Preparing for Genji.
Apr. 29th, 2007 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sechan19This week I'll be heading to the Gotoh Art Museum - located outside of Tokyo in Kaminoge - to see their one-week-of-the-year exhibition of the 13th century Tale of Genji scrolls. To that end, I've been reading articles about the Genji monogatari to get myself in the right headspace for them.
Just recently, I read an absolutely beautiful article by Japanese literature scholar Royall Tyler about the relationship between Genji and his beloved wife Murasaki. Throughout, I was struck by Tyler's keen perception of the nuances that color this extraordinary tale, and I wanted to share an excerpt from his conclusion, which takes a long view of the interactions of these two characters and very sympathetically illuminates their follies and tragedy. The text sets a very good tone for my visit, as one the scroll fragments in the Gotoh collection is the painfully beautiful illustration of the Minori Chapter in which Murasaki succumbs to illness and dies.
"Naturally Genji has always stirred readers' dreams, but Murasaki lives with Genji the man. It is he who claims her, tests her, hurts her, cajoles her, lies to her, loves her, and even against her wishes never lets her go. Some have described their love, too, as 'ideal' and have even called its story 'the fulfillment of ideal love.' I wonder what they mean. Who would wish on a couple the fate of Genji and Murasaki? It is not a happy one.
"Genji alone provokes this fate, moved by ambition that requires more of Murasaki than she can give him. After the abdication of Emperor Reizei, his secret son, he entertains before the reader thoughts if not of empire, then at least of dynasty. Already the grandfather of a future emperor in the female line, he nonetheless regrets not being the same in the male...
"Thus Genji, who would really have reigned if his father had not refrained from naming him heir apparent, has long wished to correct this error and, so to speak, to rewrite history. Dare one imagine that he made love to Fujitsubo [his father's wife] with that in mind? At any rate, it is to this sort of desire - one his gifts allowed him the hope of fulfilling - that he sacrifices with deep but blind sorrow the woman he really loves.
"Murasaki may understand little of this, but there is much that he does not understand about her, either. She has her own destiny. If he, in a truer world than the flawed on they inhabit, is a born emperor whom only fortune has cheated of his realm, she in that truer world is his equal, and in this one suffers a counterpart of misfortune. Her resistance to his three infidelities proceeds from no intrinsic trait, but only from the predicament of a flawed birth that does not match her nature. For him, reclaiming what should have been his requires such manipulation of persons and circumstances that despite both genius and supernatural favor he falls short after all. He wanted too much. Reizei has no heir, Onna Sannomiya [his second wife] slips from him, and these two great transgressions (against his father and against Murasaki) cost him the substance of what he is and has.
"Murasaki, as beautiful as he, has never for a moment been ordinary either. Still, she is a woman, and her different destiny depends on his. It is not just an inner matter. Despite her repeated affirmations of distinctness, she does not free herself from his appetites until his powers begin to fail and her own death approaches, and if she were not thanks to him an empress's adoptive mother, that empress's last visit to her could not seal her life. Yet in rising at the end above happiness or unhappiness she achieves something that he does not; for until lost to view he remains, like many another great man, entangled in the complexities of an extravagant pride."
This article first appeared in Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 54, no. 4 (1999); pages 435-480. Click here for full bibliographic details.
Just recently, I read an absolutely beautiful article by Japanese literature scholar Royall Tyler about the relationship between Genji and his beloved wife Murasaki. Throughout, I was struck by Tyler's keen perception of the nuances that color this extraordinary tale, and I wanted to share an excerpt from his conclusion, which takes a long view of the interactions of these two characters and very sympathetically illuminates their follies and tragedy. The text sets a very good tone for my visit, as one the scroll fragments in the Gotoh collection is the painfully beautiful illustration of the Minori Chapter in which Murasaki succumbs to illness and dies.
"Naturally Genji has always stirred readers' dreams, but Murasaki lives with Genji the man. It is he who claims her, tests her, hurts her, cajoles her, lies to her, loves her, and even against her wishes never lets her go. Some have described their love, too, as 'ideal' and have even called its story 'the fulfillment of ideal love.' I wonder what they mean. Who would wish on a couple the fate of Genji and Murasaki? It is not a happy one.
"Genji alone provokes this fate, moved by ambition that requires more of Murasaki than she can give him. After the abdication of Emperor Reizei, his secret son, he entertains before the reader thoughts if not of empire, then at least of dynasty. Already the grandfather of a future emperor in the female line, he nonetheless regrets not being the same in the male...
"Thus Genji, who would really have reigned if his father had not refrained from naming him heir apparent, has long wished to correct this error and, so to speak, to rewrite history. Dare one imagine that he made love to Fujitsubo [his father's wife] with that in mind? At any rate, it is to this sort of desire - one his gifts allowed him the hope of fulfilling - that he sacrifices with deep but blind sorrow the woman he really loves.
"Murasaki may understand little of this, but there is much that he does not understand about her, either. She has her own destiny. If he, in a truer world than the flawed on they inhabit, is a born emperor whom only fortune has cheated of his realm, she in that truer world is his equal, and in this one suffers a counterpart of misfortune. Her resistance to his three infidelities proceeds from no intrinsic trait, but only from the predicament of a flawed birth that does not match her nature. For him, reclaiming what should have been his requires such manipulation of persons and circumstances that despite both genius and supernatural favor he falls short after all. He wanted too much. Reizei has no heir, Onna Sannomiya [his second wife] slips from him, and these two great transgressions (against his father and against Murasaki) cost him the substance of what he is and has.
"Murasaki, as beautiful as he, has never for a moment been ordinary either. Still, she is a woman, and her different destiny depends on his. It is not just an inner matter. Despite her repeated affirmations of distinctness, she does not free herself from his appetites until his powers begin to fail and her own death approaches, and if she were not thanks to him an empress's adoptive mother, that empress's last visit to her could not seal her life. Yet in rising at the end above happiness or unhappiness she achieves something that he does not; for until lost to view he remains, like many another great man, entangled in the complexities of an extravagant pride."
This article first appeared in Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 54, no. 4 (1999); pages 435-480. Click here for full bibliographic details.
