Genji Monogatari - First Thoughts

I started reading the Tale of Genji, or Genji Monogatari, this last weekend. At the very least, it's one of the top classics of Japanese literature, written by a woman which I think is interesting (apparently writing fiction was beneath men of the period), and there is debate about whether it can be called The First Novel, or at least The First Historical Novel, The First Psychological Novel, or the First Classic Novel. Anyway, it was written approximately one thousand years ago, and is full of characters will real and recognizable human emotions/motivations, unlike the characters in the works other authors of the time were pumping out.


- Translation Issues -

I checked a copy out from my library and ended up with the Tyler translation - apparently one of three main translations - Waley, Seidansticker, and Tyler, of which Waley was the first one, and more of an adaptation than a translation (he took the plot, characters, scenes, etc, but more or less rewrote the book to be a more modern, western-style novel), Seidansticker apparently tried to be more faithful and started including a few notes, and Tyler has perhaps gone too far which adherence to the original, with tons of linguistic, cultural, and historic footnotes. I like that it's educational, but at the same time I'm wondering if it will detract from the story.

The main problem that all of these translations have had to tackle is that in the Japanese original, hardly any of the characters have names, because apparently in the court of the Heian era, naming someone was rude and presumptuous. So instead, the original seems to use a whirlwind of titles, relationships, and nicknames to refer to the different characters, making it extremely confusing for modern audiences. Waley answered this problem by picking a nickname or some other reference in the original, and left it in Japanese in his translation so that it seemed like a perfectly proper name - for example Utsusemi for the woman who was pursued by Genji romantically, and at one point left her robe behind so that Genji referred to her in the poetry he sent as like a cicada who left her shell behind (Utsusemi means cicada shell). To a somewhat lesser extent, this is also done in Seidansticker and in Waley, and apparently also in Japanese modernizations. While the identity of the characters is usually at least ascertainable from context, when academics and others discuss the works, they at least need some way to refer to the characters, which is how the anachronisms originally developed.

Basically, Tyler's translation starts with a thirty page or so introduction to why the book was translated the way it was, why he did this or that - and at the beginning of every chapter a list of the characters involved, listing all their different possible names, their pertinent relationships, etc. As I said, all of this is very educational, which I do appreciate in its own way, but it does make me think of the saying that translations are like women - either beautiful or faithful, not both.

One thing I love love love about the Tyler one, though, is his handling of chapter names. Each chapter starts with a full page with the name of the chapter in Japanese, a translation of this title, and then a little paragraph description of how the title is a metaphor relating to whats going on in the story.


- Looking is Touching -

What's funny to me right now is that the society is in many ways ultra-conservative - women pretty much hang out behind curtains in rooms surrounded by other women, there is really no privacy and at the same time to even catch a glimpse of a clothed women through a crack in a door is almost worse than if you were to catch a glimpse of her naked today. All of this is so different and its hard to imagine, really, even while I'm reading - all of the action going on with so many barriers in place. At the same time, the society is in other ways quite liberal - Genji is going around having sex with everyone, and people are just not very freaked out about it - even with the double standard and all of that, it seems like the gravity of actually having sexual intercourse is about on par with the gravity of doing so today, or perhaps at most that of 50 years ago... while even 'seeing' a woman, literally, is much more serious - making the gap between the two much smaller. Nowadays we can see but not touch - there's an enormous gap between the two, whatever you think of today's promiscuity, men see hundreds of women just walking down the street without thinking a thing of it. In Genji - if you catch a glimpse of a fully clothed woman for a moment, you're perilously - or perhaps not so perilously - close to having possessed her. In fact, in Genji, if it says that Genji 'sees' someone, it could easily be a euphemism for Genji having sex with that person.


- Chapter One -

In which Genji is the world's first Mary Sue, his mother is subjected to and succumbs to schoolyard jealousy and wickedness, his grandmother and the Emperor spend a lot of time crying, he becomes a man and falls in love with a woman who looks like his mother (at the age of 12).

Chapter One is all about Genji's early childhood, and while he does seem to be a Mary Sue - beautiful, genius - basically perfect in all ways - he at the least isn't surrounded by mysticism or any supernatural elements. He is the son of the emperor with one of his many ladies - one of relatively low class, as it turns out, and his favourite. Because he loved her so much, and this didn't seem fair to the ladies who should have had higher status, everyone else sort of hated her. She was a very nice woman and all of that, but they were jealous, and after all this was the imperial court, in other words very similar to high school, and they isolated her and locked her in closets etc until she sickened and died from the nastiness. Genji's grandmother was very sad, and so was the Emperor, and they carry on and weep A LOT, and the emperor takes Genji to the palace to be raised after a short time. Lovely scene, anyway, in the grandmother's overgrown garden, as she receives and responds to the Emperor's sentiments.

Genji turns out to be beautiful and brilliant etc, and the Emperor is sorely tempted to name him Heir Apparent, but for political reasons he really can't, so instead he decides that the best thing for Genji is to be named a commoner (outside of the royal family) so that he can use his gifts to make his own place in the world. Lest you think that Genji is special in getting a real name unlike any of the other characters, it should be noted that Genji basically just refers to someone who was kicked out of the imperial family by being given a surname - it wouldn't be weird to call him 'a Genji'. The Emperor starts feeling a bit better about his previous main squeeze when he finds a girl, Fujitsubo, who looks a lot like her. Genji likes Fujitsubo a lot too, which is only natural (??) since they look so much alike, and they are called The Shining Lord and the Sunshine Princess. Genji turns 12, so they cut off his pigtails (which is sad, because they make him look so cute? The illustration - not so much) and make him a man, complete with an older wife who's not that into her child-groom. Now that Genji is a man, he's not allowed into the private women areas which are curtained off, so he and Fujitsubo can only 'be together' by sitting on opposite sides of the curtain and singing/playing music together. Kind of sweet but also more than a little weird....