Envisioning the Tale of Genji: Media, Gender, and Cultural Production
Haruo Shirane
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 0231142374
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Bringing together scholars from across the world, Haruo Shirane presents a fascinating portrait of The Tale of Genji's reception and reproduction over the past thousand years. The essays examine the canonization of the work from the late Heian through the medieval, Edo, Meiji, Taisho, Showa, and Heisei periods, revealing its profound influence on a variety of genres and fields, including modern nation building. They also consider parody, pastiche, and re-creation of the text in various popular and mass media. Since the Genji was written by a woman for female readers, contributors also take up the issue of gender and cultural authority, looking at the novel's function as a symbol of Heian court culture and as an important tool in women's education. Throughout the volume, scholars discuss achievements in visualization, from screen painting and woodblock prints to manga and anime. Taking up such recurrent themes as cultural nostalgia, eroticism, and gender, this book is the most comprehensive history of the reception of The Tale of Genji to date, both in the country of its origin and throughout the world.
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under the banner of Zhuangzi, the surface of the Genji was believed to contain deeper Buddhistic and Confucian meanings and lessons The following passage appears at the beginning of the Myōjōshō (Notes for the Morning Star, ca. 1539–1563), a major Genji commentary by Sanjōnishi Kin’eda (1487–1563):46 When it comes to the main purpose of this monogatari, it is said to be based on amorous affairs [kōshoku] and bewitching beauty [yōen], but the true intent of the author was to take people and pull
contents to forge linked verses by allusion to both the story and the poems. Late medieval painters and nō playwrights (such as Konparu Zenchiku [1405–1470] ) also depended on these digests and renga handbooks to re-create The Tale of Genji visually and on stage. The audience for The Tale of Genji increasingly grew beyond the bounds of the nobility in the Edo period (1600–1867), when it was read by both urban commoners and educated samurai. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
and the production of Genji paintings (formal, iconographic). In this instance, the original texts that these manuscripts replicate were changed into hybrid word–image form. The Genji did not remain static as it passed through the hands of these artists and copyists, but was modified and personalized. Extant hakubyō pictures have to be seen as part of a unique Monochromatic Genji 113 aspect of manuscript culture and as works that potentially generated a somatic connection between viewer and
readers, as does the Sengenshō (Notes of the Immortals’ Origins, 1381), written by Emperor Chōkei (1343–1394).21 Yet others created topical entries, inserted illustrations to appeal to a more general readership, or included digests of the tale. By the end of the Edo period (1600–1867), there were more than five hundred such Genji commentaries. By the twelfth century, familiarity with The Tale of Genji had become indispensable for both male and female waka poets, and its readership grew
commoners. The powerful warlords (daimyō) of the late medieval period were drawn to the world of The Tale of Genji, probably initially through renga, which became a major cultural activity. Samurai offered linked-verse sequences as prayers for victory in war, and renga became an important communal poetic form in wartime. Nijō Yoshimoto (1320–1388), a waka scholar and renga poet in the Nanboku-chō (Southern The Tale of Genji and the Dynamics of Cultural Production 13 and Northern Courts)