Table of Contents
Two roughly late twelfth century works represent a transition in the reception of The Tale of Genji. The first, Genji shaku by Sesonji Koreyuki (d. 1175), begins the long line of scholarly commentaries that are still being written today.[1] The second, Mumyōzōshi (ca. 1200, attributed to Shunzei’s Daughter), can perhaps be said to round off the preceding era, when Genji was simply a monogatari (tale) among others, enjoyed above all by women. In contrast with Koreyuki’s textual glosses, Mumyōzōshi gives passionate reader responses to characters and incidents in several monogatari, including Genji. The discovery of something like it from much earlier in the preceding two hundred years would be very welcome.
Fortunately, some evidence of earlier reader reception survives after all, not in critical works, but in post-Genji tales themselves. Showing as they do demonstrable Genji influence, they presumably suggest at times, in one way or another, what the author made of Genji, or how she understood this or that part of it. This essay will discuss examples from Sagoromo monogatari (ca. 1070–80, by Rokujō no Saiin Senji, who served the Kamo Priestess Princess Baishi)[2] and Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari (ca. 1060, attributed to the author of Sarashina nikki). Chief among them are the meaning of the chapter title “Yume no ukihashi”; the question of what happens to Ukifune between “Ukifune” and “Tenarai”; and the significance of Genji’s affair with Fujitsubo. Discussion of these topics, especially the second, will hark back at times to material presented in earlier essays, although this time with a different purpose.
A passage from Hamamatsu illustrates simply how a post-Genji monogatari can shed light on the way a particular Genji passage might have been understood by its original audience. It concerns the trials inflicted on Genji’s mother by her jealous rivals (“Kiritsubo”). Their nature remains vague, despite talk of the possibility of a “nasty surprise awaiting her along the crossbridges and bridgeways, one that horribly fouled the skirts of [her] gentlewomen.”[3] Her distress is easy to imagine, but one may still wonder whether her rivals did anything more pointed to cause her death.
The stories about curses included in Konjaku monogatari shū suggest an answer with which the Hamamatsu author apparently concurred. At the beginning of the surviving portion of her work (the first chapter of which is missing), she transposed the plight of Genji’s mother to the Chinese court, complete with an unmistakable counterpart of the hostile minister of the right. In Hamamatsu this minister “places all sorts of curses” on Kara no Kisaki, the counterpart of Genji’s mother, and many of the Chinese emperor’s women do the same.[4] Midō Kanpaku ki, the diary of Fujiwara no Michinaga, likewise mentions attempts to lay curses, once probably on himself, and once probably on a lady of the court.[5] In the end Kara no Kisaki, like Genji’s mother, leaves the palace for good, although she does not die—her home, unlike that of Genji’s mother, being a very long way from the Chinese emperor’s palace and so much safer. Her experience and the testimony of Michinaga provide nearly contemporary confirmation of a reasonable conjecture about what remains unstated in the Genji narrative. It also highlights the contrasting approach taken by Murasaki Shikibu, who, by means of silence and understatement, turned a little world as jealous and vindictive as any other, as her original audience well knew, into a model of elegance for the ages.
A second, more diffuse issue concerns the nature of the hero in Sagoromo and Hamamatsu. The authors, who had Genji and Kaoru to choose from as two models, seem to have been more at home with Kaoru. (“Pity Poor Kaoru” has already discussed this question.) Presumably their audiences were, too. The chapters of The Tale of Genji that cover Genji’s life are impressive, but it is the Uji chapters that announce the fiction of later Heian times and beyond. Although Genji makes a memorable hero, he seems to have had no clear successor.
It is not that the Sagoromo and Hamamatsu authors made their heroes perfect. Sagoromo no Taishō and Hamamatsu no Chūnagon, especially the former, are not above betraying husbands and fathers, or ruining women’s lives. Like Kaoru, however, they both enjoy brilliant worldly success in the background, while displaying in the foreground a dreamily melancholy, otherworldly side. Sagoromo’s fantasies of entering religion so resemble Kaoru’s that he has been described as “a second Kaoru,”[6] while in Hamamatsu, Buddhism as a sort of fantasy world is replaced by China, and by repeated oracles and dream communications. The closing section of Hamamatsu even features an extended variation on the rivalry between Kaoru and Niou over Ukifune. Just as the reader of the Uji chapters is constantly invited to sympathize with Kaoru’s sorrows, whatever they may be, so in Sagoromo and Hamamatsu the hero’s sorrowful feelings alone matter, regardless of what he may have done to arouse them. The beautiful hero enjoys full indulgence. The narrator’s treatment of him little resembles the shifting, sometimes critical, and always personally engaged attitude toward Genji evident in his story.
[1] Hikaru Genji ichibu uta (1453) by the nun Yūrin (fl. ca. 1450) and the work of Kaoku Gyokuei (1526 – after 1602) constitute the only significant writing on Genji by women between Mumyōzōshi and modern times. Gaye Rowley is due thanks for this information.
[2] On the author of Sagoromo monogatari and her context, see D’Etcheverry, “Rethinking Late Heian,” 42–69; and Love After The Tale of Genji, 39–57.
[3] TTG, 4; GM 1:20.
[4] Ikeda Toshio, Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari, 44.
[5] Hérail, Notes journalières de Fujiwara no Michinaga, ministre à la cour de Heian 2:581 (Chōwa 1.4.10 [1012]) and 3:121 (Chōwa 4.7.2 [1015]).
[6] Gotō, “Mō hitori no Kaoru,” 68–89.