Murasaki Shikibu Research Articles

从中国文化视角看日本文学经典《源氏物语》

“Genji Monogatari” is a famous literary work in Japanese history. It is known as the “peak of Japanese literature” and is generally recognized by academic circles as the world's first full-length novel. But at the same time, because the author Murasaki Shikibu has a profound knowledge of Chinese culture, the shadow of Chinese elements can be seen everywhere in the work. This book is very similar to the legends and Bianwen of the Tang Dynasty in my country, but the article is correct and elegant, and the prose is full of charm. In addition, he quotes a large number of historical facts from Han Dynasty poetry and Chinese classical books, and the author cleverly hides them in moving storylines, giving this book a strong flavor of Chinese classical literature. This article aims to analyze the Chinese elements reflected in “Genji Monogatari” and compare its spiritual connotation with the spiritual connotation of Chinese culture. Using “Genji Monogatari” as a literary representative reflected in Japanese culture, it explores the differences between Chinese culture and Japanese culture and the outstanding manifestations of cultural exchanges between China and Japan. It has deepened our understanding of cultural exchanges between China and Japan, and jointly promoted cultural development and literary creation through mutual learning, learning from each other's strengths, and our own innovation.

Potato Puppet Theater/Beating the Beauties: A Seventeenth-century Japanese Picture Book for Children

Potato Puppet Theater/Beating the Beauties:A Seventeenth-century Japanese Picture Book for Children Pia Jolliffe (bio) and Keller Kimbrough (bio) In a fabulous trove of Japanese children's books that was sealed inside a statue of the bodhisattva Jizō in the ninth month of 1678, there is a particularly charming volume with the double title Imo jōruri (Potato Puppet Theater) and Bijin tataki (Beating the Beauties, a title that likely alludes to the act of tapping out a rhythm rather than beating anyone). [Figure 1] The book was published by Tsuruya Gohei, probably of Kyoto, sometime between 1661 and 1678, and it belonged to a child named Chōkurō, the son of a seventeenth-century merchant known as Obiya (obi-maker/seller) Jirōkichi. Chōkurō died young, and although his age at the time is unknown, upon his demise his father had Potato Puppet Theater/Beating the Beauties and nine of Chōkurō's other books and various personal possessions, including a thick sheaf of used calligraphy practice paper, a copybook of warrior pictures, and a kawaraban broadsheet—a kind of proto-news publication, in this case detailing a sensational double-suicide—placed inside a fourteenth-century image of Jizō as a memorial offering for his son. Jizō has long been associated with the Buddhist salvation of children, and Jirōkichi's decision to encase Chōkurō's personal things inside a wooden statue of the bodhisattva would have ensured the boy's connection to Jizō in the afterworld.1 Today the image stands at Izawaji Temple in Matsusaka City, Mie Prefecture, a hundred kilometers or so from the former capital of Kyoto, but when it came to be enshrined there is unknown.2 The seventeenth century is generally regarded as the beginning of Japan's early-modern period—a roughly 350-year span of relative peace, prosperity, and national unity during which the urban merchant class came to hold unprecedented economic power—and for the study of children and childhood in this period, Chōkurō's Potato Puppet Theater/Beating the Beauties is an object of great significance. As we shall show in this article, it is a precious source that addresses [End Page 197] all four of Peter Stearns's challenges in the study of childhood: the scarcity of historical data produced by children themselves; the lack of data on pre-teenage children of different genders and social statuses; the need for the history of childhood to go beyond "the West"; and the challenge of judging historical childhoods through a lens that is not distorted by modern values and ideas.3 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Cover, Imo jōruri, Bijin tataki (Potato Puppet Theater/Beating the Beauties), c. 1661–1678. Courtesy of the Izawa Town Council. [End Page 198] In its first part, Potato Puppet Theater, the book is a parodic warrior tale of the harvesting, washing, cooking, and consumption of a patch of planted potatoes. In its second part, Beating the Beauties, it is a sing-song list of the most famously beautiful women of the past and present, both historical and imagined: Yang Guifei of China; the goddess Kichijōten; the Somedono Empress; poets Ono no Komachi, Izumi Shikibu, and Koshikibu no Naishi; poet and author Murasaki Shikibu, who is best known for writing the great early eleventh-century novel/ romance The Tale of Genji; several fictional female characters from The Tale of Genji; celebrities of the seventeenth-century Shimabara licensed quarters (a Kyoto entertainment district of legalized prostitution, established in 1640); and many others. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Inside cover with drawings and a cursive signature ("Obiya Chōkurō"). Imo jōruri, Bijin tataki (Potato Puppet Theater/Beating the Beauties), c. 1661–1678. Courtesy of the Izawa Town Council. On its inside cover, the book contains the simplified cursive signature "Obiya Chōkurō" beside a crude drawing of what appears to be a man with long, curved arms, and an unidentifiable object that looks to us somewhat like a spaceship, or, perhaps, a striped potato or the face of a bug. [Figure 2] The signature suggests [End Page 199] the identity of...

Feminine Writing of Murasaki Shikibu and in The Tale of Genji

Murasaki Shikibu is one of the most famous court lady writers, or Feminine Hand, in Heian Japan. Her work The Tale of Genji, usually interpreted as revealing womens sufferings, needs an alternative explanation with a new eye. That is, a feminist voice must exist at that time, as well as unconscious feminist awareness. They have already begun to explore love, desire, and pleasure for themselves. They were even eager to express themselves in their language system, and, most importantly, they were successful in doing it. Helen Cixouss ricture Fminine theory from The Laugh of Medusa provides a new lens to look through Murasakis era and the Genji. Indeed, Murasaki can be regarded as a medieval feminist who voiced her thoughts on gender inequality in a new language system. The characters she created are individualized rather than generalized. Murasaki, a representative of many other female writers, heralded an era of female writing and entered the canon of world literature: use her body to write and never stop exploring womens own galaxy.

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji. Trans. and abridged by Dennis Washburn. The Norton Library. New York: W. W. Norton, 2022 (2015), xxvi, 821 pp.

As Edward Kamens claims in his article on The Tale of Genji in the Companion to World Literature, ed. Ken Seigneurie, vol. 2, ed. Chrstine Chism (2020), “If the ‘Azumaya’ tale-reading scene is indeed a microcosm and prototype of the monogatari of its mode of performance, the ‘Hahakigi’ ‘rainy night conversation’ is a generating turbine that not only propels Genji (and his progeny) out into the world of love and loss but which also throws out a seemingly limitless current of energy for storymaking and storytelling, giving rise and giving life to the many tales and tales-within-tales that follow in what are, for us, now, the pages of The Tale of Genji . . .” (1083–84).

The Tale of Genji and Its Chinese Precursors: Beyond the Boundaries of Nation, Class, and Gender by Jindan Ni

Reviewed by: The Tale of Genji and Its Chinese Precursors: Beyond the Boundaries of Nation, Class, and Gender by Jindan Ni Nicholas Morrow Williams (bio) The Tale of Genji and Its Chinese Precursors: Beyond the Boundaries of Nation, Class, and Gender . By Jindan Ni. Lexington Books, 2020. vii, 209 pages. $111.00, cloth; $45.00, E-book. Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji) might seem to be as familiar and well understood as anything in Japan studies, but the volume under review confirms how much within the novel remains opaque and open to further interpretation. Jindan Ni's wide-ranging study offers a fresh appreciation of the novel's bold and even "transgressive" (p. 109) qualities. While the introduction places the study appropriately in the context of previous scholarship on the Genji itself, it already raises the broader perspective of "world literature" in the vein of scholars such as David Damrosch and Wiebke Denecke. Asserting the need for "a shift away from focusing on Japanology to a perspective on comparative literature" (p. 7), Ni promises to examine the novel in relation to a number of comparative issues, such as the restrictions of class or gender on personal identity. Though this compact study may not resolve any of these issues, it demonstrates their pertinence to parallel concerns of modern theorists and within contemporary pop culture, showing the perennial and cross-cultural significance of the novel's themes. The first three of the study's six chapters deal more directly with the "Chinese precursors" of the title. Ni's first chapter compares the use of the moon as the representation of an ideal, alternative world in Taketori monogatari, Genji, and also the poetry of Bai Juyi (772–846). The diffuse argument has to do with the way that each of these uses the moon to represent longing for different modes of existence; the chapter's larger significance lies in how it establishes the framework of Ni's research, examining Murasaki Shikibu and her work in light of concerns beyond the situation of Heian Japan. The second chapter examines the "living phantom" of Lady Rokujō which wreaks such havoc in the novel, comparing its function to the Chinese story of Huo Xiaoyu, whose vengeful ghost haunts her disloyal lover. Unfortunately, Ni fails in this chapter to engage with the well-known monograph on this subject by Doris Bargen. 1 The third chapter is somewhat similar in addressing the issue of "class" in the novel, particularly in relation to the hopes of lower-ranked women to raise their status via marriage [End Page 225] to Genji. Ni shows how these hopes are frustrated and compares these women's fate to several characters in the poetry of Bai Juyi. In the second half of the monograph, Ni expands her scope. The fourth and fifth chapters rely on psychoanalytic concepts of transgression and repetition, respectively, to analyze broader structures in Genji. At the beginning of chapter 4, "Rethinking the Narratives of Fallen Women," Ni mentions AKB48 idol Minegishi Minami, who shaved her head in 2013 to demonstrate her repentance after violating her pledge not to have sexual relationships with men, and uses this contemporary example to lead into a discussion of numerous acts of transgression in the novel, ranging from the acts of kaimami to Genji's clandestine relation with Fujitsubo. Ni also cites poems by Fujitsubo (p. 122) and later the Third Princess (p. 130) that illustrate their conflicted impulses to abandon the world of suffering and remarks: "In Buddhism, every form of attachment to the human world is regarded as an obstacle to reaching peace; therefore, even the bonds of lifelong duty and affection between parents and children are also considered transgressive" (p. 123). It would be valuable to pursue this line of inquiry further and to consider the symmetrical relation between transgressions against the sociopolitical order, on the one hand, and against the ideals of Buddhist emancipation on the other, but of course to do so one would have to compare the original Japanese terms that are used for these concepts, rather than identifying them with the capacious English "transgression." Chapter 5, "Repetition, Substitution, and Tragedy," confronts directly one of the signal narratological features...

Poetyka polskiego przekładu Genji monogatari, czyli Opowieści o księciu Genjim Murasaki Shikibu

POETICS OF THE FIRST POLISH TRANSLATION OF GENJI MONOGATARI, OR THE TALE OF GENJI BY MURASAKI SHIKIBU: THE TRANSLATOR’S POINT OF VIEW The article identifies the most important translation strategies and challenges faced by the translator of the first Polish translation of Genji Monogatari, or The Tale of Genji. The work, written in 1008, is a masterpiece of not only Japanese but also world literature and is widely included in the cultural heritage of humanity. Its author, Murasaki Shikibu (?978-1025 or 1031) is considered a forerunner of modern literary fiction with a profound humanistic approach. The work itself has been translated into modern Japanese and many European languages. Originally written in classical Japanese, it is distinguished by the ambiguity of expression, lexical polysemy, elaborate honorific language, and cultural hermeticism. The author discusses how, in light of the above, the Polish translation will balance the goal of making Murasaki’s work intelligible for the Polish reader with the need of preserving the elements of ‘foreignness’ of the old Japanese culture, for the translation is intended to fulfill not only a mediating and communicative function between Polish and Japanese cultures but also a cognitive one.

Genji'nin Hikâyesi ve Üç İngilizce Yeniden Çevirisi

The Tale of Genji, (Genji Monogatari) is a written by a Japanese noble woman, Murasaki Shikibu, and is the perhaps the earliest novel ever which is revered today as a chef-d'oeuvre in the world, even though it dates back to early eleventh century. The Tale of Genji covers almost three quarters of a century. This work, which was partially translated into English by a Japanese politician, Suematsu Kenchō, in 1882 (1974) was later translated into English by three native speakers of English: Arthur Waley (1937), Edward G. Seidensticker (1976), and Royall Tyler (2001). The retranslations of The Tale of Genji provide attractive material for Translation Studies, enabling scholars to observe the dynamics of literary translation. This study was conducted within the structure of certain fields such as polysystem theories, paratexts, retranslations hypotheses and translation strategies in the domain of Translation Studies. The article focuses on the global and local translation strategies of the three English translators and compares them in order to show how these strategies affect the target text.

Murasaki’s Epistemological Awakening: Buddhist Philosophical Roots of The Tale of Genji

Abstract I approach Murasaki Shikibu’s marvelous literary pearl The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari) as analogous to glistening orbs that “come out of the disease of suffering oysters,” the suffering being the death of her beloved husband Fujiwara no Nobutaka (950?–1001). In addition to drawing evidence from the novel itself, I have relied on Murasaki’s lesser-known Poetic Memoirs and Diary that offer important insights into her state of mind and circumspect literary style. The Lotus Sūtra is the key that unlocks Murasaki’s philosophical intent, with its use of parables and poems to provoke deeper understandings of Buddhism and personal realizations. The Buddhist principle of impermanence (Sanskrit anitya; Japanese mujōkan) serves as both the aesthetic of aware and an unavoidable fact that residents of the Heian court (like those in the Lotus Sūtra’s Burning House) choose to ignore or escape by reveling in superficial pursuits of beauty and political power. Various characters in the novel attempt to follow the path to the epistemological awakening the author Murasaki sought for herself.

Connecticut State Library Spotlight

Connecticut State Library Spotlight

Anxieties of Authorship, Critique of Readership: Mishima Yukio’s Modern Noh Play Genji kuyō

Mishima Yukio's dramatic suicide half a century ago ensured that his name would forever be associated with a certain fanatic imperialism, and largely fulfilled his own wish that he would die as a military man. And yet, he was until the end foremost a literary artist, concerned with the critical reception of his written works and preoccupied with his lasting reputation as an author. This paper examines Mishima’s portrayal of the celebrity writer, as well as the potentials and limitations of literature as presented in his oft-neglected modern noh play Genji kuyō (Devotional offering for Genji, 1962). It positions the play within the long history of prayers for Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji, ca. 1008) that began in the twelfth century in response to the perceived ambiguous morality of the author Murasaki Shikibu (d. ca. 1014). Mishima's Genji kuyō provides a pointed criticism of readers, as well as anxieties regarding a writer's life and literary recognition. Though Mishima himself famously disowned it after its initial publication, Genji kuyō offers critical insights regarding the writing and reading of literature.

Women's fan writing and transformative works in eleventh-century Japan

This exploration of the literary cultures of eleventh-century Japan analyzes the ways in which the writing and reading practices of the period resemble those of modern transformative fan communities. Studying the defining fictional text of this era, The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 1021), within the framework of fan studies demonstrates how existing so-called canonical material was transformed into a vehicle for female-centric reimaginings of dominant narratives. The circumstances of the work's authorship and its initial reception are examined via the author's own diary and The Sarashina Diary (ca. 1059), a memoir written by an early reader of the Genji, providing insight into both individual fan identity and the extensive female-led fan communities of the period.

TRIẾT LÍ THẨM MĨ CỦA MĨ CẢM AWARE TRONG TRUYỆN GENJI CỦA MURASAKI SHIKIBU

Japanese culture has flourishing, diversity and unique culture in Asia. Appearance of the aesthetic system in the early period and profound effects of aesthetic conception on artistic and cultural life are typical causes connecting the national cultural identities. In which, aware aesthetic has a great influence and enduring vitality in national culture, especially in literature. The article presents the theoretical framework concerning aesthetic philosophy ingeneral and aware aesthetic in particular. From this poit onward, study focuses on philosophical aesthetic of aesthetic such as the time of life, the beauty and loneliness throughout The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. This paper explores concept the life and the beauty in Japanese thoughts in the Heian period.

Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji: Philosophical Perspectives ed. by James McMullen

Reviewed by: Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji: Philosophical Perspectives ed. by James McMullen Sonja Arntzen (bio) Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji: Philosophical Perspectives. Edited by James McMullen. Oxford University Press, New York, 2019. xxii, 305 pages. $99.00, cloth; $24.95, paper. This volume, comprised of eight essays that examine different aspects of Genji monogatari from a "philosophical perspective," is the sixth in a series, "Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature," which ranges from the Oedipus Plays of Sophocles to Franz Kafka's The Trial. In his foreword, the series editor, Richard Eldridge, posits that a rift between philosophy and literature in the Western tradition began as early as Plato when he had Socrates "criticize the poets and attempt to displace Homer as the authoritative [End Page 184] articulator and transmitter of human experience and values" (p. vii). The aim of this series is to repair that rift. Since this volume is the fourth major work on the Genji to appear in seven years (including the new translation by Dennis Washburn),1 my first reaction was to wonder whether another volume on the tale was needed at this moment. After reading this engaging volume, however, I was inspired to reflect philosophically on the source of that reaction and recognized that such a concern is rooted in the utilitarianism that dominates North American culture. There is no compelling reason for "need" to be an important criterion when judging works of literary reflection. I give a brief overview of the eight essays and then reflect on the scholarly contribution of this volume as a whole. For the volume's first essay, which is entitled "The Structure of Genji's Career: Myth, Politics, and Pride," Royall Tyler was tasked to provide an outline of the novel. He chose to focus on Genji's political career and to reveal in detail how the plot line of the rivalry between Genji and his elder half-brother Suzaku is underpinned by a myth told in the oldest Japanese chronicles about the rivalry between two brothers: Hikohohodemi, who had the luck of the mountains, and Honosusori, who had the luck of the sea. The result is a thought-provoking analysis of the first 40 chapters of Genji monogatari. As Tyler himself admits, however, it sets "aside most of the work's best known and most admired characters, scenes, and themes" (p. 36). Notably, all the women characters vital to the narrative are sidelined. If the reading focuses on the hero, a clear, linear narrative line can be discerned, but if the reading focuses on the women characters, the structure appears episodic. In the end, this essay confirms Tyler's own assertion, that trying to grasp Genji monogatari as a whole "resembles striving to capture one picture of a landscape that changes with every hour, season, and play of light, as well as with the viewer's own mood and interests" (p. 36). The second essay, "The Epistemology of Space in The Tale of Genji" by Wiebke Denecke, employs the concept of space to recuperate the importance of the tale's engagement with China "as a geographical, political, social, textual, linguistic, literary, material, and aesthetic presence" (p. 69). She assembles an impressive array of Chinese references in the novel to show how the narrative structures space and how space is known by the characters. Denecke avoids establishing an essential duality between wa [End Page 185] (Japanese) and kan (Chinese) elements. Rather, she emphasizes a playful "'juxtaposition' of variables" along a wa/kan spectrum. In this way, she extends some of the critical territory opened up by Thomas Lamarre's Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription (Duke University Press, 2000). In a daring conclusion, she addresses whether her own essay is "philosophical overkill" and in so doing interrogates the entire project of the present volume and even the series. Drawing an insightful analogy with the Eurocentric resistance to considering the Chinese tradition of "masters literature" as true philosophy, she argues not for "philosophy" in Genji but "philosophicality." It is a stirring polemic. The third essay, "Ritual, Moral Personhood, and Spirit Possession in The Tale of Genji" by volume editor James McMullen, examines...

Literature, Truth and History in Genji Monogatari by Murasaki Shikibu

Literature, Truth and History in Genji Monogatari by Murasaki Shikibu

Some contributions on the experience and therapy of depression published in the Italian journal Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane («Psychotherapy and the Human Sciences»)

The author reflects about a psychoanalytic interpretation of The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari), considered by many to be the greatest novel of the ancient Japanese literature. It was composed by Murasaki Shikibu (about 1.000 A.D.), a lady-in-waiting for the Empress Akiko at the imperial court in Heian, now Kyoto. The tale is mostly full of poetical explorations about themes of love, affection, friendship, loyalty, into the social political Heian’s world and in conformity with Buddhist conviction in the vanity of the world. A comprehensive reading of the text including Murasaki’s life and her background, gives us the possibility to catch the human attempt to cure depression through narration. Kirsch et al. in 2002 studied all 47 randomized clinical trials (RCT) submitted by pharmaceutical companies to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval of the six most prescribed Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI) antidepressants. The mean difference between drug and placebo was less than 2 points on the 21-item (62-point) Hamilton Depression Scale (which is the version used in many of the these RTCs). This superiority to placebo, although statistically significant, was not clinically significant. Furthermore, 57% of the trials funded by the pharmaceutical industry failed to show a significant difference between drug and placebo. Most of these negative data were not published and were accessible only by gaining access, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, to FDA documents. This research is discussed in light of the wider problem of the roles of medications and interpersonal relationship in psychiatric practice. The polarity of relatedness and self-definition («anaclitic» and «introjective»), fundamental to the development of psychoanalytic theory and consistent with a number of other approaches to personality theory, provides the basis for articulating aspects of personality development, variations in normal personality organization, the explanation of a wide-range of psychopathology, and aspects of the therapeutic process in both short and long-term treatments. The contributions of this fundamental polarity to these aspects of personality theory speak to the validity of this theoretical model and the importance of the fundamental polarity of relatedness and self-definition. The formulations and findings discussed in this paper indicate that there is much to be gained by going beyond the symptom focus of contemporary diagnostic nosology presented in DSM-III and DSM-IV, and seeking instead to identify underlying principles of personality organization. Empirical evidence shows that empirically supported treatments are helpful for many mental disorders. However, in most countries the great majority of people do not have access to psychological therapies. The English Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) program aims to improve the access to psychological therapies by training over 10,500 new therapists in empirically supported treatments and deploying them for the treatment of depression and anxiety disorders. IAPT treats over 560,000 patients per year, obtains clinical outcome data on 98.5% of them, and this information is in the public domain. Around half of these patients recover and about two thirds of them show benefits. The clinical and economic arguments on which IAPT is based are presented, along with details on the service model, how the program is implemented, and findings updated to July 2017. Limitations and future directions are discussed.

O Conto de Genji, de Virginia Woolf

Em 1925, na revista Vogue, a escritora inglesa Virginia Woolf escreveu uma resenha empolgada pela tradução do orientalista Arthur Waley para “O Conto de Genji”, atribuído à escritora e poeta Murasaki Shikibu, considerado um dos primeiros romances japoneses, escrito no começo do século XI. Mesmo que curto, o texto dá conta da prática de crítica literária promovida pela autora na época, aliando a pesquisa na autoria de mulheres e o sentimento do que chamava de leitor/a comum diante de um texto literário, sem amarras acadêmicas.

Unbinding “The Pillow Book”: The Many Lives of a Japanese Classic by Gergana Ivanova

Reviewed by: Unbinding “The Pillow Book”: The Many Lives of a Japanese Classic by Gergana Ivanova Joannah Peterson UNBINDING “THE PILLOW BOOK”: THE MANY LIVES OF A JAPANESE CLASSIC, by Gergana Ivanova. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 240 pp. $65.00 cloth; $64.99 ebook. Gergana Ivanova’s Unbinding “The Pillow Book”: The Many Lives of a Japanese Classic illuminates the complex reception history of one of Japan’s most celebrated and widely adapted texts. The Pillow Book (c. 1002), written during the height of Japan’s Heian era (794–1185), contains author Sei Shōnagon’s account of her time as a lady-in-waiting in the service of Empress Teishi. The text draws upon a variety of literary genres (memoir, essay, lists, anecdotes, poetry), fostering great diversity in the ways in which it has been rewritten and adapted over the centuries, variously as erotic parody, educational material for women, nativist rhetoric, and even as a prototypical Heian blog. Its reception has been impacted by conceptions of its author’s feminine gender, comparisons to the canonical Tale of Genji (written by female contemporary Murasaki Shikibu around 1008), and the many interpretative communities through which it has traversed. As Ivanova demonstrates, The Pillow Book is a consummate “case study of how literary criticism, gender structures, and the status of women have changed over time” (p. 1). Japanese markets have recently seen a surging interest in the classics, from scholarly commentaries to comics. Similarly, the afterlives of classical texts have gained attention in English language publications. Scholarly interest in The Pillow Book is reflected in vital works by Keller Kimbrough, Linda Chance, Evelyne Lesigne-Audoly, and Valerie Henitiuk. However, it is due to Ivanova’s tremendous efforts that The Pillow Book now enjoys a more diachronically all-embracing study of its long and fascinating history. Impeccably researched and well-articulated, Ivanova’s monograph contributes to recent re-conceptualizations of “reception history” and “canon formation”: that is, the shift away from a presupposed stable “original” text and a heightened interest in the ways in which texts are continually re-made. Ivanova extends considerations of Michael Emmerich’s work on the Tale of Genji (2013) by emphasizing the importance of secondary writings in the face of a lost and unknowable original, as well as notions from Joshua S. Mostow’s work on the Tales of Ise (2014) regarding the ways in which texts have been used to advance social and political goals. Ivanova’s book breaks further ground by showing that “even within the same historical setting, [The Pillow Book] did not perform the same [End Page 349] functions for audiences of differing genders” (p. 2). Ivanova also reveals new insights into educational texts for women by bringing disparate adaptations into a new context, one based on readership rather than genre. Furthermore, Ivanova’s innovative use of previously overlooked materials, such as parodic rewritings of The Pillow Book, enables her to broaden her interpretive scope while at the same time challenging previous notions of the utility of parody, thus demonstrating that conceptualizations of genre continue to impact views of The Pillow Book’s reception. Chapter one, “What is The Pillow Book?,” serves as a highly accessible introduction to Ivanova’s theoretical stakes, research parameters, and ambitious goals. Chapter two, “(Re)constructing the Text and Early Modern Scholarship,” reveals the ways in which early modern scholars, seeking to make the work more comprehensible by compiling an authoritative text from the many variants in circulation, assigned a single genre to a work that is comprised of many. This narrow classification had profound effects on later characterizations of Sei’s work, namely, the designation of the work as a zuihitsu or miscellany, which was first used by nativist scholars to assert Japan’s literary superiority and later used to argue that it was “random, spontaneous, and trivial” (p. 48). Chapter two also situates changing perceptions of Sei’s artistry within the seventeenth century’s burgeoning publishing industry. In showing how the demand “to turn Japan’s literary heritage into ‘common knowledge’” shaped texts such as The Pillow Book in ways that had long-lasting effects, Ivanova makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the...

Frayed Fabrications: Feminine Mobility, Surrogate Bodies, and Robe Usage in Noh Drama

How should we understand the role robes play within noh dance-drama's enactments of femininity? In the above poem Genji's jilted lover, Rokujō, bemoans her inability to keep her vengeful spirit from besieging the Lady Aoi, for whom Genji has spurned her. Within the worldview of Murasaki Shikibu's early eleventh-century narrative, to bind the hem was to tether the restless spirit to its host's body, like a tourniquet stanching spectral energies from seeping to infect victims. The famous noh play Aoi no Ue (Lady Aoi), in which Aoi is played not by an actor but by a short-sleeved robe (kosode), activates the poem's metaphor onstage. Moreover, the Japanese poem's final term, tsuma, signifies both as “robe hem” and “wife,” foregrounding a gendered dimension sutured to problematic notions of feminine deportment and mobility whose dramatic manifestations merit exploration.

The Tale of Genji and Heian Literature: Reception History, Translations, and New Frontiers - Mapping Courtship and Kinship in Classical Japan: The Tale of Genji and Its Predecessors. By Doris G. Bargen. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2015. xix, 372 pp. ISBN: 9780824851545 (cloth, also available in paper and as e-book). - The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World

The Tale of Genji and Heian Literature: Reception History, Translations, and New Frontiers - Mapping Courtship and Kinship in Classical Japan: The Tale of Genji and Its Predecessors. By Doris G. Bargen. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2015. xix, 372 pp. ISBN: 9780824851545 (cloth, also available in paper and as e-book). - The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World

The interlingual translation between premodern China and Japan: Bai Juyi’s poetry and Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji

ABSTRACTMurasaki Shikibu (c. 973 or 978 – c. 1014 or 1031) was a Japanese court lady, who wrote The Tale of Genji about a millennium ago. Her Genji is the most popular and widely read fictional narrative in the Japanese literary canon. Genji has been revered as expressing the aesthetics and identity of Japanese. Bai Juyi (772–846), one of the most admired poets from China’s Tang Dynasty (618–907), left numerous verses and influenced East Asian Literature. This paper intends to explore Murasaki Shikibu’s dialogic engagement with Bai Juyi to show a journey of literary translation and creation. It is argued that Murasaki Shikibu transforms the senses or the essence of Bai’s poetry into a poetic realm for her prose. The author argues that the interlingual translating practice of Murasaki Shikibu is not simply a matter of borrowing from literary sources; it is a rewriting that goes beyond indigenous aesthetics and then expands the possibilities for literary creation. This approach will also enable researchers of translation studies to trace tangible evidence of influence as a thread that connects traditional Japanese and Chinese literary studies with contemporary translation theories.