Book Thoughts: The Tale Of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu
Reputedly the first-ever novel, isn't that wild?
I enjoyed this but preferred its arch rival The Pillow Book, if you're only looking to read one seminal Japanese work from 1000 AD make it that one. (At time of writing this I'm less than halfway through Genji and not sure I'll finish, this thing is 70+ hours long).
Heian era Japan is wild, from what these two books have shown me at least. [Author's note: Assume everything I'm about to say has some chance of being true, but is also likely to be based on a misunderstandings, I know incredibly little about this time and place].
Basically: it seems that sexual/social mores at the Heian court were just way more loose and liberal than I ever would have imagined could exist before, say, the 20th Century. Genji is – I'm sorry to say it – an incorrigible fuckboy, he sleeps with (and abandons) both young maidens and married women with abandon, and even though some of the affairs are considered inappropriate and would get both parties in trouble if discovered, it feels like the existence of such affairs is broadly accepted and/or encouraged, the game is just not to get caught.
There are vast numbers of conversations in the book that could 100% take place in a modern Californian polycule, with Genji berating his primary for the suspicions he assumes she has about his amorous adventures, and which (though I may be anachronizing here) seem to largely involve defensive projection.
At the exact same time, some of the gender norms at the time are extremely restrictive: women hide behind screens when talking to men, and Genji goes to crazy lengths just to get a glimpse of the women he's talking to. And yet with many of them he's also able to sneak behind their screens at night for some sexy-times, but still can't see their faces in daylight, it is truly a realm of contrasts.
The weirdest thing about The Tale is how completely it reads like self-insert fanfiction by a teenage boy: it's about a guy who's really great and handsome, and everyone says how great and handsome he is, and also how great his poems and art and music are, and all the girls want to be with him, and after they get with him they spend the rest of their lives pining for him.
This is weird specifically because it was written by a woman (imperial courtier Murasaki Shikibu).
Eventually I started to wonder if there was some level of irony or reversal I was missing: was this novel an indirect way of dissuading other women from falling for Genji-types?
For a start, the things Genji did that were described as great and wonderful did not generally strike me as particularly great or wonderful, though I may just be myopic due to time and distance. (One definitely-unfair parallel here is that the book is full of poems that the narrator insists are amazing and swoon-worthy, but at least in my translation they all seemed to be variants of "Is the something-flower really all that purple? It has dew underneath it" or "My sleeves are wet [because I am crying so much about you]" – I fully understand that they might be incredible Japanese, and if you understand the references in them, but it's funny to experience in English).
Meanwhile, all of Genji's bad behaviours are described relatively sympathetically, but strike me as really very bad. I started to wonder whether, in some way I don't fully grok, the book is meant to bury Genji, not to praise him – perhaps a sly warning to women to be wary of handsome men, who can do literally anything and will be praised by society regardless? (Handsome friends of the blog are welcome to chime in here).
One mistake I think people often make with old books, highlighted by me making this mistake with Genji, is to think "this feels strangely familiar, the past is not such a foreign country after all." I think there are two underlying mistakes here.
First, the ancient text has been pre-processed for you by modern scholars and translators far more than you might realise. In the case of Genji, I found out a very funny version of this after reading: apparently in the original none of the characters have names? According to a redditor (pre-llm era):
In Classical Japanese court prose, one almost never mentions the subject of the verb in a sentence. Instead, the subject has to be inferred from the relative formality of the verb's conjugation, which indicates the rank (and sometimes gender) of the subject of the verb in the social hierarchy. [In Genji], almost all the female character were assigned names by consensus by later scholars.
Amusingly,
Even the Author's name is unknown! Murasaki is the name of a character in the book. The author was Lord Shikibu's daughter, and scholars came to refer to her as 'Murasaki' based on the character in the book she wrote AND MURASAKI THE CHARACTER IS NOT EVEN NAMED MURASAKI IN THE BOOK!!!!!
When the Murasaki character showed up I was like "oh lol Murasaki-The-Author put in a self-insert character Murasaki" but it turns out... possibly no part of that sentence is exactly true?
Secondly, the process by which this book reached your hands is extremely non-random, both in terms of which works get preserved by history and which works you're reading today. I read this book BECAUSE it has a reputation as a relatively fun and accessible read; it's a romance novel with a straightforward plot and some truly delightful Jane Austen-y observations.
Meanwhile, it is only rare freaks like Jehan who read the great but truly difficult works of the past; there's a reason that I picked Genji off my pile and not the roughly-contemporaneous Beowulf, because hwaetever is going on with that thing is far beyond my patience these days.
Anyway, Tale of Genji: lightly recommended I guess? I'm enjoying it, and it's kind of magical that something so old can be so enjoyable, but also I'm not sure it's worth the time I'm putting into it, and now that I've started I've found it hard to stop.