welcome to camp telophase

reading_genji

You know you wanna.

SKAAAAAAAAAAANK!!


 

I've just looked through all the entries on canon_sues and no one's posted Genji yet! Someone should really remedy that lack.

... What are you all looking at me for?

 

Good essay on Gojyo and Hakkai and incest in Saiyuki by harukami. Massive spoilers if you don't know their backstories and how they met.

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Something I was thinking about in regards to the Tale of Genji: back when I was lurking on rec.arts.sf.fandom (or possibly it was rec.arts.sf.composition), I vaguely remember reading someone's post about medieval history. She said that once she really paid attention to the ages of the historical figures in question and realized that medieval Europe was being run by the equivalent of her highschool football team, medieval politics suddenly made so much more sense.

I think the same can be said for Heian Japan, at least as it's presented through the Tale so far. Someone in a comment on one of rachelmanija's posts about it made a crack about it being the first fanfiction, and it's so damn easy to find fanfic tropes in it, and rachelmanija's mentioned that the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagan, who was a contemporary of Murasaki, the Tale's author, reads just like Livejournal. And apparently Murasaki made some thinly-veiled slams at other court ladies in her book, including Sei Shonagan. Which makes me want to map her onto fanfiction.net, if Sei Shonagan maps onto Livejournal.

*fights temptation to fandom_wank them*

ETA: And wordsofastory says in a comment on my post about chapters 1-3 that the bit about Genji being compelled to sleep with the unattractive lady reminds her of a highschool jock being forced by his mother to take the geeky next-door neighbor to a dance. See? IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE!

 

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.

( In which Genji is Speshul )

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.