In brief
An emperor loves a woman of too low a rank, the court hates her for it, and she dies, leaving a small son so beautiful that people call him “Hikaru Genji or Genji the Shining One” (Kiritsubo). The rest is that son’s life and what comes after it: fifty-four chapters and some seventy years, written in Japanese by a lady-in-waiting at the Heian court about the year 1010. It is often called the world’s first novel. That claim is arguable, but there is no doubt about what it does: it follows people as they age, remember, repeat themselves and regret, at a psychological depth rare in prose fiction of any period.
It looks at first like a catalogue of love affairs. It is closer to a long, unhurried study of how much harm can be done by an attractive man who means no harm, in a society where the women he visits can do very little except wait.
The argument
Murasaki has no thesis, but she has one pattern and repeats it until it becomes an argument. As a boy Genji loses a mother he cannot remember. He is told that his father’s new consort, Fujitsubo, is “very like” her (Kiritsubo), and he falls in love with her. He fathers a son on her in secret, and the child is raised as the Emperor’s (The Festival of Red Leaves). Unable to have Fujitsubo, he finds her ten-year-old niece, takes her home and brings her up to resemble his ideal (Murasaki). Love in this book is mostly substitution, and it passes down the generations: long after Genji’s death, the last heroine is valued because she resembles a dead woman.
The second half of the pattern is that the wrong comes back. Late in life Genji marries a young princess, Nyosan, and a young man, Kashiwagi, seduces her. Genji finds the letter that proves it and understands that the boy who will be brought up as his is not his. Then comes the book’s great moment of recognition: “Suddenly it occurred to Genji to ask himself whether perhaps his father, the Old Emperor, had not been in just the same fix” (Wakana, Part II). No god punishes him. He simply lives long enough to stand where he made his father stand.
Behind this lies a view of time. Japanese critics since Motoori Norinaga in the eighteenth century have taken mono no aware as the book’s central idea: the pathos of things, a sensitivity to beauty because it is passing. The Buddhism of the period supplies the frame, in which attachment binds us and the proper end is to leave the world. Nearly everyone in the novel wants to take vows. Few of the men manage it.
The shape of the book
Readers usually divide it into three parts. The first runs from Genji’s birth to his height. His early affairs include Utsusemi, who slips away leaving only a scarf, like “the dainty husk which the cicada sheds” (Utsusemi); Yūgao, who dies in a deserted house, taken by a spirit (Yūgao); and his wife Aoi, who dies after childbirth, possessed by the ‘living spirit’ of his older mistress, Lady Rokujō (Aoi). An imprudent affair with a rival’s daughter brings on exile at Suma, the book’s quiet centre. Recalled, he rises to supreme power, builds a great palace with a garden for each season, and in chapter 33 is raised to a rank close to an emperor’s.
The second part is short and devastating. It opens with Wakana, the longest chapter pair in the book, in which Genji at about forty accepts the Third Princess out of vanity and obligation. Murasaki, who has never had a wife’s formal rank, understands what it means for her and falls gravely ill. Rokujō, long dead, speaks through a medium and calls Genji “heartless, dishonest” (Wakana, Part II). Murasaki dies without being allowed to become a nun, as she has begged. In Mirage, Genji spends a year in grief, has her letters from Suma destroyed, and prepares to leave the world. The ink, he sees, is “as fresh as on the day when they were written”. His death is not narrated at all.
The third part moves on. Thirteen chapters follow his supposed son Kaoru, who suspects his birth and is morbidly scrupulous, and his grandson Niou, who is not scrupulous at all. Most of it is set at Uji, a misty place of river and Buddhist retreat south of the capital. Kaoru loves one princess there who refuses to marry and starves herself; he and Niou then pull apart Ukifune, her half-sister and look-alike, who tries to drown herself, is rescued by a bishop and becomes a nun. When Kaoru sends her young brother with a letter, she will not admit who she is. The book ends there, with Kaoru guessing wrongly about why. Few books of this scale end so far from their hero, or refuse a conclusion so quietly.
The voice
The narrator presents herself as a woman of the court passing on what she knows, and she gossips. Waley’s opening keeps the shrug: “At the Court of an Emperor (he lived it matters not when)”. Elsewhere she excuses herself for telling Genji’s secrets: she would not recount them, “did I not know that if you found I had omitted anything you would at once ask why” (Yūgao). She skips what bores her and says so, and she hints at more than she states. The effect is intimacy, and it lets her judge Genji without quite condemning him.
Prose alternates with poetry. The tale holds nearly eight hundred waka, which is how these people courted, apologised and mourned. No character has a personal name. They are known by rank or by a poem or place connected with them, so that Murasaki, Yūgao and the rest are titles given by readers, and the same figure can change title as her life moves on.
The book also contains its own defence. In The Glow-Worm Genji teases a girl for reading romances, then argues that “history-books such as the Chronicles of Japan show us only one small corner of life”, and that a story comes from experience that “has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart”. It is “no part of the story-teller’s craft to describe only what is good or beautiful”. This is among the earliest theories of the novel anywhere, and it is put in the mouth of a man trying to seduce his adopted daughter.
The court
The world is tiny: a few thousand people in Heian-kyō, modern Kyoto, counted as society, and the novel rarely looks beyond them. Power lay with the Fujiwara regents, who ruled by marrying daughters to emperors and acting for their grandsons, and so every birth in the book is political. A consort’s standing depended on her father, which is why Genji’s mother could be hounded to death and why, in a shrewd piece of statecraft, the Emperor makes the boy a commoner with the surname Genji, to keep him out of the succession. It is why the faction of Kōkiden, his father’s first consort, can drive him into exile, and why the daughter he has by the Akashi lady is taken from her mother to be raised by Murasaki for the throne.
Women lived behind blinds and screens, seen by almost no one but family and maids; men visited at night and left at dawn. A man could have several wives, and a woman’s security depended on his continuing to come. This is a woman’s account from inside that arrangement, merciless in the politest possible tone. The rainy-night talk (The Broom-Tree), in which young men rank women like goods, is comedy that gets less funny on rereading. Lady Suyetsumuhana, the red-nosed princess Genji mocks (The Saffron-Flower), turns up years later in a ruined house still waiting for him.
The people
Genji
He is talented at everything, moved by everything, and genuinely kind: he goes on supporting women other men would drop. He also abducts a child, forces himself on women who have refused him and often persuades himself that he is the injured party. Murasaki never says that he is bad. She lets us watch him and draws the line through what his women suffer.
Murasaki
The heroine whose name has attached itself to the author is the book’s moral centre, raised and shaped by a man who then fails her. Her mother’s low rank means she never becomes his principal wife, and her childlessness leaves her with nothing of her own. She adopts the daughter of a rival and loves her. Her last poem asks whether the dewdrop on “the wind-swept grasses of the heath” can hope “to build a safe abode” (The Law).
Lady Rokujō
The most frightening person in the book is a cultured widow who is humiliated in public when Aoi’s servants push her carriage aside at a festival, and who then finds, with horror, a “smell of mustard-seed incense” in her own clothes and hair: the incense used at exorcisms, and proof that her spirit has been attacking Aoi while she sleeps (Aoi). She does not know she is doing it, and the book never lets her become a monster.
Kaoru and Ukifune
Kaoru, named for the fragrance of his body, is Genji with the charm removed and the scruples left in. Ukifune, whose name means a boat set adrift, is the book’s last surprise: a nobody treated as a substitute by everyone, who finally says no to all of them.
How it was made
We do not know her real name. “Murasaki” comes from the heroine and “Shikibu” from a post her father held. She was born into a minor branch of the Fujiwara around the 970s; her father, Tametoki, was a scholar and provincial governor. Her diary says she picked up Chinese listening to her brother’s lessons, and that her father wished she had been a boy. She married in about 998 and was widowed around 1001, and she probably began the tale then. By about 1006 she was serving Empress Shōshi, daughter of the all-powerful Fujiwara no Michinaga, and the book made her name at court. Her diary records the poet Kintō calling for her as “Murasaki” in 1008, and Emperor Ichijō remarking, on hearing it read, that she must know the Chronicles of Japan, which earned her a mocking nickname.
She wrote in kana, the Japanese script then thought fit for women and fiction, while men wrote serious prose in Chinese; the status of the script is part of why the book could be so free. She seems to have circulated it in parts, and we do not know in what order. Some scholars, and Yosano Akiko among earlier readers, have doubted that she wrote all of the Uji chapters. No autograph survives. By about 1021 the girl who wrote the Sarashina Diary could be given the whole work and read it through in a passion. The text we read comes mainly from the edition by the poet Fujiwara no Teika, two centuries later.
Readers and critics
It was a classic almost at once. Poets were told they had to know it; by the twelfth century it had its own commentaries and the illustrated scrolls, among Japan’s oldest surviving narrative paintings. Medieval moralists worried that its author had gone to hell for writing lies, and Confucian scholars in the Edo period read it as a warning. In the late eighteenth century Motoori Norinaga swept all that aside: the book, he argued, should not be read for moral lessons at all, but for its feeling for the pathos of things.
Modern Japan made it a national monument and sometimes an embarrassment: Tanizaki’s first modern version (1939–41) had to leave out Genji’s affair with Fujitsubo. Kawabata Yasunari named it the summit of Japanese literature in his 1968 Nobel lecture. In the West it barely existed until Arthur Waley published his six volumes from 1925 to 1933. Virginia Woolf reviewed the first in Vogue. Later critics, Norma Field among them, have turned from Genji to the women, and read the third part as a reversal of what the first appeared to celebrate.
Afterlives
Much of Japanese art has drawn on it. Noh made several plays from it, including Aoi no Ue, which Mishima rewrote for the modern stage. Saikaku’s Life of an Amorous Man (1682) parodied it in fifty-four chapters, and Ryūtei Tanehiko’s Fake Murasaki, Rustic Genji moved it to a shogun’s court. Yosano Akiko, Tanizaki and Setouchi Jakuchō all put it in modern Japanese. In 1951 Kōzaburō Yoshimura filmed it, and Yamato Waki’s manga Asakiyumemishi gave it to a generation of readers. A scene from the scrolls and a portrait of the author are on the 2,000-yen note. Classics Day, 1 November, marks that 1008 diary entry.
How to read it
- Know what you are holding. Waley’s version, quoted here because it is free, is beautiful and very free: he cuts poems, adds phrases and leaves out one chapter (38). Royall Tyler’s (2001) stays closest to the original’s manner, and Edward Seidensticker’s (1976) is the plainest. Only Waley’s first four volumes are on Project Gutenberg, which take the story to Genji’s last year.
- Forgive chapter one. Waley himself says “This chapter should be read with indulgence”. The novel starts properly with the rainy night.
- Keep the family tree open. Without personal names, it is easy to lose people. Waley’s lists at the head of each volume help.
- Do not stop at Genji’s death. Many readers do, and they miss the strangest and most modern part.
Read next
- The Diary of Lady Murasaki. The author in her own voice: observant, sharp about colleagues, unhappy at court.
- Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book (c. 1002). The same world seen a few years earlier by the wit whom Murasaki’s diary disparages, in lists and brief notes.
- The Sarashina Diary (c. 1060). A woman’s memoir of a life spent wishing to be in Genji, and an early record of a reader’s obsession.
- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913–27). The European book most often set beside it for its treatment of time and memory.
- Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, The Makioka Sisters (1943–48). A modern Japanese novel written by a translator of Genji, in its long, seasonal rhythm.