Anxieties of Authorship, Critique of Readership: Mishima Yukio’s Modern Noh Play Genji kuyō

Mishima Yukio's dramatic suicide half a century ago ensured that his name would forever be associated with a certain fanatic imperialism, and largely fulfilled his own wish that he would die as a military man. And yet, he was until the end foremost a literary artist, concerned with the critical reception of his written works and preoccupied with his lasting reputation as an author. This paper examines Mishima’s portrayal of the celebrity writer, as well as the potentials and limitations of literature as presented in his oft-neglected modern noh play Genji kuyō (Devotional offering for Genji, 1962). It positions the play within the long history of prayers for Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji, ca. 1008) that began in the twelfth century in response to the perceived ambiguous morality of the author Murasaki Shikibu (d. ca. 1014). Mishima's Genji kuyō provides a pointed criticism of readers, as well as anxieties regarding a writer's life and literary recognition. Though Mishima himself famously disowned it after its initial publication, Genji kuyō offers critical insights regarding the writing and reading of literature.

Women's fan writing and transformative works in eleventh-century Japan

This exploration of the literary cultures of eleventh-century Japan analyzes the ways in which the writing and reading practices of the period resemble those of modern transformative fan communities. Studying the defining fictional text of this era, The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 1021), within the framework of fan studies demonstrates how existing so-called canonical material was transformed into a vehicle for female-centric reimaginings of dominant narratives. The circumstances of the work's authorship and its initial reception are examined via the author's own diary and The Sarashina Diary (ca. 1059), a memoir written by an early reader of the Genji, providing insight into both individual fan identity and the extensive female-led fan communities of the period.

Phenomenology, Aesthetics, and Worldbuilding in Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings

In this paper, I examine the theoretical aspects of worldbuilding in Murasaki’s and Tolkien’s imagined worlds and accentuate the role of aesthetic landscape creation through which spatio-temporal layers are negotiated. As a starting point, I refer to Thomas Ryba’s Husserl, Fantasy and Possible Worlds (1990), where he evaluates the believability of secondary worlds via Husserlian phenomenology. To shed light on Ryba’s statement that authors must be “adept at describing the qualities of characters and the world in which they live” (232) through the lens of engagement, I contend that critically acclaimed imagined worlds such as Heian Japan in The Tale of Genji (c.1000 A.D.) and Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) demonstrate two fundamental qualities: the physical environments possess aesthetic qualities and the emotional experience of the place is integrated into the fabric of worldbuilding, generating an aura of believability.

Shōjo Murasaki, Seinen Genji: Sexual Violence and Textual Violence in Yamato Waki’s Fleeting Dreams and Egawa Tatsuya’s Tale of Genji Manga

This paper examines how two manga versions of the Heian classic Tale of Genji, belonging to two different genres and targeting different readership, engage with and interpret the tale’s episodes depicting sexual encounters, which may be read as problematic in the original text. The shojo version, Yamato Waki’s Asaki yumemishi, published between 1980 and 1993, and targeting predominantly female audiences, how two distinct approaches in its treatment of certain potentially uncomfortable episodes: some episodes which verge too close to a reading of sexual violence, are outright erased from the manga versions. Others, whose presence is invaluable to the narrative, are remarkably faithful to the original text, while at the same time contextualizing and domesticating all threats of sexual violence that might have marred the original text. By contrast, Egawa Tatsuya’s seinen version of Genji monogatari, marketed towards a young male adult readership, takes the extreme approach of depicting all sexual encounters in the tale as consensual, pleasurable and highly explicit. The ambiguity of the original text is simply done away with by juxtaposing said text and its fairly accurate rendition into modern Japanese with quasi-pornographic, shunga-evoking scenes of sex.

The Tale of Genji: A Japanese Classic Illuminated

-