The Tale of Genji

by Murasaki Shikibu

Introduction

If Genji contains digressions, parallel plots, stories within stories, and shifts of view, so do many other long novels.

Don Quixote comes to mind.

the nineteenth-century English novel does not prepare the reader for a heroine (Murasaki) who dies two-thirds of the way through, for a hero (Genji) who dies a little later, between chapters, or for a closing chapter that ties up no loose ends.

In its richness and variety, The Tale of Genji rewards not only reading but rereading. Greater familiarity with it reveals new depths.

The Stature of the Work

Short Summary of the Tale

The Author

Manuscripts and Texts

The World of the Tale

The Pattern of Hierarchy

Narration, Courtesy, and Names

Poetry

In poetry people could address each other from the heart. Many early anecdotes tell how an eloquent poem by someone of very low rank, addressed to a superior, gained the person recognition as a fellow human being.

People learned to write by copying poems, they acquired the language of poetry by memorizing a great many examples, and they confirmed what they knew by composing more themselves.

Readers and Reading in the Author's Time

Reading The Tale of Genji Today

The tale is for readers who have time. Not only is it long, but it invites a degree of reader participation—a kind of active absorption—that few contemporary novels demand.

One not only spoke softly and at a measured pace, one also nurtured ambition with understatement and well-placed silence.

The Tale as Fiction and History

The Language of Genji

The style of the tale is indisputably a great literary achievement, but it is also very difficult. Names are rare, and verbs seldom have a stated subject.

Neither the resources of the language itself nor the requirements of discretion encourage clarity of expression,

the original was undoubtedly clearer then than it is now, and much of its famous elusiveness may be due to later readers' ignorance of reference, idiom, and telling turn of phrase.

Three linguistic features of the original deserve special comment. These are its evenness of flow, the integral role played in it by grammatical devices that indicate the speaker's social standing with respect to the person addressed or discussed, and certain modal inflections of the verbs in the narration.

The original has (with local exceptions) a lovely, smooth flow that cannot be conveyed in English, which resists such unstressed evenness...

The modern Japanese language still makes it difficult to talk to or about someone without defining one's standing vis-à-vis that person,

but not so contemporary English, which offers relatively few means to achieve it.

an English translation cannot help sounding relatively informal.

Certain verbal inflections in Genji and other literature of its time have become an issue in recent years. The chief of these is -keri, which seems to indicate a verbal mode (rather than tense) that brings the events narrated into the present.

However, English lacks such a verbal mode of narrative immediacy, and translating into the present would not help, since the present is still a tense, not a mode, and is in any case difficult to sustain successfully throughout a long narration.

The basic tense of narration in this translation is therefore the past. However, most passages of interior monologue are in the first-person present.

Calculating Time

In other words, all ages given are one year greater than in English usage.

The Illustrations

him

The Heir Apparent.

her

Genji's mother.

6

Here by end of January, 2020 for Buddy Read.

He seems to have cared forever for each one of his loves. The passing years never effaced his feeling for any lady he had known, although this only aroused in many the sorrows of the lovelorn.

No lady Genji had known, however briefly, lacked a distinction of her own, nor did any give him reason to regret courting her; and perhaps that is why nothing came between them and him, and why they always got on so well. That those who wished for more should lose interest in him was something he accepted as the way of the world.

was just after the twentieth of the third month when he set out from the City. He told no one the hour of his departure but left almost invisibly, with a mere seven or eight intimate retainers. To those due something from him he merely sent discreet letters, some of which, in the moving fullness of their eloquence, must have been well worth reading; but it was all so upsetting that I never inquired about them properly.

Having got wrong everything I have written, I must have made him seem even odder and more foolish than he was.

my head is aching so badly that I am not up to it, and I am afraid I shall have to go on another time, when I remember more.

They spent all night assuring each other in all ways of their love.

The son of a noble house, one who is promoted at his pleasure and who swells with his own glory, is unlikely to feel that it is any business of his to put himself out studying. He prefers to amuse himself, and those who bend to the times fawn on him since he rises in rank as he wishes, although they deride him meanwhile in secret; they curry his favor and do his bidding until by and by he resembles a great man, but once change intervenes and the one to whom he owes it all is gone, his fortunes decline, leaving him scorned and without a friend in the world.

45

Needless to say, His Grace's was especially accomplished, but it also conveyed a father's love so movingly that all present wept while they hummed it. However, a woman has no business repeating what she cannot know, and since I do not wish to give offense, I have omitted it.

The Records of the Historian.

Even quite uninteresting remarks sound worthy when delivered with gravity and composure, and a discussion of poems 33 that are nothing in themselves may leave the heart of the matter veiled and yet at first hearing sound fascinating when done in the right sort of voice, leaving room for the imagination and seeming to withhold the beginnings and the endings.

The most profound and absorbing remarks will find no audience when indifferently spoken.

łharano.

Oharano

It upset her to think of leaving the pillar on the east side, against which herself she had leaned so often, to someone else, and she therefore pasted together some bits of paper the color of cypress bark, wrote on them in tiny letters, and with a hairpin pushed the paper into a crack in the pillar: “I am leaving now a home that has long been mine: O handsome pillar, you whom I have loved so well, please do not forget me yet!” Tears almost prevented her from finishing.