The Tale of Genji: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Junichiro Breakdown of Genji)

by Murasaki Shikibu

  Some contemporary readers insist that The Tale of Genji is less about Genji himself than about the women in it—their feelings, their experiences, their fates. However, it is to Genji that the narrative returns again and again during his life. He is, so to speak, its home. That is why this summary will follow his story, passing over in silence along the way a great many characters and scenes. It is meant neither to exaggerate Genji's importance nor to replace a reading of the tale, merely to orient someone about to start the book.

  At the end of chapter chapter 1, Genji is married to the daughter of a particularly powerful courtier. No one consults him on the matter, and in fact he is too young for the marriage to affect him very much. His wife, known to readers as Aoi, continues to live at her father's, which was normal, while he remains in residence at the imperial palace. (For the meaning of “known to readers,” see “Narration, Courtesy, and Names” on page xxi.) His mother died too soon after his birth for him to have known her, but he hears that his father's future Empress (Fujitsubo) resembles her closely, and in his earliest adolescence he comes to adore her. In time he will secretly make love to Fujitsubo, and their son will succeed to the throne.

  Still, Fujitsubo is really beyond his reach, and he longs for someone who can be his alone. He finds this special love in a little girl who looks just like her. Murasaki, who is Fujitsubo's niece, is about ten when he first sees her. He brings her up personally, and when she is old enough he marries her. She is the true, great love of his life, and her death (chapter 40, “The Law”) destroys him. In the meantime, however, he will have known many other women.

  As a boy Genji seems to love Fujitsubo because people say she looks like his mother, and he is quite conscious of what draws him so uncannily to Murasaki. Much has been made of these substitutions, some readers suggesting that all Genji's other women are equally stand-ins for his mother. However, the narrative up to the time of his death does not encourage that view. Fujitsubo dies in chapter 19 (“Wisps of Cloud”) and vanishes from his reported thoughts after chapter 20 (“The Bluebell”).

  In chapter 2 (“The Broom Tree”) the teenage Genji listens while three young men share the secrets of their love lives. This is the famous “rating women on a rainy night” conversation, which opens his eyes to wider possibilities. Later in the same chapter he goes exploring, and in several succeeding ones he begins more affairs. This behavior has led to his being called a playboy, a profligate, or worse. However, several of these chapters are extremely amusing, and the author may have used him only to present the varieties of a youthful lover's folly in a series of brilliant episodes, ranging from tragic obsession to utter, hilarious disaster. Moreover, the narrator insists several times that Genji never forgot any woman he had once known, and the tale bears this out.

  Genji the lover is devastatingly handsome, charming, and eloquent, and he seems to enjoy throughout his life absolutely unlimited material means. As a very young man he naturally has little weight or responsibility in the world at large, but increasing age and rank, as well as his extraordinary natural gifts, soon begin to make him a political force, hence to stiffen political opposition against him. Being Genji, always out for adventure, he cannot resist making love to one of the daughters (known to readers as Oborozukiyo) of his chief political enemy, and disaster strikes when the gentleman finds him in bed with her. Unfortunately, the girl's older sister (the Heir Apparent's mother) is not only powerful but evil tempered. In her outrage she sets out immediately to destroy Genji, and he has to retreat into self-exile.

  He goes to Suma, a stretch of shore on the Inland Sea that is now within the city limits of Kobe, and since he is in disgrace he must leave Murasaki behind. The narrative dwells at length on the poignancy of his suffering as he languishes in the wilds. Then a great storm threatens his very life. He has strange dreams of his late father and of other supernatural beings. As soon as the storm begins to subside, an eccentric and wealthy gentleman (the Akashi Novice) arrives by boat to invite him to be his guest a little farther along the shore, at a place called Akashi. Genji accepts.

  At Akashi, Genji comes to know the gentleman's daughter (the lady from Akashi), who is pregnant when at last he is called back to the City. He already has a son (Yūgiri) by his first wife, who died some years ago, and of course there is also his secret son by Fujitsubo, the future Emperor Reizei. This new child, his last, is a girl, and in time, after Reizei's long reign, she will be the Empress. It is she who will lift Genji toward the supreme good fortune of a ranking nonimperial noble: that of being the grandfather of an Emperor.

  After his triumphant return from exile (chapter 13, “Akashi”), Genji is above all a man of power. Although still susceptible to the charms of certain women, he does not actually consummate any new affairs. He seems concerned mainly with beauty and prestige.

  Genji's only serious courtship between chapters 14 and 33 is addressed to a Princess (Asagao), with whom he clearly had some sort of relationship as a very young man (chapter 2). It comes early (chapter 20), it does not last long, and it is a complete failure. Wondering why he tries at all, readers have suggested he is nostalgic for Fujitsubo. Perhaps his rapidly rising stature has reminded him that although he loves Murasaki deeply, she is not really worthy before the world (as the Princess would be) of the figure he has become.

  By chapter 33 (“New Wisteria Leaves”) Genji has risen to extraordinary heights. He has built a magnificent complex of four interconnected mansions, each linked with one of the four seasons and housing a lady important to him, on land that seems to have passed to him from an extremely distinguished lover, the Rokujō Haven (Rokujō no Miyasudokoro, now deceased). This is his incomparable Rokujō (“Sixth Avenue”) estate. More remarkably, the Emperor, his secret son, has appointed him Honorary Retired Emperor. There was no historical precedent for this step at the time of the tale. Genji now towers over his world.

  Then, in chapter 34 (“Spring Shoots I”) Genji responds to an appeal from his half brother, Retired Emperor Suzaku. As an ineffectual young Emperor, Suzaku was forced by his mother to persecute Genji and his allies. Now he is planning to renounce the world, and his favorite daughter is still very young and immature. He therefore wants Genji to look after her: in other words, to marry her. Genji agrees. Perhaps he hopes for a new, younger Murasaki, since this girl, too, is Fujitsubo's niece. However, she is also the great prize sought by the most ambitious young men of the court, and she has the one thing that Murasaki lacks: the rank that would allow her to be a wife even for an Honorary Retired Emperor.

  Alas, that is all she has to offer, since otherwise she is a complete nonentity. Too late, Genji realizes that he has made a bad mistake. Even he cannot afford to slight Retired Emperor Suzaku's daughter, but when Murasaki becomes ill, he abandons her nonetheless for weeks on end to look after Murasaki. In time this causes a new disaster. A young man steals in to Suzaku's daughter while almost all her staff are away and makes love to her (chapter 35, “Spring Shoots II”).

  Genji soon finds out, and he is furious. To make matters worse, she is now pregnant, and in due course she bears Kaoru—a boy wrongly assumed by the world to be Genji's son. The lover dies of guilt and shame soon after the birth. Suzaku's daughter becomes a nun over Genji's strenuous objections. Meanwhile Murasaki is still ill. Genji's new marriage has been a catastrophe.

  Murasaki dies two or three years later, in her early forties. Genji, then in his early fifties, survives her as a mere shell of his former self. It appears that after the reader sees him for the last time, he leaves the world, retires to a temple, and dies within a year or two.

  The narrative in the last third of the book—the last thirteen chapters—resumes after a gap of about eight years. Several major characters have disappeared from the scene. Chapters 42 to 44 (“The Perfumed Prince” through “Bamboo River”) are disjointed, but from chapter 45 (“The Maiden of the Bridge”) on, the tale is all of a piece.

  Chapter 42 reintroduces as young men Kaoru and Genji's g
randson Niou, a son of the daughter (now Empress) born long ago at Akashi. Niou and Kaoru are fast friends, and from chapter 45 on they are rivals in love.

  After a bitter experience of court life, a certain Prince, a widower, has retired with his two daughters to Uji, a few hours' ride south of the City. There, beside the Uji River, he has sought refuge in religion, and the rumor of his noble piety reaches Kaoru, who also feels vaguely out of place in the world. In chapter 45 Kaoru begins visiting him and hears at last, from an old woman there, the secret of his own birth. He also catches a glimpse of the Prince's daughters and longs for the elder (Ōigimi). In fact, he rather wants them both, but he nonetheless tells his friend Niou about them, and Niou begins to court the younger sister (Naka no Kimi). Soon he manages to make love to her.

  This should commit Niou to Naka no Kimi, but he can seldom actually make the trip to Uji, and his prolonged absences now convince both sisters that he has only been toying with her. Ōigimi becomes certain that she will suffer the same fate if she ever accepts Kaoru, and she decides that she no longer wishes to live. At the end of chapter 47 (“Trefoil Knots”) she starves herself to death, and Kaoru is heartbroken.

  In chapter 48 (“Bracken Shoots”) Niou moves Naka no Kimi to his residence in the City, but in chapter 49 (“The Ivy”) he is obliged by intense political and parental pressure to accept as his main wife a daughter of Genji's son Yūgiri, now the most powerful official at court. Kaoru remains in touch with Naka no Kimi, and he now notices that she is much more like her sister than he had realized. He begins to long for her after all, and his attentions arouse Niou's jealousy. To deflect them, Naka no Kimi tells him about a half sister of hers: a third, unrecognized daughter of the Prince. Readers know this young woman as Ukifune. Ukifune, she says, looks extraordinarily like Ōigimi, and the resemblance indeed stuns Kaoru when he sees her. Henceforth, he resolves to pursue Ukifune.

  Unfortunately, when Ukifune comes to spend a few days with Naka no Kimi, Niou discovers her, too. Immediately after that, Kaoru consummates his union with Ukifune and moves her secretly to the now empty house at Uji, but Niou still manages to track her down and to make love to her himself (chapter 51, “A Drifting Boat”).

  Ukifune is now caught between the two. Kaoru is a far greater lord than she could normally expect to marry even as a junior wife, and her mother is all in favor of him, but Niou excites her much more. Kaoru, who has been building a house for her in the City, announces the date when he will come and fetch her, and the tension mounts as Niou plans to spirit her away first. Unable to choose between them, Ukifune decides to drown herself in the Uji River.

  As chapter 52 (“The Mayfly”) begins, she has disappeared. No body is found, and to keep up appearances the household arranges a quick, false funeral. Kaoru and Niou mourn her. However, she has not drowned after all. Near the beginning of chapter 53 (“Writing Practice”) two monks find her, speechless and weeping, under a tree. They report their discovery to their master, a senior cleric, and the cleric's sister, a nun, looks after her tenderly. She finds that Ukifune is not in a normal state of consciousness and that she is also suffering from total amnesia. Since the whole party has only been passing through Uji on a pilgrimage, the sister takes her home to a place called Ono, where Ukifune's condition remains unchanged for two months until at last the cleric exorcises her. She then recovers some of her memory, but she keeps whatever she remembers to herself. Next she convinces the cleric to ordain her as a nun.

  By the end of chapter 53, a year after Ukifune's supposed death, Kaoru has caught wind of her existence, and in chapter 54 (“The Floating Bridge of Dreams”) he verifies who and where she is. Determined to see her again, he sends her a letter by her young half brother, but she refuses either to acknowledge that the letter is for her or to recognize the boy. In the book's closing lines, the disappointed Kaoru wonders whether someone else (presumably Niou) has been keeping her hidden there for himself.

  This inconclusive ending troubles some readers, and it has been suggested that the author died or was otherwise obliged to leave the tale unfinished. However, the ambiguity may also be intentional.

  The Author

  Murasaki Shikibu was born about 973 into the middle-level aristocracy that supplied provincial governors. She belonged to the vast and, in some other branches, supremely powerful Fujiwara family, but her given name went unrecorded, and Murasaki Shikibu is a nickname. “Shikibu” (“Bureau of Ceremonial”) refers to a post once held by her father, while “Murasaki” is the name of her tale's fictional heroine. Her father, Fujiwara no Tametoki (died 1029), served as governor in the provinces of Harima, Echizen (to which she accompanied him in 996), and Echigo, and he was also a scholar of Chinese. She married in 998 or 999 and was widowed in 1001. Her daughter Katako (or Kenshi), later known as Daini no Sanmi, was probably born in 999 and may have died about 1080. In about 1006 Murasaki Shikibu was called to serve Empress Akiko (or Shōshi), no doubt because of her talent for writing fiction. The last record mentioning her is dated 1013, and she may have died the next year. Apart from The Tale of Genji she left diary fragments (Murasaki Shikibu nikki, much of which describes events at the palace in 1008) and a personal poetry collection (Murasaki Shikibu shū), which was probably compiled after her death.

  Nothing indicates exactly when Murasaki Shikibu began her tale or when she finished it, but her diary suggests that the work as it existed in 1007 or 1008 was hers, and she has been recognized ever since as the author of all fifty-four chapters. However, internal evidence suggests that these chapters were not all written in their present order. The Tale of Genji contains much brilliant writing, but it also leaves an impression of brilliant editing.

  Few readers or scholars have ever doubted Murasaki Shikibu's sole authorship, but the surviving evidence in favor of sole authorship is not that strong. The tale she mentioned in her diary is unlikely to have been the whole work, and she may have continued writing for years after that, perhaps with more or less long gaps, while her outlook shifted with advancing age and her intended audience changed as well. However, it is certain only that something like the present text existed in 1021, when a young girl returned from a distant province to the capital and received a complete copy of Genji from her aunt. In her mature years the Daughter of Takasue (as she is known) wrote an autobiographical memoir (Sarashina nikki) in which she described the joy of reading it. Her “over fifty chapters” suggests the present fifty-four, and she mentions Ukifune, the heroine of the last four. The evidence in favor of sole authorship is therefore suggestive but incomplete.

  A fifteenth-century scholar is the first person known to have suggested that Murasaki Shikibu's daughter, rather than Murasaki Shikibu herself, wrote the last third of the book (chapters 42 to 54). The idea seems then to have been more or less forgotten until the poet Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) proposed it in a new guise. Akiko published two pioneering modern Japanese translations of Genji, and by the time she had finished the second she believed that Murasaki Shikibu had written only chapters 1 to 33. She attributed chapters 34 to 54 to Murasaki Shikibu's daughter. Others have questioned the authorship of chapters 42 to 54 or of chapters 42 to 44, and recent computer analysis has turned up statistically significant discrepancies of style between chapters 45 to 54 and the rest, as well as discrepancies among some of the earlier chapters.

  If Murasaki Shikibu was not the sole author, no known evidence actually points to her daughter; however, Daini no Sanmi, a distinguished poet, is the only plausibly identifiable candidate. Some person or persons could have added new chapters by 1021, as a few people tried to do later on, and might have preferred for various reasons to remain anonymous and leave the credit to the tale's acknowledged originator. The question is unlikely ever to be settled.

  Manuscripts and Texts

  No manuscript of the tale survives from anywhere near Murasaki Shikibu's time. The earliest known textual fragments appear in Genji monogatari emaki, an incomplete set of late-twelfth-century illustratio
ns. By the thirteenth century the text was becoming corrupt, having been copied over and over again, and two scholars set out independently to restore it. One was Minamoto no Mitsuyuki (died 1244), whose work was completed in 1255 by his son Chikayuki (died 1277). Since Mitsuyuki served as Governor of the province of Kawachi, his recension is known as the Kawachi-bon (“Kawachi text”).

  The great poet and man of letters Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241) began a similar project at about the same time. Teika wrote in his diary that his copy had disappeared in the 1190s and that he had therefore begun collecting and collating others. The work was completed in 1225. Four chapters of his so-called Aobyōsbi-bon (“Blue cover text”) survive in his own hand, and his recension, in later copies, has been standard since the fourteenth century. All accessible modern editions are based on the Aobyōsbi-bon line. This translation relies on the authoritatively annotated ones included in three superb compendiums of the Japanese classics: Shin Nihon koten zenshū (published by Shogakukan), Nihon koten shūsei (Shinchosha), and Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei (Iwanami).

  There is also a group of manuscripts, called beppon (“other texts”), apart from the Kawachi-bon and Aobyōshi-bon lines. From the standpoint of the nonspecialist, especially the reader of a translation, there is no striking discrepancy between the Kawachi-bon and Aobyōshi-bon lines, but study of the beppon may yet yield insight into an earlier state of the text.

  The World of the Tale

  Something essential to remember while reading The Tale of Genji is that no one in it is ever alone. A lord or lady lived surrounded by a more or less large staff of women and, just outside, men. The notions of solitude and privacy did not exist. A lady slept within curtains, it is true, but they were only curtains, and any number of gentlewomen slept just outside them on the floor. When a lord went somewhere secretly at night, he might (at some risk to himself) take only two or three attendants with him. If he said something privately to a gentlewoman, he managed to do so in a room already containing a good many of them.