What I am Reading : The Tale of Genji / Genji Monogatari !

Surely there is a mutual agreement that course readings are more often than not quite dull, so when I finally got my hands on the Tale of Genji for an Asian studies course, I was appalled by the thickness of the novel. It is a translation of a story written ten centuries ago in the eleventh century, making the language and culture unimaginable: this has been a fairly challenging read. (Because of its thickness and small text, my closest friends have heard me endlessly reference it as 'the brick' implying the book's literal resemblance to a brick and the difficulty of the literature.) Luckily, class lectures have been wonderful at supplementing media and vasts amount of background information to ensure that we have some insight into the time period of Genji. I marvel at how a novel can transcend so many centuries, and I admit that I have become very curious about aristocracy during the Heian period in Japan.

Reading from the perspective of a twenty-first century female (and born in Canada for that matter), I can assure you the treatment of women in the Tale of Genji certainly will not make it a pleasant or leisurely tale. But it is captivating nonetheless, even as a translation. It was written in 54 separate books, or installments, which is sadly not incredibly suggestive of how they are pieced together. Not to mention that the number of characters introduced is endless, there must be hundreds. The lack of record for women in general, and the fact that they are not named for themselves but by location or the men they are associated with, makes tracking the characters (not to mention the true name of our author) nearly impossible. Even the men are referred to by their rank in court, which is ever changing and rising, so an overall understanding of who is being referred to might give you a headache (props to the translators of Genji). The background information required to understand Genji and the Heian period would take so long to cover that I likely will have to sit here and write a novel of my own to explain it (and there probably are novels that do just that, now that I think about it, there are even Genji scholars who devote their careers to studying the long monogatari... but this site does a quick enough summary if anyone is interested: click). We have already spent more than a month focusing on it in class and are barely half way through the chapters.

This week we began watching Genji Monogatari: Sennen no Nazo (Tale of Genji: A Thousand Year Enigma), a film released in 2011 about the monogatari and Murasaki Shikibu (a nickname for our author with what little that we know about her) plays a role in it as well. I have discovered the discrepancy between reading the sexual violence and violation that befall women and watching it happen as censored as possible in a film. More than half the novel is left out of the film (naturally, it is a whole 54 chapters long with over a hundred characters) but I quite like this article, it captures the film really well: click. While Genji is not represented nearly the same way and they make some major plot changes, it is still really enjoyable (though not entirely accurate which is no surprise if they have to cut out so many chapters and still appeal to a twenty-first century audience). It can get a little confusing at times because we are constantly switching between Murasaki Shikibu's world and the fictional one she is creating.

At chapter twenty-six in the brick, I am still finding that understanding all of the literature rivals trying to understand Shakespeare's plays without Sparknotes haha. Thankfully the Royall Tyler translation of the text also provides a large number of foot notes to bridge the gap between the text and our modern world. I am thoroughly enjoying it and if anyone is looking for a challenge, oooh this would be the one :)



First image retrieved from: [click]
Second image retrieved from: [click]
Third image retrieved from: [click]