Dying in Two Dimensions: Genji emaki and the Wages of Depth Perception

The Gotō Museum’s “Yomigaeru Genji monogatari emaki” exhibit of 2005–6 was an ambitious attempt to “resurrect” (yomigaeru) the museum’s legendary illustrated handscrolls of The Tale of Genji (the Genji monogatari emaki) by analyzing the flaking, faded twelfth-century scrolls scientifically and having artists paint a series of new, more polished and more vibrant but ostensibly “faithful” copies to be exhibited alongside the originals. In its apparent attempt to make the scrolls more accessible and appealing to modern audiences, the exhibit was nothing less than an attempt to produce a contemporary viewing public in relation to art of the Heian period (794–1185).¹ But such a desire to consolidate the audience’s impressions of the artwork does away with facets of the scrolls that might endanger the construction of a unified viewership. In particular, the refabrication of the scrolls strategically excludes the narrative calligraphic kotobagaki sections that in fact compose the lion’s share of the extant Genji scrolls, effectively severing an intimate bond between narrative text and narrative image. Even more significantly, the redacted reproduction fails to account for the calligraphic performance of dying that figures so prominently in the climatic deathbed scenes of the Tale of Genji protagonists Kashiwagi and Murasaki no Ue. In this article, I would like to consider some of the potential implications of this omission. My primary goal will be to think through the spatial and temporal dimensions of artistic representations of death in relation to the composition—and decomposition—of the Genji emaki. Specifically, I want to examine some of the consequences involved in “resurrecting” the twelfth-century scrolls within the context of the twenty-first-century gallery in order to critique a contemporary insistence on the flatness of images and the displacement of text that results.

Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (1008, Genji monogatari) is commonly regarded as the highest achievement within the canon of Japanese literature and stands as a powerful icon of Japanese cultural identity. Genji comprises fifty-four chapters and centers primarily on the affairs of the title character, a preternaturally talented courtier of the Heian period. It holds the reputation of being a paragon of classical literature and can be said to symbolize a peak of Japanese cultural achievement in the premodern era. The Genji monogatari emaki (ca. 1140, Illustrated handscrolls of The Tale of Genji), which represent the oldest surviving copy of the Genji text, have thus by association earned the status of a sacred relic to be enshrined and “resurrected” in order to preserve or renew a sense of national pride. The “Yomigaeru” exhibition works to bolster this sentiment not by restoring the bleak, deteriorated paintings but by replacing them with entirely new, dazzling, repainted versions.

The Genji monogatari emaki are a set of illustrated handscrolls composed in an alternating text and painting format in which the Genji scenes deemed most compelling by five groups of artists were excerpted from the narrative and rendered in incredibly lavish, deeply interrelated, calligraphic and pictorial forms. Most of the scroll sections have been lost, but it is thought that at one time, sections that corresponded to each of The Tale of Genji’s fifty-four chapters existed. Each scroll section consists of a painted interpretation of one scene from a particular chapter from Genji. Each of these is preceded by a calligraphic preface, or “kotobagaki,” excerpted from the Genji narrative that relates the scene depicted in the painting. These kotobagaki were done in five different hands, with the most skilled calligrapher writing for the most famous scenes.² Sponsored by competing aristocrats, groups of artists worked closely as ensembles to produce the scrolls in an elaborate “built-picture,” or “tsukurie,” system of artistic production, based on the layering of planes of ink and color to build up the painting in distinct stages. A head artist would see to the shitagaki or “under-sketch” for each scene (basically an outline of characters and architectural shapes), and then other painters proceeded to successively overlay the pigments (e.g. crushed-shell white, malachite green, ferrous red, etc.).³ There...