Rewriting Murasaki: Vernacular Translation and the Reception of Genji Monogatari during the Tokugawa Period

A major shift in readership occurred during the Tokugawa period as certain works from the sinological and classical Japanese traditions that had previously been accessible only to aristocratic, monastic, or elite warrior circles became available for the first time to townspeople, lower-ranking samurai, and wealthy peasants. Many new readers had low levels of literacy, and various publications attempted to provide these audiences with easier access to difficult texts in the form of simple commentaries, digests, and illustrated editions. There were also translations that incorporated vocabulary and conventions from the contemporary written and spoken vernaculars. Genji monogatari in particular was rewritten numerous times in this way. Though the exact number depends on how wide the net is cast, there are at least ten works extant from the beginning of the eighteenth century onward that may be described as translations similar to the close and thorough kind more usually associated with the modern period. Few studies to date have treated the phenomenon of early modern Genji translation since Fujita Tokutarō collated his comprehensive bibliography of Genji-related texts in 1932.¹ Today, many of these works are unavailable in reprint or facsimile, and the prevailing account of the history of Genji translation in Japan places its starting point in 1912, with the publication of Yosano Akiko’s modern Japanese version.²

The present article traces the beginnings of a new way of engaging with Genji in the early modern period: the emergence of a now-neglected body of translations that did not greatly alter the Genji storyline and that exchanged the Heian Japanese of Genji for written forms of Tokugawa language with a theretofore unseen degree of narrative richness. There had been abridged, digest translations of Genji for centuries as well as commentaries that involved elements of intralingual rewording, but it was not until the eighteenth century that longer, more detailed transpositions appeared.³ My discussion will center on the first few of these extensive Genji translations, which were published within a twenty-year period in the first half of the eighteenth century: (1) Fūryū Genji monogatari (An Elegant Tale of Genji, 1703), by Miyako no Nishiki (pen name of Shishido Kōfū , 1675–?); (2) a translation published in four installments by Okumura Masanobu (1686–1764) between 1707 and 1710; and (3) Shibun ama no saezuri (Murasaki’s Writings in the Gibberish of Fisherfolk, 1723), by Taga Hanshichi (dates unknown).⁴ For the titles of the Okumura translations, see figure 1. Although these works are similar in that they all follow the source text in broad outline and include illustrations, they display varying degrees of adaptation and transculturation; approaches range from the high degree of closeness or “faithfulness” that a reader might expect of a “translation” today to what some translation studies scholars would call “target-text-oriented” translation, whereby the norms of the target language and culture take precedence.⁵ What they share is a concern with making a version of Genji available in more widely used and easily understood language.

But why was this kind of translation necessary, when commentaries had previously sufficed and when there were already numerous digest and illustrated editions available? Though we may call them translations now, how did the translators themselves conceive of what they were doing? In the pages that follow I will address these questions with reference to the approaches of the first three early modern translators of Genji and then explore what their discussions of translation reveal about the reception of classics in the early modern period.

Figure 1.

Genji translations by Okumura Masanobu.

Accessing the Classics

First it is necessary to outline in more detail the circumstances that gave rise to these early modern vernacular translations of Genji. As mentioned above, a new wave of access to classical texts—in the form of commentaries, digests, and illustrated editions—was made possible in the Tokugawa period by the burgeoning print industry and by increased rates of literacy.⁶ Significantly, women were among the newly literate from the...