Lecture 2003-07-10
"What is the Tale of Genji About?"
Dr. Royall Tyler

The rainy season was still lingering when we met on July 10th for a special lecture, so we were spared the broiling heat of this time last year. The meeting was called to take advantage of a brief visit to Tokyo by the noted translator of Genji, Dr. Royall Tyler, who presented his conception of the theme of the book under the title "What is The Tale of Genji about?" We were happy to have with us on this occasion one of our distinguished members, Dr. Donald Keene, under whom not only Dr. Tyler but also Mrs. Eileen Kato, who addressed us last month, had studied at Columbia University, and who addressed us so memorably last October on the subject of his book on the Emperor Meiji. After the meeting there was a chance for those attending to meet Dr. Tyler and Dr. Keene over drinks and snacks provided thanks to Mrs. Kato and Mrs. Uta Schreck. 

Dr. Tyler began by giving quite a detailed account of the traditional interpretations of The Tale of Genji. Unfortunately a short summary cannot do full justice to it. An early commentator had indicated, around 1280, that Genji conveyed all of human life. By contrast, for the average modern reader it is a book about Genji's many love affairs, typified by a description of the tale in an article in The New York Times as "a biographical account of the sexual exploits of a Japanese prince in the demimonde." A similar view of it was already taken by a Buddhist monk in 1170, who condemned all vernacular fiction as false and licentious, especially The Tale of Genji, which had a pernicious effect on young people. In later centuries, Buddhists and Confucianists also decried the tale's sexual permissiveness, but felt the need somehow to excuse it by saying, for example, that Murasaki Shikibu evoked amorous adventures only in order to draw readers on towards her true goal, and that it as "an expedient teaching that leads men to the path of the Mean". So there seem to be two basic responses: for some readers Genji's love life obliterates all else, while for others the work opens onto loftier reaches of human thought and experience. 

Even so, Genji's love life still continues to be the focus of the academic gaze. Some take a sympathetic view, saying, for example, that Genji's loss of his mother in early childhood drives him in search of one surrogate after another, or that each woman turns out to be a way-station in his quest for an endlessly receding feminine ideal. Others are merely revolted by Genji's behaviour. One feminist has seen the tale as a dire warning to all women to avoid entanglement with men. Genii is seen as a serial rapist, and it is Murasaki Shikibu's heroines, with their struggles to overcome their trials, who stand at the centre of her work. This image of Genji as a Don Juan is so much taken for granted that a reviewer of Miki Minoru's opera The Tale of Genji felt that the librettist, Colin Graham, was right in giving Genji a conscience about his actions, otherwise he would be too unsympathetic a character to support a three-hour opera. But with all this it needs to be noted that nearly all of Genji's escapades take place only in the first dozen chapters, the ones that are the most read. 

The first concerted essay on Genji was written in 1703 by And™ Tameakira, who called Genji's intercourse with Fujitsubo, his father's empress, and the resulting birth of the future emperor Reizei, the crux of the entire work. In his essay he speaks of the common reaction of horror towards the book. The contemporaneous Confucian Banzan felt compelled to say that the reader was not to take the tale's amorous tone seriously; the author had only included such a gross incident to make it clear that Genji's amours were not the theme of the book. And™ Tameakira's way out of the dilemma was to say that the author had invented the affair in order to warn future Genjis and Fujitsubos against repeating the offence. He thus laid the foundations for a more penetrating interpretation which sees the theme of the book as one of sin and retribution, which is the prevailing opinion among academics in Japan, but one which Dr. Tyler did not share. 

Dr. Tyler then proceeded to outline his own interpretation of the book, which he said could be divided into four phases: rivalry, triumph, folly and revenge. The first two phases form Part One of the Tale, the third phase Part Two and the fourth, Part Three. 

The "rivalry" is a struggle between Genji and his elder half-brother Suzaku. The emperor is forced to appoint Suzaku his heir, but makes no secret of his personal preference for Genji. This imperial preference encourages the Minister of the Left to give his daughter Aoi to Genji; the Minister of the Right, who is Suzaku's grandfather through his daughter Kokiden, takes Suzaku's side. Suzaku had wanted Aoi and lost her to Genji -- and Genji then stole Oborozukiyo, Kokiden's younger sister who was in Suzaku's service. Later on, Suzaku falls in love with the young Akikonomu, but Genji, who has triumphed by them, gives her instead to his secret son Reizei, who is ostensibly the emperor's son. The struggle between the two comes to a head when when Genji is discovered in bed with Oborozukiyo. By then Suzaku is emperor, and Kokiden controls the court. Genji's audacity has given her the chance to get rid of him by charging him with sedition, so Genji exiles himself to Suma. However, Kokiden does not know the true paternity of Reizei, whom the old emperor before his death had appointed as the heir to Suzaku. This secret poses a problem to anyone wishing to understand what happens during Genji's exile. 

The most dramatic event at Suma is a great storm, evidently provoked by Genji's proclaiming to the gods: "There is nothing I have done that anyone could call a crime." This statement has given commentators much trouble, but there is reason to believe that Genji's intercourse with Fujitsubo, though a human sin, did not offend the gods, and that the storm's function was to purge him of the human sin and also the evil heaped upon him by the Suzaku faction, whose will opposed that of the gods. 

In the opening chapter of the book we read that the emperor had encouraged Fujitsubo to admit Genji to her intimate company, and when he learnt that she was pregnant he said nothing. When the baby was born he recognized the likeness to Genji, but brushed it off with a lame remark. Readers have assumed that the emperor did not know the truth, but he most certainly did. This kind of scene followed the pattern of an accepted convention. The emperor sees the fulfillment of his hopes in Fujitsubo's son, but has to remain silent for reasons of state. Suzaku has no son, so by keeping the secret the emperor can appoint Reizei as Suzaku's heir. It must be seen as an achievement on the part of the author to have built her tale on the secrets of the throne. 

While at Suma, Genji has a dream in which the god Sumiyoshi appears to him and says he is going to speak to the emperor Suzaku about Genji's exile. When he arrives, he glares into Suzaku's eyes, so that he becomes gravely ill, and has to recall Genji. In this way the old emperor, even after his death, has assured Genji's success and Suzaku's defeat. Dr. Tyler then quoted from the Sumiyoshi Jindaiki evidence to show that the god regarded Genji as the legitimate heir to the throne, and that Genji's affair with Fujitsubo was thus a crucial step in restoring the legitimate line through Reizei. This idea makes sense, because right from the time of the Nihon Shoki or the Kojiki, myths about great transgression on the part of the hero seem to have been required for the acquisition of great power. Moreover there is a parallel story coming from China, in which a young favourite of the first emperor, Ch'in-shih-huang-ti, makes love to the empress; the emperor exiles him, but before doing so gives him a secret transmission from the Buddha which is then passed on to a new line of emperors. Further, in the Sagoromo Monogatari (c. 1060) the hero violates the daughter of the emperor, and the empress presents the resulting son to the emperor as her own, by him. Ultimately the hero becomes emperor, thanks to a transgression similar to Genji's. This means that for those familiar with this story, Genji's transgression with Fujitsubo would be only slightly stronger meat. 

At the end of the "triumph" phase, Suzaku has retired, and Reizei appoints Genji an honorary retired emperor. The "folly" phase begins with Suzaku feeling unwell, apparently because of Genji's triumph. Before he leaves the world to become a monk he wishes to find a suitable husband for his favourite daughter, the Third Princess, who is a niece of Fujitsubo. He finally approaches Genji, who, in his folly, accepts her, because, although devoted to his present partner Murasaki, he welcomes a match with a girl more of his own rank. Murasaki cannot accept this and withdraws from him. He tries to placate her by confiding to her his impressions of other women he has known. One of these is Rokuj™, who had died after years of suffering caused by Genji's refusal to recognize his relationship with her publicly. Rokuj™'s wrathful spirit hears Genji's chatter and attacks him by making Murasaki ill. In the end Murasaki dies and leaves Genji an empty shell of a man. Meanwhile, Suzaku has learnt that his daughter has been violated by Kashiwagi while Genji is away nursing Murasaki. After giving birth, the daughter fears she is dying and Suzaku hurries to her and over Genji's protests accedes to her pleas to make her a nun, to save her from Genji. His now sharply focussed animus against Genji leads to the final phase, that of "revenge". 

This last phase constitutes Part Three, which is very different in style from the preceding two parts, so much so that the possibility exists of the tale's having been written by more than one author. The plot line does not appear so clearly, and in fact only becomes visible again in the next-to-last chapter. Between Parts Two and Three, both Genji and Suzaku have died, and the "revenge" consists in Suzaku's angry ghost being dedicated to tormenting Kaoru, the Third Princess's son, whom all believe also to be Genji's. The closing chapters are centred on Ukifune, remembered as having thrown herself into the Uji in despair at being pursued by both Kaoru and Niou (Genji's grandson). But this is not in the text, and in fact she is carried off by a spirit into a silent wood. An exorcist forces the spirit to declare itself, and it says, "I was once a monk, but a little grudge against the world kept me wandering." No-one in the whole tale could say this but Suzaku, who is the uncle of Ukifune and also of Oigimi, Kaoru's great love, whom the spirit also claims to have killed three years before. Even after the exorcism the spirit continues to haunt Ukifune, who remains dangerously insane. 

So is The Tale of Genji an erotic work? It has wonderfully erotic passages, but these do not make it an erotic work, any more than it can be called a tale "about" rivalry, triumph, folly or revenge. It is better to say that it is about a supremely gifted hero, whose human failings slowly undo him, which is hardly an unfamiliar theme. And what of the women? If it were not for Genji we would never meet them, but at the same time there would be no Genji without them. So perhaps it is wiser just to say that the heart of the tale is like the autumn moon. 

My Q&A. 

In reply to a question Dr. Tyler replied that he had naturally been conscious of the existing English and French translations. His own work builds on its predecessors, since literary translation is not an individual but a collective process. Arthur Waley's is a first-stage translation of unusual genius. When introducing a work into a language and culture with no prior experience of its assumptions, he was not merely entitled but required to take liberties. Some of the things Waley did with the text now have no standing academically -- but this does not mean that what he did was wrong. Professor Seidensticker set out to correct the most obvious of Waley's "liberties", but he would surely not have sold nearly so many copies of his own translation had not Waley's version broken the ground. Dr. Tyler felt that his own version was more accurate in the fine detail, and modern technology had allowed him to add a footnote apparatus to help the reader keep track; but although he had seen room for another translation he acknowledged his debt to his predecessors.  

The meeting closed with a vote of thanks proposed by Dr. Donald Keene, who began by saying that he had been delighted to teach Dr. Tyler's class, which he could still say forty years later, and in the presence of two of its members, was the best he had ever taught. His own first connection with Genji had come in 1940, when he was eighteen and reading the newspapers was torture: one country after another in Europe was falling to Hitler. At that time the Waley translation had been his salvation. He had bought it in a secondhand bookstore in Times Square for 49 cents, thinking only that such a large book was a good bargain! Until he heard Dr. Tyler, however, Suzaku had appeared colourless, but now he knew better. Dr. Tyler's approach to the text had originally been analytical but he later added literary appreciation.