Appraising Genji: Literary Criticism and Cultural Anxiety in the Age of the Last Samurai (review)

Holding this book on numerous visits to university buildings, I noticed many passersby craning their necks to get a better look at the cover. Small surprise, since it carries the haunting and beautiful image of the ghost of Yūgao in The Tale of Genji, from the 1886 print series Tsuki hyakushi (One hundred aspects of the moon) by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–92). The delicate tendrils of the eponymous plant even find their way onto the title page inside. Here, the spray partly glimpsed through her ghostly robes in the print substitutes for that colon so nearly ubiquitous now in titles of academic monogaphs and articles. This attractive piece of book design (uncredited) is clearly making a point.

But isn't it beautiful yet slightly anachronistic, using an image of a quintessentially Meiji-era artist to advertise a monograph on an Edo-period commentary on a Heian-era text? The commentary in question is the Genji monogatari hyōshaku (Appraisal of Genji), published incomplete in two installments of 1853 and 1861 by Hagiwara Hiromichi (1815–63). Caddeau's introduction stresses that the commentary draws significantly on earlier Japanese and Chinese analytical techniques and "stands at the apex of Edo-period scholarship on Genji," yet he notes "its absence from much of the discourse on Genji for the last century," and especially that it "did not receive widespread recognition in the Meiji period" (pp. 6–7). The work might thus seem to look resolutely backward over premodern traditions as a critical summa, rather than forward to modernity and beyond, though he promises to show the commentary as highly revelatory of the extended Zeitgeist nevertheless.

Initial qualms become still more importunate as chapter one opens with half a dozen pages on modern Genji-themed productions: the Takarazuka Revue's 2000 Myūjikaru Genji monogatari, Yoshimura Kōsaburō's 1953 film, and manga of the 1990s and 2000s. Is this another example of relentless presentism, obediently marketing the premodern through the prism of modernity and contemporary culture? Fortunately not. Most of this book, chapters two through five, focuses on the life of Hiromichi and this, his major work, especially the sources of his analytical tools and how he developed and applied them. The framing chapters, one and six, make a serious attempt, though not always wholly successful, to place this work in the much larger context of the vicissitudes of Genji reception under a broad range of cultural influences. This reception history and presentation of the central text is an important scholarly contribution, much of which will indeed be valued by readers interested in a lengthy span of cultural history.

This book comes at the intersection of two subfields of English-language literary criticism of premodern Japanese texts emerging over the last two to three decades, signifying a new stage in the maturity of the field as a whole: reception history based on premodern commentaries, and reception history of The Tale of Genji drawing on other premodern texts including adaptive and imitative ones. One might suggest a three-stage trajectory (with much overlap of stages) beginning primarily with late-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century translations of the most canonical texts. In the second phase, from the mid-twentieth century, although some canonically central works get retranslated, more canonically peripheral texts are translated; more numerous critical monographs appear using Japanese monographs and articles; and some English-language studies exhibit more independent analysis, inspired by prevailing Western theoretical currents.

A "third wave" makes much more direct use of premodern secondary sources for literary analysis and reception history. Representative examples on Genji reception or commentary include work by Thomas J. Harper from as early as 1971¹ ; an article by Noguchi Takehiko² ; studies by Janet Goff and James McMullen³ ; and from the 1990s and 2000s numerous works on early twentieth-century canon formation, especially the recent monograph by...