The Epistemology of Space in The Tale of Genji

Although The Tale of Genji is today the quintessentially Japanese national classic, its engagement with China shapes the tale on virtually every page. This essay argues that Murasaki Shikibu was keenly interested in philosophical questions of how humans experience space and that China played a pivotal role in formulating and engaging these questions. As a Heian woman she had no access to the world of Chinese-style poetry composition or the Confucian Academy, but she deploys China as a marker of spatial or temporal difference that inspires her probing of fundamental questions: How can spaces convey moods and structure human experience? How can a woman narrate inaccessible male spaces? This essay shows how philosophical questions about the experience and description of space drive the tale’s plot and character portrayal and how this “epistemology of space” is predicated on the manifold presences of China at the heart of the Genji’s brilliant narrative art and psychological depth.

Calligraphy, Aesthetics, and Character in The Tale of Genji

Until the late nineteenth century, when the Western, or Renaissance, conception of art—painting, sculpture, and architecture—was introduced to Japan, calligraphy reigned supreme as cultural practice and artifact. Calligraphy, alongside poetry and music, was fundamental to a proper education at the imperial court, the setting of The Tale of Genji. Marks produced with a pliable brush and ink function practically as records of thought and intent but also perform aesthetically. Genji includes hundreds of mentions of calligraphy, demonstrating its centrality in interactions between characters. From Genji, we learn how calligraphy revealed a sense of self and of others, how calligraphy was an object of aesthetic and moral judgment, and what role it served in intersubjective relations.

Genji’s Gardens

This essay explores conceptual and cultural notions of “nature” in the Heian period and especially the many representations of nature in The Tale of Genji. Nature represented is nature codified; concrete nature imagery was employed in sustained ways to sketch the emotional state of protagonists. Yet nature could also trigger, rather than resonate with, emotional response. Central is a series of readings of the gardens of the Rokujō estate in The Tale of Genji; in turn, those readings are framed in a larger survey of garden design theory, practices, and uses in the Heian period. Gardens in this tale offer profound insights into both how Heian courtiers related to nature and the structure of its protagonists’ relationships. In this sense, “nature” and basic structures in the tale are intimately connected.

Rethinking Gender in The Tale of Genji

The study of gender is now seen as central to our understanding of The Tale of Genji. Scholars have focused on representations of amorous relations in the text to highlight women’s suffering, as well as their struggle for autonomy and their agency. This essay argues that categories such as women, sex, gender, and agency are historically and culturally variable and therefore cannot be treated as transhistorical and universal categories. It seeks to make visible the cultural variability of gender in the Genji by arguing that women do not uniformly constitute a self-evident and pre-given category, that gender is performative, and thus how it is performed—what constitutes being a woman—is itself shaped by class and status, and that modern liberal conceptions of agency are inadequate for understanding the Buddhist world of the text.

Flares in the Garden, Darkness in the Heart

This essay explores various dimensions and manifestations of interiority and exteriority in The Tale of Genji, beginning with analogies to the subject and structure of Japanese screens (byōbu) that depict “scenes inside and outside the capital” and interior and exterior scenes in the Tale itself. It then moves on to suggest that names of characters and of chapters in the Tale also can be seen as aspects of its interiority and exteriority, just as can certain feature of its narrative structure, and then concludes with reflections on how the many poems that are on the surface of the text reveal its deepest interiors while at the same time making the Tale itself a container or “house” for and of them.

The Structure of Genji’s Career

The hero of The Tale of Genji is famous or infamous above all as a lover and a seductive master of the courtly arts. The political aspects of his career are not as well recognized, perhaps because they are often difficult to distinguish from his love interests. One goal of this essay is to disentangle in Genji’s case political or personal advantage from erotic enterprise. A second goal is to show that Genji’s overt career follows a political (for want of a better word) trajectory that gives his story an underlying form distinct from simple acknowledgment of passing time. The main issues are the imperial succession, acquisition of decisive influence at court, and hierarchically advantageous marriage. Genji’s trajectory follows the rise of a man who comes against the odds to dominate his world, then overreaches himself and loses all that he holds most dear. Having been forced by external circumstance to favor his lackluster first son (Suzaku) publicly, the Kiritsubo Emperor does all he can to favor his brilliant second son (Genji) privately. Feeling cheated of the honor to which his gifts and his father’s favor should have destined him, Genji maneuvers successfully to overcome those who forced him into this position. Out of pride he then takes a gratuitous step that estranges him from his beloved Murasaki and, by the way, crushes his unfortunate brother. When last seen, he is only the shell of a once great man.

Murasaki’s “Mind Ground”

Over the course of its reception history, The Tale of Genji was viewed by many readers and commentators as a Buddhist text relevant to issues of morality and ethics, but also metaphysical questions about the nature of truth, perception of the phenomenal world, and the phenomenal world’s relationship to language. Numerous Genji commentaries promoted the idea that the Tendai Buddhist notion of nonduality formed an underlying structural component of the tale. Writers based this idea on the belief that the Genji’s author, Murasaki Shikibu, had mastered a system of meditation put forth in The Great Calming and Contemplation (Ch. Mohe zhiguan, J. Makashikan) by the sixth-century founder of Tien-t’ai in China, Zhiyi (538–597). This essay examines the commentaries as well as a group of paintings produced alongside them as crucial evidence for the existence of a nascent philosophical theory of the novel. Taking seriously the ideas of historical readers who attempted to understand Genji holistically through the lens of Tendai philosophy may bring us closer to the intellectual foundations of the tale than previously imagined, adding another dimension to our understanding of the relationship between Buddhist philosophy and literature.

Ritual, Moral Personhood, and Spirit Possession in The Tale of Genji

The eponymous hero of The Tale of Genji has been frequently described as promiscuous and morally reprobate. This essay explores the construction of selfhood in the novel and suggests that Genji goes on a moral journey. It draws on the work of the American philosopher Herbert Fingarette, whose classic analysis of the Analects of Confucius posits ritual as the main influence in the construct of the person in the tradition associated with his name. The present essay uses the youthful Genji’s precocious achievements as a performer of ritual, music, calligraphy, and dance as a starting point. It suggests that initially his reflexes reflect concern with his own reputation and shame at discovery of transgression rather than inwardly directed guilt. As he grows older, however, partly under Buddhist influence, gradually he becomes more introspectively concerned with the impact of his behavior on others. The essay identifies several agencies that structure the moral world of the novel, including Buddhist notions of predestination, retribution, and spirit possession.

Introduction

The introduction describes the supreme position of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji in the Japanese literary and cultural tradition and the general character of the work as the story of Genji, the son of an emperor, and those around him. It addresses the role of philosophy in this extended and episodic narrative, maintaining that it rests on assumptions concerning human experience and its literary representation that can be explored in philosophical terms. It introduces what is known of the author and the creation of her work in the early-eleventh-century Heian period imperial court, together with the intellectual and religious traditions, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shinto, that informed attitudes to life in the contemporary world.