The Aesthetic Interpretation of Life in The Tale of Genji

Abstract

I first intend to focus on the refinement or rarefication of the cult of beauty which existed in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries in Japan, at the time when Murasaki Shikibu, or Lady Murasaki, wrote her universally acclaimed masterpiece, the Genji monogatari, or The Tale of Genji.1 She was born almost exactly a millennium ago, and her novel covers the reigns of four emperors (significantly, those of Genji’s father, his brother, his son, and his nephew, in that order), or approximately sixty or seventy years. Presumably, if the final portions of the novel are set in the contemporary period, i. e., the time when she was concluding the novel, it would cover a period from about the middle of the tenth century to the early eleventh century. The reason we can think that the depiction of the elegance (the Japanese term miyabi meaning “elegance” is widely used to characterize the court culture of Heian, the imperial capital), the extaordinary sensitivity to the beauties of nature, the beauty of women — the beauty of men also, for that matter — the beauty of music, pictures, clothing, incense, perfume, even certain kinds of games, reflects actuality, and is not just a kind of idealized world that Murasaki creates, is that we have other texts, such as Sei Shonagon’s exquisite Makura no sōshi, or The Pillow Book,2 thought to have been written in the last decade of the tenth century, and diaries of the same general period, which recount, and give us detailed descriptions of, precisely the same kinds of practices, the same kinds of aesthetic pursuits.