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The Tale of Genji is an episodic novel written in the early eleventh century about the imperial court of Heian-era Japan (794–1185). Lady Murasaki Shikibu was a woman of the court and penned this novel about a world she knew well, one characterized by romantic intrigues and struggles over power and status. Her hero—Prince Genji—embodies many of her culture’s most prized virtues. He is beautiful and cultivated, talented at music, art, dance, and poetry, and equally gifted in the art of seduction. The chapters are organized around adventures, or episodes, in Genji’s life and, although the novel is structured chronologically, many of his seductions occur simultaneously. The first seventeen chapters (of the novel’s fifty-four) are the ones most often translated into English, tracing his path from birth to adulthood, as he seeks to find love, personal expression and purpose.
A beautiful young man, Genji has little problem winning attention from the ladies of the court, nor does his marriage to Lady Aoi prove an impediment to his full enjoyment of female companionship. Marriages in the imperial court were arranged to advance or secure political power and status, rather than romantic love, and often took place in childhood. There was little stigma attached to sexual liaisons and, as the early debate about Genji’s place at court makes clear—children born out of wedlock could inherit political power. These cultural conditions provide the backdrop for Genji’s various exploits, all of which reveal different dimensions of his character as well as the ways that men and women might interact. He is consistently attracted to situations or women who are in some way unavailable and, particularly when he is young, he is willing to pursue them regardless of the repercussions.
The novel charts Genji’s growth as a person. Across the chapters, he comes to appreciate more fully how his actions affect other people. Early in his life, he presents a paradoxical combination of thoughtfulness, as when he pays a visit to his elderly, ailing nurse, and thoughtlessness, when he refuses to accept no as an answer and kidnaps Violet. In the chapters where he pursues Yugaō, the price she pays for his disregard of the Lady of Rojukō is exceptionally steep. He may not be culpable for her death—he does not kill her himself—but he bears responsibility. Similarly, his pursuit of Princess Wistaria puts them both at grave risk. Again, he is not exclusively at fault, but here too he is unwilling to accept a refusal. Thus, the closing chapters of the translation, where Genji visits again with some of the women from his past, provide an important measure of how far he has come. He can accept the role he played in Rojukō’s jealousy, accepting the burden of her daughter’s future. Across the novel, the focus on Genji’s interior life allows unparalleled access to his increasing maturity, measured paradoxically in the ways he experiences guilt and remorse.
Crucial to The Tale of Genji is its intimate portrait of Heian-era court culture. It is a sophisticated, peaceful culture that often comes into contact with others. An ambassador from Korea appears in the first chapter, and characters practice religions that originated elsewhere in the Asian world and write poetry in meter borrowed from China. These external influences enhance, rather than diminish, the imperial court. Devoted to beauty, to nuance, and to a thorough appreciation for various ideas of harmony, the culture of the Heian era is sophisticated and complex. There are elements that might strike readers as odd—as, for example, the practice of blackening the teeth to enhance beauty—but The Tale of Genji itself is shockingly modern in its careful exposition of the title character’s personality.
One element of the novel that warrants attention is its use of poetry. The prose of Murasaki’s world is balanced by the many short poems, or waka, that she includes. Her compositional practice itself thus creates a harmony of form and style, as she uses the poems to document or communicate the characters’ specific emotions and the prose to paint the fuller world in which their emotions make sense. The deft inclusion of natural images, in the book and the poems, likewise shows how similar elements might be written differently, in condensed form as part of the poetic line or across the sprawling canvas provided by a long novel. Murasaki’s vision of her world is generous and withering at the same time. While most translations, this one included, focus on the early years of Genji’s life, the novel in its entirety extends beyond his death (and Violet’s) as it continues to detail what it was like to live in the imperial court of eleventh-century Japan.
