Masamune Hakuchō Reads Genji: A Translation of “Genji Monogatari: Hon’yaku to Gensaku”

It’s hard not to have respect for translation. It can bring an original that’s practically dead back to life.”

—From Masamune Hakuchō’s “Eiyaku ‘Genji monogatari’”¹

Masamune Hakuchō (1879–1962) seems a particularly unlikely candidate to have written some of the most thought-provoking and historically significant essays of the twentieth century on the subject of Genji monogatari —the eleventh-century classic that has been known in English as The Tale of Genji ever since Arthur Waley (1889–1966) published his six-volume translation under that title from 1925 to 1933.² Hakuchō is remembered to literary historians as a figure slightly removed from the center of the Japanese Naturalist movement; as the author of works with titles such as “Jin’ai” (Dust, 1907), “Doko e” (Where To?, 1908), and “Ushibeya no nioi” (The Stench of the Cowshed, 1916); and as one of the most important literary critics of the generation before Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), who is often deemed, somewhat misleadingly, to have first established literary criticism in its own right in Japan. Introduced to Christianity and European literature in his youth by the charismatic Christian evangelist Uchimura Kanzō (1861–1930), Hakuchō soon drifted away from religion but remained a lifelong devotee of translated fiction, which he read in both Japanese and English. His profound engagement with foreign and especially Western literature came to be regarded, along with a tendency toward skepticism and nihilism, as one of his defining characteristics. The novelist and translator Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965) echoed this general impression when he observed in his 1932 essay “Masamune Hakuchō-shi no hihyō o yonde” (On Reading Mr. Masamune Hakuchō’s Criticism) that “there can’t be many authors over the age of forty writing today who are as skeptical of the value of their motherland’s traditions and as partial to the literature of the West as Mr. Hakuchō.”³ Not surprisingly, Hakuchō’s most celebrated work of literary criticism is “Dante ni tsuite” (On Dante, 1927), in which he describes Dante as “one of the writers of the West who is least likely to be appreciated in Japan” and explores his own enduring fascination with The Divine Comedy, setting it in opposition to what he saw as modern Japanese fiction’s focus on the quotidian and the personal.⁴

Despite his notoriety as a self-described “worshipper of the West,” Hakuchō was also broadly familiar with premodern Japanese and Chinese literature, especially with popular works first published in Japan toward the end of the early modern period, which enjoyed a revival from the early 1880s as Hakubunkan and other prominent Meiji publishing houses and even newspapers began issuing movable-type reprints.⁵ As a child, Hakuchō was an avid reader of Japanese rewritings of Chinese works such as Shuihu zhuan (Jp. Suikoden, Water Margin) and Sanguozhi (Jp. Sangokushi, Romance of the Three Kingdoms), both of which circulated in various forms in the late Edo period. As for Japanese fiction, he was particularly fond of the yomihon (reading books) of Kyokutei [Takizawa ] Bakin (1767–1848), whom he once identified as “the greatest person in Japan” on a quiz in elementary school. He grew up reading this author’s representative works, including Nansō Satomi hakkenden (The Chronicle of the Eight Dogs of the Nansō Satomi Clan, 1814–1842), Chinsetsu yumiharizuki (The Marvelous Story of the Drawn-Bow Moon, 1807–1811), Kinsesetsu bishōnenroku (A Modern Story: A Record of Handsome Young Men, 1829–1834), and Shunkan sōzu shima monogatari (An Island Tale of the Priest Shunkan, 1808).⁶ The familiar image of Hakuchō as a Naturalist writer steeped in Western literature is thus only partially accurate.

And in truth, Hakuchō’s series of four essays about Genji monogatari can be counted among the most provocative and important in modern times. First published between 1926 and 1951, they are “Koten o yonde” (On Reading the Classics, 1926), “Eiyaku ‘Genji monogatari’” (An English Translation of Genji monogatari, 1933), “Futatabi eiyaku ‘Genji monogatari’ ni tsukite” (Further Thoughts on Genji monogatari’s English Translation, 1933...