The Tale of Genji
Dec. 17th, 2020 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ndrosenI have been reading The Tale of Genji for months, a few pages at a time when not occupied with other books and magazines, and I am now more than halfway through it, at six hundred pages. It can be difficult to keep the characters straight, partly because someone can be referred to, not by name, but by his current title, something like “the Consultant Captain,” or the lady of a certain wing of the house. Still, I’m not reading it because it is easy and in harmony with current sensibilities, but because it gives a window, even in a translation which may not be able to fully convey the Old Japanese original, a portrait of the beliefs, interests, manners, and ambitions of courtiers and their ladies in the Japan of a thousand years ago. It contains some timeless and cross-cultural observations on human behavior as well; not for nothing is it called the world’s first psychological novel.
It is interesting to speculate on what a companion novel might have been like, written by a lower class contemporary of Lady Murasaki Shikibu, and portraying some of the peasants and salt burners whose labors made possible the lives of leisured esthetes like Genji, but such a book probably could not have been written. Lady Murasaki’s peasant sixth cousin would not likely have been literate, and would have possessed neither leisure to write nor a supply of affordable paper.
It is interesting to speculate on what a companion novel might have been like, written by a lower class contemporary of Lady Murasaki Shikibu, and portraying some of the peasants and salt burners whose labors made possible the lives of leisured esthetes like Genji, but such a book probably could not have been written. Lady Murasaki’s peasant sixth cousin would not likely have been literate, and would have possessed neither leisure to write nor a supply of affordable paper.
