Tale of Genji, 1-3

[telophase]

rachelmanija and kate_nepveu are reading The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu and I am a sheep baa.

Well, ok, I've taken a stab or two at reading it before and got lost in who was who and what was what, so it rather helps to read someone else's commentary and the read it myself. For the two or three of you who may not know it, the Tale of Genji is the world's first novel, written by a woman at the Heian court approximately 800 years ago. Genji, the eponymous hero, is also possibly the world's first Mary Sue.

The best part about it all is seeing how many shoujo tropes have been in existence for the better part of a millennium at least.

I'm reading the Royall Tyler translation, which seems to have a decent amount of footnotes in it. rachelmanija's reading a different version, and kate_nepveu's reading the Seidensticker translation.



** marks typical shoujo tropes I picked out.

Chapter 1: The Paulownia Pavilion.

The Emperor loves Genji's mother, who is not of high enough rank to be a consort and is one of the lower-ranking concubines, to distraction, and therefore the MEEN GURLZ IN HIGHSCHOOL other consorts get jealous and play nasty tricks on her.** She dies of some tragically beautiful wasting disease.** Genji goes to live at the palace with his imperial daddy. His grandmother drops dead. The emperor can't make Genji his heir apparent because of Politics, so he gives him a last name (the Imperial family doesn't have last names), so he can be of good service as a minister, even though everyone can see he's too Speshul. Including the court phrenologists and some Korean phrenologist that the emperor sent him to secretly.

Interesting tidbit: "Genji" isn't really a name, it's a title signifying that he's been given a last name. In the Heian court, it seems that people go pretty much by their titles and not by names, which makes it confusing for later readers, many of whom have tagged various personages in the story with nicknames over the past eight hundred years.

The emperor finds a young girl who resembles Genji's motehr and raises her and marries her. Genji's in love with her too.** Genji has Issues.

Chapter 2: The Broom Tree

Genji's 17 (16 the way Western people count the years), a captain of the guard, and he and his buds are hanging out and drinking and bitching about women. kate_nepveu's take on it is:

What I got out of it: all failures of romantic or sexual relationships are the fault of the woman for failing to balance, to the man's taste, (a) assertiveness against rotten treatment by the man and (b) forgiveness for rotten treatment by the man. At least, according to the windy conversations of the men in the first part of the chapter.

My take on it is that it sounds like all the guys I knew in college who'd get together, drink beer, and bitch about chicks. Not much has changed in 800 years. At any rate, they tell a lot of stories and admire Genji for being Speshul and good-looking.**

Later on, Genji's forced to take refuge at a governor's house overnight - much to the governor's surprise and dismay - to avoid breaking a travel taboo, and starts crushing on the governor's stepmother, a young woman who is staying with the governor while her husband and the governor's father, the Iyo Deputy, is away deputying. She's not as taken with Genji as Genji thinks she ought to be, resisting even when he steals her away for a bit of fun.** Genji takes this as a challenge and employs her younger brother as a page and uses him as a go-between. The lady still resists, and at the end of the chapter Genji's more horny than ever and sleeps with her brother.**

This translation is slightly coy as to what exactly went on between Genji and the boy:

"Very well, then you, at least, shall not leave me." Genji had the boy lie down with him. The boy so appreciated his master's youth and gentleness that they say Genji found him much nicer than his cruel sister.

I call it "coy" if, when I was a teenager, I'd have completely missed the meaning of the passage.


Chapter 3: The Cicada Shell

A short chapter. Genji gets the boy to sneak him into his sister's presence as she's playing Go with another woman. The other woman isn't very attractive, although her demeanor and behavior is graceful. (ETA: Misreading there. See comments.) The boy intends to sneak Genji into his sister's room that night, but she guesses what he's up to and sneaks off. Genji manages to crawl into bed with the unattractive woman, but when he figures it out, he realizes that if this woman learns that he accidentally crawled into her bed thinking she was someone else, she'd be hurt, and so the handsome, gallant Genji just makes do with her and never lets on.** Although he does manage to deftly avoid giving her his name.

When he's done, he and the boy sneak off, Genji filching an item of clothing that the sister dropped. He continues to moon about her and sends her poetry, which she resists. Much to the other woman's disappointment, she receives no poetry (Genji, you cad!). At the very end of the chapter, we learn that Genji's crush is secretly sad that she has to resist him.**

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I found this bit of the introduction, by Tyler, amusing. It's in a section talking about the courtly language, which deals a lot in poetic metaphor and circumlocution instead of directness:

Some readers have wondered whether the men and women in the tale ever actually do anything, since they seem to spend their nights merely chatting; but katarau, which ostensibly means that, actually refers to other intimacies as well. ... A man who "sees" or "is seeing" a woman (a standard expression) is at least to some extent sharing his life with her, and Genji's having "seen" Utsusemi in a pitch-dark room (chapter 2) means bluntly that he has possessed her.

Does anyone else catch the irony in using a word that in our modern language functions exactly like "seen" in Heian Japanese? To someone unfamiliar with "possess" as a euphemism for "have sex with," the meaning must be equally opaque.