu produced the first female-authored treatise on poetry, a work that reveals her understanding of composition and her desire to position herself as an authority on Mikohidari poetry. In examining her activities as a poet and scholar, the chapter considers the position of female poets and scholars in thirteenth-century Japan. Although women have been treated primarily as readers rather than scholars of The Tale of Genji, Abutsu's grasp of the Genji, her activities as a mentor, and the response to her writings by male commentators prove that she should be considered an interpreter of the Genji at par with male authors of extant treatises. She offers an exception to the notion that the spheres of poetic commentary and scholarship of The Tale of Genji were the sole domain of men and provides a glimpse into common oral teaching practices and traditions of transmitting poetry and narrative among women.

The eponymous hero of The Tale of Genji has been frequently described as promiscuous and morally reprobate. This essay explores the construction of selfhood in the novel and suggests that Genji goes on a moral journey. It draws on the work of the American philosopher Herbert Fingarette, whose classic analysis of the Analects of Confucius posits ritual as the main influence in the construct of the person in the tradition associated with his name. The present essay uses the youthful Genji’s precocious achievements as a performer of ritual, music, calligraphy, and dance as a starting point. It suggests that initially his reflexes reflect concern with his own reputation and shame at discovery of transgression rather than inwardly directed guilt. As he grows older, however, partly under Buddhist influence, gradually he becomes more introspectively concerned with the impact of his behavior on others. The essay identifies several agencies that structure the moral world of the novel, including Buddhist notions of predestination, retribution, and spirit possession.

There was one cultural achievement that Rome and Japan self-consciously lacked: indigenous philosophical traditions. This made philosophers in Rome and Confucian scholars in Japan into both exemplars of authority and targets for satirical attack. This chapter explores the strategic use of satire by Japanese and Latin authors in appropriating and attacking their reference cultures’ philosophical traditions. It compares the little-known Genji Poems (Fu Hikaru Genji monogatari shi), a re-creation of Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji in Sino-Japanese verse, to Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, a canonical compendium of the Seven Liberal Arts. Both texts play with cultural and linguistic translation. The Genji Poems translate the romantic Tale of Genji into the Chinese-style world of scholarship, boldly claiming canonicity for a vernacular tale, but also ridiculing scholarly pretensions. Similarly, Martianus translates some of Cicero’s polemics against Plato into Greek Mennipean satire—explored here through Lucian’s satires—which is playful and slap-stick, but also considers the act of making fun of philosophers to be a superior form of philosophy. Both the Genji Poems and Martianus’ Marriage show how serious aesthetic and philosophical critique joins hands with parody and satire as a tool of canonization, of cultural reconciliation, and empowering self-deprecation.

This chapter examines the Sarashina Diary in relation to the Tale of Genji. The Sarashina Diary secured for Sugawara no Takasue no Musume a place in Japanese literary history as the first “reader” of the Tale of Genji. Takasue no Musume's reading of the Tale of Genji was also closely intertwined with her reading of other texts such as the Kagerō Diary and the Murasaki Shikibu Diary, which helped guide her to write the story of her own life. The Sarashina Diary can be seen as resisting the Kagerō Diary, particularly its critique of fiction. This chapter considers Takasue no Musume's portrayal of herself as a naive reader and how her penchant for this self-image relates to the Murasaki Shikibu Diary. It also discusses the Sarashina Diary's allusions to the Tale of Genji and concludes with some reflections on the deeper meaning of Takasue no Musume's identification with the character Ukifune in the Tale of Genji.

The hero of The Tale of Genji is famous or infamous above all as a lover and a seductive master of the courtly arts. The political aspects of his career are not as well recognized, perhaps because they are often difficult to distinguish from his love interests. One goal of this essay is to disentangle in Genji’s case political or personal advantage from erotic enterprise. A second goal is to show that Genji’s overt career follows a political (for want of a better word) trajectory that gives his story an underlying form distinct from simple acknowledgment of passing time. The main issues are the imperial succession, acquisition of decisive influence at court, and hierarchically advantageous marriage. Genji’s trajectory follows the rise of a man who comes against the odds to dominate his world, then overreaches himself and loses all that he holds most dear. Having been forced by external circumstance to favor his lackluster first son (Suzaku) publicly, the Kiritsubo Emperor does all he can to favor his brilliant second son (Genji) privately. Feeling cheated of the honor to which his gifts and his father’s favor should have destined him, Genji maneuvers successfully to overcome those who forced him into this position. Out of pride he then takes a gratuitous step that estranges him from his beloved Murasaki and, by the way, crushes his unfortunate brother. When last seen, he is only the shell of a once great man.

The Gotō Museum’s “Yomigaeru Genji monogatari emaki” exhibit of 2005–2006 was an ambitious attempt to “resurrect” the museum’s legendary illustrated handscrolls of The Tale of Genji (the Genji monogatari emaki) by having artists paint a series of new, more polished and more vibrant but ostensibly “faithful” copies to be exhibited alongside the originals. However, the refabrication of the scrolls strategically excludes the narrative calligraphic kotobagaki sections that compose the lion’s share of the extant Genji scrolls, effectively severing an intimate bond between narrative text and narrative image. The redacted reproduction also fails to account for the calligraphic performance of dying that figures so prominently in the climatic deathbed scenes of the Tale of Genji protagonists Kashiwagi and Murasaki no Ue. This chapter considers some of the potential implications of this omission. It aims to think through the spatial and temporal dimensions of artistic representations of death in relation to the composition—and decomposition—of the Genji emaki. Specifically, it examines some of the consequences involved in “resurrecting” the twelfth-century scrolls within the context of the twenty-first-century gallery in order to critique a contemporary insistence on the flatness of images and the displacement of text that results.

This chapter takes up one of Abutsu's best-known works, her diary Fitful Slumbers. The diary demonstrates her vast knowledge of The Tale of Genji, a talent that enables her to position herself as pining heroine in the mode of the Genji's Ukifune. Her portrayal suggests ways in which medieval women were casting themselves as heroines in their autobiographical writings by borrowing from classical tales. The figure of Abutsu in Fitful Slumbers is wracked by indecision over whether to become a nun or return to court life, an ongoing theme that reveals how reclusion, tonsure, and ascetic practice were seen as paths for women of the Kamakura era and how these choices functioned within autobiographical narrative.

The introduction describes the supreme position of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji in the Japanese literary and cultural tradition and the general character of the work as the story of Genji, the son of an emperor, and those around him. It addresses the role of philosophy in this extended and episodic narrative, maintaining that it rests on assumptions concerning human experience and its literary representation that can be explored in philosophical terms. It introduces what is known of the author and the creation of her work in the early-eleventh-century Heian period imperial court, together with the intellectual and religious traditions, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shinto, that informed attitudes to life in the contemporary world.

This introductory chapter emphasizes the interconnectedness between the place of courtship and the literal and figurative movements of its participants by exploring anthropological and political approaches to The Tale of Genji. It looks closely at a scene from Chapter 13 (“Akashi”) that features hybrid courtship combining parental arrangement with an individual courtship initiative without kaimami (lit., “looking through a gap in the fence;” a uniquely Japanese form of erotic hide-and-seek that is the central trope of courtship in the Genji). Taken together, the courtships described in this chapter drive the narrative in ways that critics of the Genji have sometimes touched upon but never fully explored. They form the vital core of this book's attempt to map the phenomenon of courtship in the Genji and in a number of other tenth-and early eleventh-century texts that shed light upon the courtship scenes in Murasaki Shikibu's immensely complex masterpiece.

This concluding chapter compares pre-Genji stories of courtship with Murasaki Shikibu's masterpiece, in order to illustrate what could go wrong with courtship, and in particular, how the complications of mid-Heian courtship and kinship is given new dimensions by the complex genealogies in the Genji. In extant pre-Genji literature, works that include the theme of courtship and kinship map it differently from The Tale of Genji, keeping the joys and travails of courtship limited to one generation of characters. Hence, the conflict and motivation generated through multiple generations in Genji's case is worth considering in contrast. To illustrate its multigenerational quest for power, the chapter narrates in brief The Tale of Genji and the implications it holds in terms of Heian-era courtship and kinship.

The body seems curiously absent in the Tale of Genji, despite the fact that this is a romance narrative about amorous entanglement and erotic desire. It is only when the body is conceived of as an enfleshed entity, constituted through flesh and blood that it registers as an absence. The chapter argues that in the Genji the body is best apprehended through its metonymic connections with robes and hair. Robes are the repositories of both the material and psychic attributes of an individual, and closely tied to the generation of erotic desire. Likewise, women’s thoughts and feelings find expression through their hair. There are close connections between the spirit (tama) and robes and hair, which function as keepsakes (katami) of the person to whom they belong. Beauty in the Genji is not located in the physical features of the body but in the comportment of the body in performance.

This chapter describes the life of Nakanoin Nakako’s father, Nakanoin Michikatsu, as a courtier in the Japanese imperial palace. After an overview of Michikatsu’s life as a courtier, it discusses his “imperial censure,” a form of punishment meted out within the court to those who incurred the wrath of the emperor; his exile from court living under the warrior Hosokawa Yūsai’s protection; his marriage to the daughter of Isshiki Sakyō-no-Daibu Yoshitsugu, lord of the province of Tango; his poetry; his decision to take vows as a lay monk; and the birth of Nakako. The chapter also considers Michikatsu’s commentary on the novel The Tale of Genji as well as his departure from Tanabe Castle and return to Kyoto after being pardoned by Emperor GoYōzei.

This chapter presents the narrative of Mr. Yamaguchi Itaro. Mr. Yamaguchi has spent many years designing and supervising the weaving of four surviving scrolls illustrating scenes from The Tale of Genji. He was engaged in a creative process that involved not merely the reproduction of paintings on textiles, but an artistic translation of the ancient paintings into Nishijin weavings. The Genji scrolls are being woven in Nishijin by three master weavers on wooden handlooms in a traditional small workshop. In 1994, Mr. Yamaguchi donated the first two scrolls to the Guimet Museum in Paris. The art of Nishijin weaving was transferred to Japan from some places on the Silk Road. The development of his weaving company is discussed.

The chapter examines discursive formulations around one Buddhist practice, fujôkan (meditating on the foul and impure body) to demonstrate how medieval texts weave together widely divergent readings of the topos of fujô, and by extension, of the body, women, and desire. In the Genji, the experience of death and dying leads not to detachment and renunciation, but a reworking of a Buddhist theme such that it produces instead a heightening of erotic and affective intensities. Setsuwa collections such as Hosshinshû (Collection of Tales of Religious Awakening) by Kamo no Chômei, and Kankyo no tomo (Companion in Solitude) by Priest Keisei, follow the protocols of waka and monogatari, offering readings of fujô, which are often at odds with those found in canonical Buddhist texts. The body, woman, attachment, and desire, far from being stable and unchanging, are in fact products of the intermingling of a variety of generic conventions and protocols.

This afterword reflects on the Sarashina Diary and collaboration with Sonja Arntzen for this book. It also comments on Ivan Morris's English translation of the diary, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams (1971), noting that the words “a Bridge of Dreams” in the title harked back to the title of the last chapter of the Tale of Genji. Morris was of the opinion that the title of the diary had nothing to do with Sugawara no Takasue no Musume. In contrast, Arntzen and this afterword takes exactly the opposite position on this point, arguing that the title Sarashina Diary is imbued with a deep literary symbolism. Takasue no Musume writes that in her youth, she read the Tale of Genji so well and often. But she sought out many kinds of literary works, both fiction and poetry. For Takasue no Musume, life and literature were inseparable.

The introduction charts the intellectual journey of the author who increasingly came to recognize that both in her own work and that of other scholars working on medieval Japanese texts, there was a tendency to use categories such as body, woman, agency, desire, and gender as if they were ahistorical and universal. The introduction spells out the kinds of anachronistic readings that emerge when these categories are brought to bear on medieval texts, and foreshadows how the book envisages re-reading these terms such that they are consonant with the Buddhist episteme within which they are produced. The introduction also provides a brief description of the plan of the book and the content of each chapter.