The Tale of Genji {complete}

{Review of the Seidensticker Genji} A thousand pages from Japan in 1000 AD. This is one of the world's first novels, perhaps the very first. Modern Japan surrounds Murasaki Shikibu with the same august aura as Shakespeare receives in England. Her novel established and uses many of the features we still expect and appreciate in novels today: internal consistency, characters distinguishable by personality, and psychological insight into their motives and desires. The most significant thing it lacks is an overarching plot, but even that is familiar to us from open-ended television serials. This story could have simply gone on and on, and some scholars speculate it was only the author's death that determined where it concludes.

It is show more primarily the tale of Genji (just as the title suggests), the man of supreme countenance (and everything which happens to him only makes him more handsome still, aging included), who falls in love with every woman he lays eyes on (except his wife) and won't take no for an answer. And who takes a young boy into his bed, when the older sister briefly denies him. And who starts grooming a ten year old girl. And gets one of his father's consorts pregnant. And the list goes on. Not even fifty pages into this novel its ostensible hero has already wilted under our 21st century moral lens, and we're just getting started. Eventually Genji receives a small measure of comeuppance, though without taking a shred of responsibility or expressing regret (except to wish he'd done even more philandering). No less than five women pour their heart out to him in letters during his self-imposed exile, and one wonders how aware of one another these women really are. Pretty aware, as it turns out, but no worries: Genji will only ever view their jealousy as 'interesting', 'silly' and 'amusing', so all remains well.

This is a kinder, gentler medieval Japan than what followed in the era of samurai and shogun, at least at court, but it was as bad as ever for the women. Even those surrounding the throne are powerless to protect themselves from sexual assault when one brazen man or another lets his passion get the better of him, or decides that's a great way to propose marriage. Men recieve almost incredulous praise for their restraint when they choose not to rape a woman, much as you find in Boccaccio's Decameron. What does the author think of all this? She seems more ready to excuse than to judge the men: "He was so young and handsome, and at an age when it was natural that he should have women angry at him. It was natural too that he should be somewhat selfish." Said fellow is so very, very handsome after all, though with all the talk of blackened or missing teeth as a token of beauty you might be better off not trying to picture it. At the same time, I wonder if she wasn't merely recording the common excuses for these goings on, pasting them over her plain depiction of the acts. Her women are in tears, despairing, unhappy under these circumstances and denied their peace by oblivious men. The very conclusion, unfinished though it is, ends with emphasis on this point.

With the exception of this element, the story's atmosphere is wonderful. Here is the Emperor and his court of ministers, provincial governors and the like. Here are elaborate gardens designed for effect, carefully rehearsed concerts with multi-stringed kotos. When someone talks about wishing to part from the world, it usually only means becoming a 'priest' or a 'nun' (a strange quirk of the translation; there are also 'bishops' in 9th century Japan, metaphors impossibly drawing on the Bible, etc.). Nobody draws a sword on anybody or even threatens violence (again, sexual assault excepted), and poetry is the word of the day. Actually, poetry is life. The integration of poetic allusions into dialogue is a fascinating highlight of the novel. Frequently the narrative is interrupted by a quotation from one poem or another that is familiar to the characters and presumably the author's contemporary readers, thus saying much more than what's conveyed by just the literal few words. Many written messages between characters are no more than a short poem from which the writer's sincerity, skill, intelligence etc. are all measured by the recipient. This might just be part of the fiction, but it would be fantastic if the Japanese court actually communicated among themselves in this way at that time. It's central to making this work a unique reading experience.

The author is present in the novel, and is identified closely enough with the character Murasaki that scholars have ascribed this name to her (nobody knows her real one). Occasionally the narrator reminds us that she is recording things she personally witnessed or has otherwise learned. She certainly presents as female when she says "It would not be seemly for a woman to speak in detail of these scholarly happenings." But for the most part she only reminds us of her presence when it provides an excuse to dodge some details: "We all read romances which list every gift and offering at such affairs, but I am afraid that they rather bore me." Not everything was different a thousand years ago. show less

Eleven hundred pages of manicured gentility, women sitting behind curtains, sleeves wet with tears, gardens, Ourobouros family trees, moongazing, sexual assault, and, to quote Blackadder, "endless bloody poetry". Relatable moments and striking imagery are few and far between, but they are to be found, like when someone's "nose and then the whole of his wary, bewhiskered face was crimson, and his mouth was twisted as if in a growl" or when Kaoru tells Oigimi, in a piercing access of true love, that all he wants is "to be with you. To spend our days together, talking of things that do not matter."

Kaoru, the "perfumed prince" whose distinctive fragrance renders him incapable of sneaking up on unsuspecting maidens like the other male show more characters, is more complex and convincing than Genji and the others, but not much more likeable even though he's the only one familiar with the word "consent":

Had the visitor been anyone but himself, matters would by now have come to a showdown. His own want of decision suddenly revolted him. Yet here she was, weeping and wringing her hands, quite beside herself. He would have to wait until consent came of its own accord.

He gets a paragraph just before this which is a rare moment of complex introspection ("I may be hurt, I may be furious, and there I stand like a post, knowing perfectly well how ridiculous I am"). Genji, on the other hand, is almost devoid of self-insight ("it astonishes me that you still think me a trifler" protests the serial trifler to one of his conquests), allowing the author to cast very occasional shade ("it was when he had little else to do that he offered such advice" after a little sermon to his son about being cautious and avoiding scandal).

It's the women, though, who provide the most emotional moments, albeit exclusively because of the searing cruelty inflicted on them by polygamy. The agony of Higekuro's first wife, when she's being supplanted by Genji's daughter, is visceral:

Suddenly she stood up, swept the cover from a large censer, stepped behind her husband, and poured the contents over his head.

She's punished by a brutal "exorcism", beaten by priests until she agrees to go away. And Kumoinokari is just as fucked off by Yugiri's philandering:

"Do you know where you are?" she said finally. "You are in hell. You have always known that I am a devil, and I have merely come home."

"In spirit worse than a devil," he replied cheerfully, "but in appearance not at all unpleasant."

She snorted and sat up. "I know that I do not go very well with your own fine looks, and I would prefer just to be out of sight. I have wasted so many years. Please do not remember me as I am now."

And then there's the story of the maid Ukon's sister, who is exiled because one suitor killed another over her through no fault of her own. This kind of thing is hard to stomach, but that's how it was back then, and still is in some places. And for me Genji was worth reading for its uniqueness, for the foregoing, and the following bits and bobs:

Peculiarly Japanese oddnesses

— The ludicrous habitual luxury: "not wishing to attract attention, he had only ten outrunners […] and his guards were in subdued livery."
— The "ritual bestowing of trousers".
— "One poem celebrating the thousand years of the pine is very like another" — no kidding.
— "It would not help the prospects of one daughter if the other were to be abducted."
— "Numbers of dogs had come bounding up and were barking most inelegantly". Yeah, what philistine taught those dogs to bark?

On fiction (all great fictions at some point discuss the nature of fiction)

Genji could not help noticing the clutter of pictures and manuscripts. "What a nuisance this all is," he said one day. "Women seem to have been born to be cheerfully deceived. They know perfectly well that in all these old stories there is scarcely a shred of truth, and yet they are captured and made sport of by the whole range of trivialities and go on scribbling them down, quite unaware that in these warm rains their hair is all dank and knotted."

He smiled. "What would we do if there were not these old romances to relieve our boredom? But amid all the fabrication I must admit that I do find real emotions and plausible chains of events. We can be quite aware of the frivolity and the idleness and still be moved. We have to feel a little sorry for a charming princess in the depths of gloom. Sometimes a series of absurd and grotesque incidents which we know to be quite improbable holds our interest, and afterwards we must blush that it was so. Yet even then we can see what it was that held us. Sometimes I stand and listen to the stories they read to my daughter, and I think to myself that there certainly are good talkers in the world. I think that these yarns must come from people much practiced in lying. But perhaps that is not the whole of the story?"

She pushed away her inkstone. "I can see that that would be the view of someone much given to lying himself. For my part, I am convinced of their truthfulness."

and

If the storyteller wishes to speak well, then he chooses the good things; and if he wishes to hold the reader's attention he chooses bad things, extraordinarily bad things.

A 4th wall-breaking 1000 year-old headache

Though no one has asked me to do so, I should like to describe the surprise of the assistant viceroy's wife at this turn of events, and Jiju's pleasure and guilt. But it would be a bother and my head is aching; and perhaps — these things do happen, they say — something will someday remind me to continue the story.

Painting and Go the only two innate talents

"It is true of every art," said the prince, "that real mastery requires concentrated effort, and it is true too that in every art worth mastering [...] the evidences of effort are apparent in the results. There are two mysterious exceptions, painting and the game of Go, in which natural ability seems to be the only thing that really counts."

As someone who sucks at painting and Go — even at Backgammon — I'm sorry to say I agree. show less

I decided to read this during lockdown in May 2020 as it's far too heavy to carry on a commute and has been sat on my shelf since one of my last trips to Japan, so perhaps 2004 or a little earlier. It's not easy, it took me a full month of basically forcing myself through it, but out the other side I'm glad I've now read it. I do think it's a great translation - including plenty of explanatory footnotes, illustrations, maps and appendices to help navigate the unfamiliar world.

It's often described as the first novel, but doesn't really conform to modern ideas of a novel. Stories begin and end without warning, timelines overlap. Genji dies between chapters with minimal fanfare and the book just carries on without him, before ending, well show more to say 'abruptly' is a severe understatement. Applying modern standards to it can be grim reading - rape, paedophilia and kidnap are all presented as unproblematically romantic. It's also pretty confusing how often all these night time meetings behind multiple screens and blinds result in a pregnancy! But its descriptions of Japanese court life at the time are fascinating and evocative and in the end that's what makes it worthwhile - this glimpse into the life of a tiny entitled class in a faraway time and place. show less

After having read all six of the Chinese Classic Novels, it seemed like a logical continuation to go on to the Classic Japanese novel Genji monogatari; not just because of the geographical proximity but also because Japanese culture was greatly influenced by China back then (the early 11th century) and I was expecting something in a similar vein. As it turned out, I was profoundly mistaken in that assumption – The Tale of Genji is something quite different and fascinating in its own, unique way.

Apart from their cultural and temporal remoteness, what probably throws off most contemporary Western readers attempting the Classic Chinese novels is their huge cast of characters, many of them figuring under several different names – show more something that can make the narrative very hard to follow. The Tale of Genji, however, manages to outdo this by not even bothering with names in the first place – all of its (supposedly around four hundred) characters are referred to only by rank or role, at the utmost a nickname by way of some association (with a place, a colour, a flower etc.). Even “Genji” is not really a proper name but a designation given to Imperial offspring outside the line of succession. Now, as the novel spans several decades and generations, ranks and roles keep changing, and you end up with not only one character having several different designations, but also the same designation being used for several different characters. This alone would probably have sufficed to make the novel nigh unreadable, but thankfully the translator and editor of the edition I have been using, Royall Tyler, kindly placed a dramatis personae not only at the end of the book but also in front of each individual chapter, and I cannot emphasise enough how extremely helpful this was (and even then, I got confused on a couple of occasions and had to backtrack to figure out in which relationship a given character stood to another, or to Genji, or to the Emperor).

Similarly helpful are the extensive explanatory notes Tyler has added as well as the gresat number of illustrations spread throughout the book, which are not only decorative but very frequently help the reader visualise clothing, furniture or other items of daily use referenced in the narrative. I was really happy with this particular edition and think it is exemplary in pretty much every respect – this is how editions of literary texts from remote epochs and places should be done. Tyler makes The Tale of Genji approachable to modern readers without modernizing it, and the same thing can be said about his translation – obviously, I do not have the first clue about how faithful it stays to the original, but it reads very well; the language has an easy, rhythmical flow, but without trying to make readers forget that they are perusing the translation of an ancient Japanese novel. Even with all of Tyler’s efforts, however, the novel remains tantalizingly opaque in many places, many of the customs – in particular those regulating relationships between the sexes – appearing strange or outright bizarre to a modern reader. But as it turns out, this is not a bad thing at all, quite to the contrary, as this distance and the resulting struggle by the reader to comprehend generate significance and as the strange customs frequently reveal surprisingly recognisable structures.

The Tale of Genji starts off with a death, the death of Genji’s mother, who his father the Emperor was so much in love with that he could not bear to let her leave when she fell sick, thus indirectly causing her death. The Emperor eventually goes on to take a new wife which resembles the previous one (i.e., Genji’s mother) very closely, and which Genji falls hopelessly in love with (and has sex with, resulting in a son a few chapters later who will eventually become Emperor in turn, i.e. take over the position of Genji’s father). And as if that was not enough, Genji (who during all this time is having countless – I gave up trying to keep up by chapter 4 – other affairs) comes across a 10-year-old child which very much resembles the Emperor’s wife (and thus Genji’s dead mother) who Genji declares his soul mate and abducts in order to bring her up to be his perfect lover (i.e., become a version of the Emperor’s wife, the one who is the spitting image of his mother). And all of this is thematically tied up with a discussion Genji and his friends have in chapter 2 about whether there is such a thing as an ideal woman… It is all quite dizzying, but also strikingly familiar – French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would have had a field day with the way the Oedipal theme here runs through several substitutions, permutations and deferrals until signifier and signified become hopelessly entangled. One can easily imagine a Lacanian reading of the novel based on the Freudian Fort/Da dialectics on this alone, and that is even before the following generations come into play… Obviously, I am not going to do this here, but I have to admit that I am sorely tempted.

Now, many people might not care about Lacan or even Freud, but even readers without any interest in psychoanalysis will very likely be struck by how deeply psychological The Tale of Genji is. I always assumed that self-reflexive subjectivity was for the most part an invention of 18th century bourgeoisie, most notably Kant and Rousseau and that Stendal was the pioneer of the psychological novel. But as it turns out, they were (well, Murasaki Shibiku was) already doing it several hundred years before in Japan. It seems likely that Murasaki got there by a somewhat different way (I will speculate a bit on that farther down), but her keen insight into what motivates human beings, her rich and nuanced descriptions of the inner life of her protagonists rival that of Stendal or any other nineteenth century psychological novelist. Even though The Tale of Genji takes place among the upper crust of Japanese feudal society (we meet several emperors, and almost all main characters are highly placed court officials), there is nothing about politics or warfare here – the novel deals exclusively with private affairs, the only subject (the narrator remarks at one point) suitable for women to write about. The novel’s scope is hence confined to the domestic, but what might seem a limitation ends up giving it focus – as an analysis of the mechanics and power shifts in Romantic relationships I think it is only rivalled by De l’amour and Proust’s Recherche à la temps perdu.

There is an additional facet to Murasaki’s work, however, which figures neither in Stendal or in Proust (or at least is nowhere near as prominent as in Genji monogatari) and that is a keen awareness of gender relations. In Japanese feudal society, the relationships between men and women appear to have been at least as strictly regulated as those between differences in rank, with distance being the all-important factor. And this means literal distance – there is a whole arrangement of barriers separating men from women in The Tale of Genji, starting with several layers of clothing, moving on to curtains, to wall screens, doors, and walls – symbolic and real space working together to keep the genders apart. Even while most of the interaction in the novel takes places between people of different gender, for the most part they are not even visible to each other during their conversations, but talk through some kind of barrier and the closeness between two people is indicated by the degree of physical separation between them. The males often invest considerable effort and guile just to catch a brief glimpse of a woman’s face or figure, which very frequently leads to them hiding and outright spying on a woman they are interested in (and at this point, I could have sworn I heard Lacan chuckle). It is important for women to keep that distance as otherwise their reputation and possibly even existence is threatened; but it will come to nobody’s surprise that the men on more than one occasion pierce those barriers even against resistance of the female behind them. Murasaki does only very rarely judge openly – the narrator generally keeps her distance, and only in a few instances draws attention to herself – but lets her characters condemn themselves by their own words and actions. There is more than one case of a male noble complaining about a female who had the misfortune to catch his eyes being “childish” only to then loudly denounce her as a wanton after she has given in to his forceful advances (and more often than not against her will). As the novel unfolds, it effectively presents something like an encyclopedia of rhetoric devices for dominating women – and I was struck by how much those devices resembled those chronicled in Kelly Sue DeConnick’s and Valentine DeLandro’s comic Bitch Planet, the first volume of which I happened to be reading at the same time as Genji. Both works obviously are very different from each other – but also very (and depressingly) similar in their cataloguing of ways in which women are manipulated and subjugated by a male-centered discourse, which apparently has not changed much during the last thousand years.

Genji, although far from innocent of this behaviour himself, at least differs from the novel’s other male characters in that he appears to genuinely care about his women, trying to give all of them at least some amount of attention and frequently taking care of their livelihood. And if this sprawling, dispersed novel has something like a centre, it would certainly lie in Genji’s relationship to one of them, the Murasaki under whose name the author of the novel has become known. She is the girl Genji abducts when she is ten years old, something the author makes quite clear was not at all a common occurrence in feudal Japan, and in spite of those rather inauspicious beginnings, the love between him and Murasaki runs as a red thread even through all of Genji’s numerous affairs and general inconstancy. With all of Genji’s ceaseless womanizing, the novel does get a bit repetitive and even a bit of a slog in parts, but the reader’s interest never quite flags completely before it is rekindled by the enchanting description of a lavish feast or the narration of a particularly adventurous tryst. And then, about two-thirds into the novel, Murasaki dies, and the chapter following this death, describing Genji’s reaction to it, is one of the most touching and heart-rending piecer of literature which I have ever read. The only comparison I can think of is the ending of Samuel R. Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders – in fact, once one starts to think about it, there are rather a lot of similarities between Delany’s novel and The Tale of Genji: Both present a decades-spanning love story between two people embedded in a closed community, both are centered around amorous relationships, both are (although for entirely different reasons) somewhat hard to get through on occasion, but reward the reader with a huge emotional pay-off…. of course, both novels read entirely differently, but the similarities are of a sufficient density to make me think that Delany consciously used Murasaki’s novel as a model for his own. All of which is a bit off-topic, but it shows, like the parallel to Bitch Planet I mentioned above, how The Tale of Genji, in spite (or possibly because) of all its strangeness and opacity, still can resonate with contemporary readers.

There is a surprising amount of poetry in this novel (at least I was surprised by it): Almost every time one of the characters sees some striking scenery, or experiences a particularly intense emotion, or has something interesting happen to them – in short, pretty much every time something in any way extraordinary happens, the experience is shaped and crystallized into a poem by the character it is happening to. And as if that wasn’t enough, poems also are an important means of communication between characters – they keep sending them to each other, and judgement on the quality of the poem often is synonymous with judgement on the person who wrote it. These poems are no spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, however, but are carefully crafted, full of clever wordplay and subtle literary allusions (and as such they are of course quite untranslatable – this is where the efforts of translator / editor Royall Tyler reach a truly heroic peak; and while there is no way to faithfully render the poems into English, he at least manages to give readers an appreciation of what the poems must be like in the original). Apart from their inherent quality and the light they shed on the characters presumably composing them (the poems being expressions of a character, their quality does vary somewhat, not all characters in the novel being equally accomplished poets), I think the poems fulfill a third, possibly even more important function for the novel as a whole: In order to be able to transform their experience into elaborately fashioned poetry, the characters need to step from the immediacy of that experience, to view it from a distance and ultimately, they need to distance themselves from their own selves.

Considering how central distance both literal and figurative is in The Tale of Genji, it is probably no surprise to find it structuring the most fundamental of the individual as well; there is a distance, a deferral inside the individual itself, and that distance not only enables the characters’ constant poeticizing but also the turning inwards on oneself, the self-observation and psychologizing that appears so strikingly modern about this novel and which now turns out to result from the profoundly feudal, hierarchical and rank-obsessed society it was written and is set in. (Or, one would at least like to imagine, maybe it is the other way around and the ancient Japanese penchant for allusive, wordplay-heavy poetry let not only to psychological observation but also to the kind of highly formalized thinking that determined Japanese society of that time and has lasting effects on the Japanese way of life until today.) show less

I had been meaning to read this for a long while. What I knew about this book going in was merely this: Many consider it to be the first novel. It is from Japan. It was written by a woman.

What I know now: Genji was a fuckboy.

Reading this book was kind of wild. I delivered many wild-eyed monologue on this book to the people around me as I was reading it. My context for ancient Imperial Japan is pretty limited, so I felt like I was constantly scouring the text itself for clues on mores/morality/etc., trying to figure out if Genji's actions were "normal" (to his extremely rarified and privileged position as the favorite son of the Emperor, or if they were supposed to be scandalous.

I did find this much more readable than I expected. Other show more than the whole "using names is rude" thing (and thankfully the translator took pity on us and added some nicknames and reminders in footnotes). I love all the communicating in verse, whether it be original, quotations of famous poems or songs of the time, or adaptations of the same.

Anyway, after a little setting up of Genji, his friends, and their ideals for women, this basically a series of Genji's falling for and/or seducing women (the two definitely don't have to be concurrent). Some of the women are married, some seem to be his cousins (?!), one is the favorite consort of the Emperor — his father. Most resist him, at least at first, to varying degrees, but at least one woman pursues him.

And one is TEN. Everyone around her says to Genji, "She's an INFANT! What the FUCK!?" And Genji says, "My intentions are good! She is just so charming! I am going to raise her and educate her!"

And then he basically forcibly marries her at twelve. Which happens almost at the end of the book, which is the end of Volume 1 of 6 of the Tale of Genji, which is also The Tale of Genji, at which point I scanned some synopses of the rest of the work and said, Yeah, I think I am done now.

I find it important to mention that, according to the text, twelve was considered to be the age of adulthood at that time. I'M STILL DONE. show less

I'm not sure if this is the translation I have (would have to root through the shelves) but the book itself is a wonder. It's a whole planet, so far away and yet full of breath and blood perceivable even at this palpable distance. What a passionate intelligence Murasaki had, and what discipline to go with it--as a writer she knew when to hold tight and when to cut and run, and she doesn't seem to waste a lot of time. As this is the very first thing anywhere in the world in its genre, she made each of these choices based on her own mind, experience, heart, guts . . . she must have been amazing in person. The one person, maybe, that I would most love to meet.

On the surface, the language is simple and flows beautifully, and the chapters (episodes?) tend to be fairly short, so it is easy to read a bit here & there. Genji was surprisingly excellent subway read (ebook, clearly) due to the brief sections and the repetitiveness. Reading during the commute is strangely like being an avid fan of a sitcom it to being addicted to a sitcom -- both have a core group of main characters and an extensive cast of extras (some with reoccurring roles, others in only one episode), and for both, while the plot details vary, the general arc/outline of individual episodes are similar.

I suppose if I had been reading the Penguin edition with the fantastic end notes that explained the significance of the colors, show more kimono patterns, etc, it would have been slower going. show less