The Tale of Genji

Murasaki Shikibu lived at the height of the Fujiwara clan's power, when Fujiwara no Michinaga was the regent in all but name and the most significant political figure of his day; she is believed to have formed the character of Genji partly through her experience of him. The tale was written to entertain the Japanese court of the 11th century, and it may have been written chapter by chapter, as she delivered installments to aristocratic women, the ladies-in-waiting.

In the Heian period monogatari meant prose fiction in the vernacular of the time, thought suitable only for women and children who could not read Chinese, the official language of government and religion. Writing in kanji, the Chinese characters used for more prestigious literature, was a masculine pursuit, and women were generally discreet in using it. Genji is written mostly in kana, specifically hiragana, in a style associated with women's writing, and outside the vocabulary of politics and Buddhism it contains remarkably few Chinese loan words.

Poetry ran through court conversation. Modifying or rephrasing a classic poem to suit the moment was expected behaviour and often carried thinly veiled allusions. The tale's poems are often in the classic tanka form, and because many were well known to its first readers, usually only the first few lines are given, leaving the rest unspoken. Court manners also made it unacceptably familiar to use a person's given name, so almost no character is named.

The first part, chapters 1 to 33, follows the early life and loves of Hikaru Genji, the “Shining Genji”, son of the emperor known to readers as Emperor Kiritsubo and a low-ranking concubine. For political reasons the emperor removes him from the succession, making him a commoner with the surname Minamoto. Genji loves his stepmother, Lady Fujitsubo, who bears him a secret son, Reizei; he kidnaps a ten-year-old girl, Murasaki no Ue, Fujitsubo's niece, raises her to resemble his ideal and later marries her. When an affair with a concubine of the new Emperor Suzaku is exposed, he is exiled to Suma, where he has a daughter, a future Empress, by the Akashi Novice's daughter. Pardoned, he returns to Kyoto, and Reizei, now emperor and aware of his true father, raises him to the highest rank.

The second part, chapters 34 to 41, tells of his decline after the age of 40. He marries the Third Princess, whom his nephew Kashiwagi rapes and who bears Kaoru, legally Genji's son; Murasaki dies, and the blank chapter Kumogakure, “Vanished into the Clouds”, implies Genji's death. After transitional chapters, the Uji chapters, 45 to 54, follow Kaoru and his friend Niou, Genji's grandson, in their rivalry over the daughters of a prince living at Uji. The tale ends abruptly, with Kaoru wondering whether Niou is hiding his former lover from him.

The original manuscript is lost, and how much of the tale Murasaki wrote has been debated for centuries. Her diary refers to the tale and applies the name “Murasaki” to herself in an allusion to its heroine, an entry internal evidence dates to 1008. It is generally accepted that the work was finished in its present form by 1021, when the author of the Sarashina Nikki described acquiring a complete copy of over 50 chapters. Murasaki often went back and edited early manuscripts, introducing discrepancies from earlier copies.

The poet Yosano Akiko believed that Murasaki wrote only chapters 1 to 33 and that the later chapters were by her daughter, Daini no Sanmi. Other scholars have doubted chapters 42 to 54, especially 44, which contains continuity mistakes rare elsewhere, and Royall Tyler reports that computer analysis has found “statistically significant” differences of style between chapters 45 to 54 and the rest. Whether the abrupt ending was intended is also disputed: Arthur Waley believed the work finished, Ivan Morris that later chapters were missing, and Edward Seidensticker that Murasaki had no planned ending and wrote for as long as she could.

When the chapters acquired their titles is not known; early mentions refer to chapter numbers, which may suggest that the titles were added later. Some scholars have posited a lost chapter between the first and the second. The work was made in the orihon or “concertina” style, sheets of paper pasted together and folded alternately one way and the other.

Written in an archaic court language, the tale was difficult to read without specialised study a century after its completion, and annotated and illustrated versions existed as early as the 12th century. Its scenes were painted again and again: the Genji Monogatari Emaki of the 12th century is the earliest extant Japanese picture scroll; Tosa Mitsuoki, who lived from 1617 to 1691, painted complete scrolls closely based on the Heian style; and the tale was a popular theme of ukiyo-e prints in the Edo period. Its chapter names became central to Genjikō, an incense game popular among the nobility.

In the early 20th century the poet Akiko Yosano translated it into modern Japanese, followed by the novelists Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and Fumiko Enchi; such translations made it easier to read but changed some meaning and gave the characters names, and many Japanese readers still use annotated versions. In English, Suematsu Kenchō's partial version of 1882 is considered of poor quality. Arthur Waley's (1925–1933) was eagerly received and is still widely read, though some purists criticised his changes and his free manner. Edward Seidensticker (1976) kept more closely to the original but named most characters; Royall Tyler (2001) kept their titles instead and added extensive notes, and Dennis Washburn's version (2015) was criticised for over-clarifying the text.

According to Ikeda Kikan some 300 later manuscript copies exist, each differing from the others. They fall into three categories. In the 13th century Minamoto no Chikayuki and Fujiwara Teika made two major attempts to edit the differing manuscripts: Chikayuki's Kawachibon, edited from 1236 to 1255, and Teika's Aobyōshibon, whose more conservative edits are thought to better represent the original. Both became the basis of many later copies; the third category, the Beppon, holds all the rest, including older but incomplete manuscripts.

Finds continue. In 2008 a late Kamakura manuscript of the sixth chapter, Suetsumuhana, found in Kyoto, showed that non-Teika manuscripts were being read in that period; the same year Konan Women's University announced a copy of the 32nd chapter, Umegae, dated to between 1240 and 1280, the oldest extant copy of that chapter, which differs from the Aobyōshi manuscripts in at least four places. In 2019 an original copy of the fifth chapter, Wakamurasaki, in Teika's hand was found in Tokyo at the home of the head of the Okochi-Matsudaira clan, one of five original volumes of the Aobyōshibon known to exist.

Of the 12th-century Emaki, believed to have covered all 54 chapters, only 19 illustrations and 65 pages of text survive, estimated at 15% of the whole. The scrolls, National Treasures of Japan, are so fragile that the Tokugawa Art Museum shows them only for around a week each November.

The Tale of Genji is an important work of world literature, noted for its internal consistency, psychological depiction and characterization. Jorge Luis Borges called it a psychological novel written “with an almost miraculous naturalness”, and Yasunari Kawabata, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, called it “the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature”. Its influence on Japanese literature has been compared to that of Philip Sidney's Arcadia on English literature.

It is often called “the first novel”, though there is considerable debate over this: the 7th-century Sanskrit Kādambari and Greek and Roman novels such as Daphnis and Chloe and the Satyricon came earlier, and in Japan the slightly earlier Ochikubo Monogatari has also been proposed. Ivan Morris held that its psychological insight, complexity and unity qualify it as a novel; others find such arguments subjective. Critics have almost consistently described it as the oldest, first or greatest novel in Japanese literature.

It is staple reading in Japanese schools. The Bank of Japan's 2000 yen banknote, issued in Murasaki's honour, carries a scene based on the 12th-century scroll, and because the diary entry of 1 November 1008 is the oldest date for a reference to the tale, 1 November is Japan's official day for celebrating the classics. It has been retold in films from Kōzaburō Yoshimura's of 1951, in at least five manga, among them Waki Yamato's Asaki Yume Mishi (1980), in Takarazuka Revue productions and in an opera by Miki Minoru (2000), and translated into languages from Russian and Italian to Hindi.