Table of Contents
Rather than introduce The Tale of Genji in a general way, these seven essays offer a few fundamental perspectives on a work that has stood for a thousand years as a rich and varied masterpiece. They remain generally silent about the pleasures the tale offers (elegance, sensibility, wit, poignancy, and so on) and about many of the issues that it raises. No interested reader should find them unapproachable, but they admittedly assume a degree of familiarity with the work. Essential to each will be the widely recognized tripartite division of the tale into Part One (Chapters 1–33), Part Two (34–41), and Part Three (42–54).[1]
This Introduction will review each essay briefly and then summarize the principal reading developed in the earlier ones, concerning Genji and his brother Suzaku. Next it will discuss the provisional character of any approach to the tale, the inevitable emergence of incommensurable views, and the position of Hikaru Genji in the work as a whole. Finally, it will turn to an issue raised in several of the essays: the difference in character between Part Three of the tale and the rest.
The first essay (“Genji and Murasaki: Between Love and Pride”) follows Genji’s long relationship with Murasaki, the woman most important to him during the greater part of his life, while the second (“Genji and Suzaku [1]: The Disaster of the Third Princess”) emphasizes his even longer relationship with his elder brother, Suzaku. Both relationships intersect when Genji marries Suzaku’s favorite daughter, the Third Princess, at the beginning of Part Two. These two essays therefore view this turning point and its aftermath from different angles. “The Disaster of the Third Princess” also discusses the supernatural influences that encourage Genji’s triumph over the faction centered on his brother.
Taken together, these two essays propose an underlying dramatic structure for what easily appears to be a fragmented, episodic work centered on love relations. However, they do not question the importance of these relations, which naturally and properly remain the principal focus of reader interest. Rather, they propose a background unity that leaves the tale’s main appeal intact and, at the same time, extends the range of the author’s achievement. The third essay (“Genji and Suzaku [2]: The Possibility of Ukifune”) discusses the nature and experience of the tale’s last heroine, her psychological condition, her likely future fate, and the significance of the exorcism scene in the penultimate chapter. It speculatively identifies the possessing power as the angry spirit of the late Suzaku, thus suggesting a possible thematic link between the first two parts of the tale and the third.
The fourth essay (“Genji and the Luck of the Sea”) approaches the relationship between Genji and Suzaku in Part One from the perspective of myth. Genji’s exile and triumphal return hark back to the Nihon shoki story best known in English as “The Luck of the Sea and the Luck of the Mountains” and referred to below in this collection as the myth of Hikohohodemi. The essay develops this parallel and links the myth to the history of the Sumiyoshi deity, who plays so vital a role in this phase of Genji’s life.
The fifth essay (“Pity Poor Kaoru”) discusses the main hero of Part Three. While many readers accord Kaoru psychological depth, “Pity Poor Kaoru” argues instead that the narrator’s chief interest in him lies in manipulating his experience so as to elicit the greatest possible sympathy for him. It also contrasts the portrayal of Kaoru with that of Genji and discusses in this connection the distinctiveness of Part Three.
The sixth and seventh essays (“Two Post-Genji Tales on The Tale of Genji” and “Veils of the Feminine over Visions of the Male”) treat more restricted topics. The former analyzes passages from the mid-eleventh-century Sagoromo monogatari and Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari in order to shed light on how their authors read The Tale of Genji. It particularly discusses ancient and modern views of Ukifune’s failure to drown herself. The latter essay analyzes and attempts tentatively to explain a motif that has stirred the curiosity of many readers: that of a man or men wishing that a beautiful man were a woman.