The World's First Novel?
Like many people I’ve been using COVID travel restrictions as a reason to travel by reading. In the evenings, or on those long Saturdays/Sundays, made even more luxurious and easy to escape by rainy weather, I curl up in my big, soft, reading chair and tackle the mammoth Japanese classic Genji Monogatari or The Tale of Genji by the lady Murasaki Shikibu. As I read I enjoy a long and fragrant cup of tiguanyin or perhaps a steaming brew of genmaicha, a wonderfully savory Japanese green tea with toasted brown rice. In preparation for this small, nightly pleasure, I’ve gathered a notebook and one of my favorite fountain pens (really an array of fountain pens and ink as I write down so many gorgeous quotes about calligraphy).
He prepared the letter with exquisite care, writing on light brown Korean paper.”
“The note was written on Michinokuni paper, which lent it an old-fashioned aura, but Genji was a little surprised, shocked even, at the seductive allure of the calligraphy, which was embellished with refined flourishes.”
Step into my library, pull up a chair, and I’ll pour you a cup of tea while we talk my book selection for September: The Tale of Genji.
The Tale of Genji with my bullet journal and a Sailor Pro Gear Slim Shikiori Dragon Palace on a day when I was working from the bedroom during quarantine. I like to take all of my notes by hand, using fountain pens.
Those of you following me on Instagram on The Metropolitanist are aware that I have spent the better part of around two months slowly making my way through the no less than monumental The Tale of Genji translated by Dennis Washburn (who has received a somewhat less than enthusiastic review from Ian Buruma in The New Yorker but which was the chosen edition sold at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in preparation for their The Tale of Genji: A Japanese Classic Illuminated exhibition, which I am sorry to say I missed). And, now that I am nearing the end (I’ve been deferring it by reading some scholarship instead of the book) I wanted to do a writeup on why you should join me in adding it to your library, or why The Tale of Genji is a work worthy of being added to your library. For those of you who are new to the Maison, I have an ongoing series of blog posts on Building Your Library focused on curating a collection of classics for the aspiring, casual connoisseur of literature. The idea is to put together a personal collection of world classics that are worth having for a lifetime. The Tale of Genji is one such work for both its influence on Japanese, and later world literature.
So, why is The Tale of Genji important? In English people think of The Tale of Genji as the first novel ever written, an idea that we could problematize for any number of reasons ranging from the fact that first novels are never consciously novels in the minds of their authors which delimits or opens up the possibilities of what they can be, to it is remarkably Eurocentric to relegate this work ahistorically to a European genre of literature that undoubtedly limits our understanding of it. But, a quick google search for the first novel ever written quickly reveals that Genji Monogatari is, in the Western tradition of the novel, generally agreed to be the first according to the BBC, the Encyclopædia Britannica, and the Guardian, so, let’s begin from the starting point that, whether you subscribe to the belief that The Tale of Genji is a novel, or not, to express a command of the novel tradition some familiarity with this text is a must. Here is a brief summary.
The Tale of Genji is a work of prose literature (though, evidently it was prose and poetry mixed) written in Japanese (a vernacular language versus the more academic Chinese that male authors wrote in at the time) written by the female author Murasaki Shikibu (a sobriquet or nickname) in the eleventh century. The text was in circulation as early as 1008 according to Aileen Gatten in her article “The Order of the Early Chapters in the Genji monogatari” in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. Shikibu was a “gentlewoman belonging to a minor branch of the Hokke Fujiwara clan” (Gatten 5) during the Heian period, an imperial period known for its unique and highly cultivated cultural life. She “served as lady-in-waiting to Empress Shōshi” (5), at least in part as a result of the success of her writing according to Ian Buruma. The tale follows Genji, the son of the then Emperor and a lesser consort. Early in the narrative, Genji, despite being the Emperor’s favorite and a beautiful child known as “the radiant prince” is made a “commoner” in order to resolve any discord regarding the line of succession. The work traces four generations of Genji’s family, with the central narrative consisting of Genji’s low birth, his rise due to his extraordinary beauty and talent (he is a masterful musician, calligrapher, artist and connoisseur), his subsequent fall from grace and exile, and then his redemption and the astronomical rise of his family line into the imperial family. This narrative is told with extraordinary nuance, bringing into vivid, living detail the elegant daily life of Genji as well as a sense of other worldly foreboding in the form of a malevolent spirit/ghost who haunts Genji throughout his lifetime, taking the lives of those nearest to him. To give you some sense of the breathtakingly poetic prose as it is interpreted and translated by Dennis Washburn.
“Her mother looked after the appearance of her daughter’s salon, which, it goes without saying, had a stylish allure and unrivaled elegance, and she made sure every little detail was perfect. As a result of her efforts, officials and noblemen at the palace regarded the chambers of the Kiritsubo as the site of an especially brilliant, stimulating salon, and they came to admire the women who served there, each of whom had her own special qualities.”
“The moon came out, the wine flowed, and they talked of the old days. The moon, shrouded in mist, had an ethereal quality, and the soft breezes that followed the rain carried the enchanting scent of plum blossoms, which mingled with the ineffable fragrances of the incense that filled the chamber. It was an intoxicating atmosphere for all present.”
When music is performed during the melancholy of autumn, the notes weave together with the chirring of crickets to produce indescribably moving overtones”
Morning coffee and The Tale of Genji
Fascinatingly, because this text is so old (so old it was passed along for centuries through hand copying) no one is certain what the intended order of chapters ought to be. The way most translations are organized is by ordering the narrative chronologically (in other words, putting Genji’s life in chronological order not in the chronological order in which the chapters were written). While Japanese scholar Leon Zolbrod compellingly argues in his analysis that the chronological order reveals that The Tale of Genji “may be defined as a romance in four parts” (29) in his article for The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese. But Gatten has argued that we must “rid ourselves of the comfortable delusion that there is only one Genji monogatari” (17) before going on to detail how Abe Akio “an eminent scholar of the Japanese classics” has put together an alternative ordering for the chapters that divides the early chapters into two different narratives. The first narrative is the Wakamurasaki Group and the second is the Hahakigi Group, with the Wakamurasaki group representing the main narrative and the Hahakigi group representing a later return to Genji’s early years and exploits. Gatten places the Kiritsubo Chapter first (as it already is) then asks readers to read in the order:
Wakamurasaki
Momiji no ga
Hana no en
Aoi
Sakaki
Hanachirusato
Suma
Akashi
and Miotsukushi
Don’t worry the titles are given in romanized Japanese and translated in the Washburn edition though there is no evidence confirming that the original tales actually had titles. The currently existing titles are names of objects so associated with characters in The Tale of Genji that those characters come to be known by the names of those objects. For example, Yūgao is translated “The Lady of the Evening Faces” and this chapter recounts Genji’s romantic encounter with her in a highly significant episode of the text. Following reading in this order, Abe Akio then recommends returning to the Hahakigi Group beginning with:
Hahakigi
Utsusemi
Yūgao
and Suetsumuhana
Morning coffee and more The Tale of Genji
The remaining chapters can then be read chronologically. I’ve gone through the trouble of laying out this alternative ordering because it brings to mind a much later, postmodern, Latin American Boom Generation novel Rayuela or Hopscotch in English, by Julio Cortázar, a canonical work of Argentine literature, itself world renowned. In Rayuela, Cortázar provides a chronological ordering of his chapters, but he also gives an alternative ordering that allows the reader to either choose which order they will read, or experience the narrative in two different ways. It is a provocative maneuver, but also a reminder that narratives can be told quite differently based on the chapter ordering. In some sense, The Tale of Genji can be made to tell more than one story, and you can return to this volume and study it fruitfully again and again for different modes of experience. I personally planned to return to the beginning and reread the Kiritsubo Chapter, and at the very least I am going to try reading the Wakamurasaki Chapter directly after to see the effect, but according to Gatten it gives the narrative a more cohesive feel.
The subject of Cortázar then brings us to another subject: why it is absolutely necessary for a Western literary connoisseur to be familiar with Genji monogatari. While I doubt Cortázar’s chapter ordering came from the question of what order The Tale of Genji was written in, one thing is true, another iconic Argentine writer and beloved magical realist: Jorge Luis Borges advised his readers to consider reading The Tale of Genji if they enjoyed his work, strongly suggesting that Shikibu’s text influenced his own, itself a fascinating subject in relation to Borges widely read “The Library of Babel.” But Shikibu’s influence extended far beyond Borges.
The original translation into English of The Tale of Genji by Arthur Waley was published in 1925. Waley himself was a peripheral member of the famous Bloomsbury Group, and Virginia Woolf (one of the leading, if not the leading, British modernist author) wrote a review of the translation. In an article provocatively titled “The Tale of Genji As a Modern Novel” by Brian Phillips appearing in The Hudson Review in 2010 traces the relevance of Genji to the modernists. Early reviews often compared The Tale of Genji to translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky translated by Constance Garnett (385), so if you like weighty Russian tomes The Tale of Genji is probably for you. It was further regularly compared to Proust, with reviewers, according to Phillips suggesting passages from Shikibu’s work could easily be grafted into Proust’s ambitious, seven volume In Search of Lost Time. At the same time, modernists were heavily influenced by Asian literature (heavily Orientalized, indeed, with modernist poets like William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound translating Classical Chinese poetry, for more on this Eliot Weinberger has a great anthology called The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry which features these suspect (too inventive) translations alongside new professional translations. Similarly, Imagists were inspired by haikus, Irish modernist William Butler Yeats was taken with Noh drama (which, if I remember correctly also influenced French avant-garde playwright Antonin Artaud) before the translation of Genji which served as source material for many Noh Plays, while Pound and the Imagists were particularly interested in mono no aware haikus, “mono no aware, one of the central concepts of Japanese aesthetics, had been formulated in the eighteenth century, by the scholar Motoori Norinaga, in his work on The Tale of Genji” (Phillips 386). Japonisme influenced Art Nouveau and Cubism (Phillips 386).
As a scholar of late nineteenth-to early twentieth century Argentine, U.S., and French literature all of this is of immediate relevance to my own knowledge of my time period, but I imagine for the lover of Virginia Woolf, Proust, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, and so on, The Tale of Genji presents an opportunity to deepen our knowledge of World Literature, its impact on some of these authors, as well as a unique chance to imaginatively travel to the lost time and world of the Heian period, which is not to suggest we can gain a command of it, but as with reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and glimpsing however imperfectly the Belle Epoque reading Tolstoy and glimpsing the rarified world of the Russian aristocracy, The Tale of Genji offers a mesmerizing and highly imaginative if refracted through translation, view of a unique period in Imperial Japanese culture. Regardless of whether you read the work as a whole, consecutively as I have done, or in pieces (keeping in mind many Japanese readers for centuries had to content themselves with hand copied fragments received in random order with no promise of ever accessing the story in full) The Tale of Genji is a uniquely moving work of literature worth adding to your collection. And, since reading such a long work presents its own unique challenges, stay tuned for my future reflections on reading “long” works of literature and feel free to leave your questions about that in the comments.
Is The Tale of Genji new to you, or have you been meaning to read it? Let me know in the comments, and, as always, remember, if you feel substantively taught by this blog post (which takes hours to write) consider supporting Maison Metropolitanist and The Metropolitanist by shopping in the Maison Metropolitanist bookshop where you can find The Tale of Genji and my next read The Ladies Paradise amongst other texts I’ve chosen, or contributing via The Metropolitanist’s ko-fi.
