Reading the Tale of Genji: Its Picture Scrolls, Texts and Romance (review)

The six articles that comprise this interdisciplinary anthology range from concrete to meditative and from persuasive to perplexing, but they are all worth reading. The collection is nicely balanced, with two essays on the artistry of Genji monogatari emaki (hereafter The Genji Scrolls), two essays on Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji) as literary text, and two essays that take a comparative literature approach. These scholars have put new critical theories to good use and found fresh ways to approach and appreciate a truly time-honored text.

Chapter 1, “Scripting the Moribund: “The Genji Scrolls’ Aesthetics of Decomposition,” by Reginald Jackson, is an extremely clear and detailed analysis of how the calligraphy of The Genji Scrolls occasionally embodies its content. The calligraphy in scenes that describe the illnesses of Kashiwagi and Murasaki becomes disordered and hard to read, as if the diseases described have infected the calligrapher as well as the characters. Jackson describes line density, line height, ink thickness, legibility, and the distribution of sprinklings of cut gold or silver foil, silver hairs, and silver dust to argue that the calligrapher intended a “prioritization of visual impact over semantic transmission” (p. 24). He also analyzes the dynamics of the painting that shows Murasaki dying to explain how architectural and textual meaning coincide (p. 26). Jackson draws upon interesting work on “representations of pain” by Elaine Scarry (pp. 28–29) to clinch his argument that “illness does violence to language, and, by extension, to written and pictorial representations” (p. 4). The “wounded calligraphy” of these sections of The Genji Scrolls is an effective “aestheticized depiction of the characters’ ailing situations as it proffers before our eyes the symbolic scripted bodies of the ill” (p. 29). The article is accompanied by numerous (although redundant and oddly ordered) gorgeous illustrations, which allow readers to see exactly what Jackson is talking about.

In chapter 2, “The Narration of Tales, the Narration of Paintings,” Sano Midori focuses on the scene of Murasaki’s last moments in “Minori” to reflect upon issues of time (specifically, the “now” of the narrative) and perspective in The Genji Scrolls. She identifies three perspectives: a bird’s-eye view, a high-angle view (in which the viewer is close to the figures in the painting), and an interior perspective, which is the view of the figures within the painting. Next Sano considers the same scene as depicted in Asaki yume mishi, the manga adaptation of The Tale of Genji. Sano describes how the shifts in perspective found in The Genji Scrolls within a single frame are accomplished in the manga through a relatively lengthy sequence of scenes. Sano also considers questions of perspective in terms of the role of ladies-in-waiting. The compositions of the paintings of scenes from “Yugiri” (Evening mist) and “Yadorigi” (The ivy), for example, reflect the original text in presenting ladies-in-waiting as nearby observers/internal narrators with only limited reliability (p. 49). Sano is more interested, however, in understanding how an omniscient viewpoint is created by readers, not a narrator. She argues that the viewer of fragments of the original Genji text excerpted in The Genji Scrolls remembers the original Genji as he or she peruses the Scrolls and recreates a new version of the narrative with each viewing, a version that is unique to each reader, each time.

Chapter 3 is the late Richard Okada’s provocative essay, “Displacements of Conquest, or Exile, The Tale of Genji, and Post-Cold War Learning.” Okada discusses both the politics of reading the text as a literary classic and the politics within the text. He argues that focusing on the aesthetic dimensions of the text was part of a politically motivated effort (even if unconsciously so) to redefine Japan as a peace-loving nation after the massive violence of the Pacific War. Okada identifies appointment to governor-ships as “bureaucratically sanctioned exile” (p...