Unreal Houses: Character, Gender, and Genealogy in the by Edith Sarra (review)

It is always remarkable when a study brings a truly fresh approach to a work as studied as Genji monogatari, but Edith Sarra's Unreal Houses: Character, Gender, and Genealogy in the Tale of Genji does just that. By exploring "how the Tale of Genji constructs and is constructed by storied houses" (p. 2), Sarra traces ways the narrative gives shape to and is shaped by the grand houses being built, rebuilt, and reimaged over the course of the work, as well as "the tale's contribution to the fabrication and critique of mid-Heian social and architectural space" (p. 2). Firmly grounded in Genji scholarship, Unreal Houses proposes a powerful interpretive framework for addressing the Genji and Heian narrative more broadly.

Unreal Houses' nuanced and thoughtful interpretations of housebuilding and house-holding schemes in the Genji are addressed through the narrative trajectories of three characters, one from each of the Genji's three generations: Genji, Tamakazura, and Kaoru. Vital to this consideration are the marriage plot central to Heian-era fiction (and other writing); the range of possible plots and hero and heroine types that plot can engender; and the ways the Genji complicates these schemas. These topics, as well as Genji's mansions as metaphors for his erotic and political aspirations, long have been central to Genji studies. Unreal Houses, however, shifts attention to how mansions structure space and time (both seasonal and generational) and in so doing shape the narrative. Sarra explores how the aristocratic mansion—and particularly the Rokujōin—works "as a figure of semiotic complexity that is both conspicuous and self-reflexive. … It reconstrues relationships among the women it shelters, and to the extent that it prompts, inhibits, or enhances the doings of its occupants, it is presented as exerting its own agency" (p. 93). In viewing the Genji through the lens of architectural agency, Sarra brings provocative close readings to individual characters, particularly the tale's heroines. She also proposes an interpretive framework that reveals how mansions, mirroring the narrative act itself, simultaneously contain and lay bare the often devastating stresses of polygynous marriage—the lingering ghosts of past generations, the anxiety of wives in unsteady relationships to each other, and the promise of children, actual or longed for.

Unreal Houses is organized into an introduction, seven chapters, and an epilogue. The first of the seven chapters outlines the marriage practices and the architectural spaces in which men and women pursue erotic and procreative business. In addition to describing the variety of house-holding arrangements associated with mid-Heian period aristocratic marriage (in which duolocal, uxorilocal, virilocal, and neolocal possibilities existed simultaneously), Sarra draws attention to the contrasting situations of life in the rear palace, with its crowd of consorts and ladies in service to the emperor living side-by-side and in competition, and the experience of the housebound woman, waiting in her own home for a visit from her husband. Sarra notes both the unease engendered by these circumstances and the possibility for architectural substitution of one for the other: the rear palace occupied the same amount of space as well as the physical boundedness of an aristocratic mansion, leaving room for an ambitious hero to conceive of an architectural structure to contain something like both.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on just such ambition in the form of the central hero, Genji, and his series of house-building projects: the restoration of the Nijōin he inherited from his mother and the installation of Murasaki there; the expansion represented by the Nijō Tōin, built to house Hanachirusato and the Akashi Lady, ultimately unsuccessfully; and finally the Rokujōin, where he assembles the household of multiple wives and a combination of real and foster lineages he has, through persuasion of his women, willed into existence. These two chapters provide a nuanced reading of Genji's early sexual relationships and his youthful attempts at building a...