Books: The Tale of Genji (Waki Yamato)

Genji and Murasaki spend a lazy afternoon together.

Details of courtly behavior aside, Genji is an amazingly modern story about the way people shape each other’s destinies and desires, sometimes without even trying. If Genji is a modern piece of work (and I feel it is), it is so not because of what it sees but how penetratingly it sees it. The whole milieu may be alien — which was what drew me into it in the first place — but the way it is seen and dissected is not. Modernism has allegedly given way to post-modernism, in which the devices of storytelling and depiction of psychological acuity are more interesting to the author than the actual story, but all this has done is created a vacuum where pop culture, largely unreconstructed modernism — like manga — rushes in to fill. What does it say when a Japanese princess who lived almost a thousand years ago wrote more absorbing and, in its own way, realistic fiction than most authors today?

Genji’s titular character, the son of Emperor Kiritsubo during Japan’s Heian era, is one of the more unusual heroes of classical Japanese literature. Rather than being a warrior or a leader or a sage, he’s a staggeringly handsome young man who leads a charmed life. Any woman who crosses his path can become his, but at the same time he’s not a thoroughgoing rake — because the story is told from his point of view, we have the advantage of empathy, both for his amours and for him. He loves (and is loved by) one of his father’s new wives after his mother dies young, and spends the rest of his life trying, however futilely, to recapture that feeling with anyone else he can find.

The irony is that a great many women would be only too happy to be seduced by him, but he wants something he can keep — although the cost turns out to be more than he can bear. It is, ultimately, the story of one man’s growing crisis of conscience when he tries to do right by all the women in his life, and ultimately cannot do right by any of them. (I wonder if this is part of where many anime series like Tenchi Muyo, all of which feature one guy surrounded by dozens of competing women, come from?) Eventually his dilemma becomes self-fulfilling: If women want me, and I also want them, why should we hesitate at joining together? Probably because, as with many things in life, nothing is ever that simple, and there are the messy matters of duty that get in the way.

Most of Genji deals with a few basic parallel plotlines that intertwine heavily and affect each other, much as their respective characters do. The most important is Genji’s relationship with Lady Murasaki, the abandoned daughter of a prince whom Genji finds himself drawn to strongly. She is bright for her age, startlingly talented, and takes a shine to him as well — and sees herself as being a potential future wife to him. In that time this would not be so shocking; one of the smarter attributes of this particular edition of the story is how the relationship between them becomes sexual once she is of age, and how the jarring consequences of that are not whitewashed.

But before that happens, Genji brings her up in a fashion reminiscent of an older brother mixed with a father. The formerly self-seeking Genji finds himself with something to care about — but, again, there is irony: he only cares about her, it seems, as an adjunct to his own self-image. He brings her up so that she might prosper, and so that he can take credit for having done such a fine job with her. And then he deflowers her, not so much out of lust or even a sense of power over her as a sense that if there is anyone best suited to the job, it might as well be him. Murasaki feels betrayed, but eventually brokers forgiveness with him on the condition that he choose one woman over all others.

Much of the ultimate impact of Genji is deliberate and played out over a long period of time. It’s not the sort of story where everything comes to a single, definite conclusion. There is a meteoric rise, and then a slow, sad decline, where one by one Genji’s privileges in the world he has surrounded himself with fall through. One of the women he has been having a dalliance with is the future wife of the crown prince, and from that he is ultimately stripped of his rank and exiled. The Emperor’s daughter bears a child by Genji, widely believed to be the Emperor’s own son, but only they know the truth, and after the Emperor’s death she strips herself of rank and becomes a nun.

In a even greater irony, when the son comes of age and finds out about the relationship, he’s only too proud to name Genji as his father — but it’s too late for Genji himself to enjoy such accolades. At the very end, with everything else in his life swept aside, Genji makes one final try for love with a girl who is not pretty, not especially talented, but has the one thing that he needs the most of in his life — unfettered, gentle honesty — and is, amazingly, rebuffed, if only because she feels he deserves better. If only she knew.

As far as adaptations go, nothing compares to the original story, of course. But one of the advantages of this retelling is how it allows someone to also savor the language and rhythms of the original without unduly struggling against its complexities. The manga helps lift that out of the way, and clears the road for travel right into the book’s heart. It’s not bad on its own, but any sensible reader should never forget where it came from, and see it simply as a signpost on that road.

Yamato brings the story to life with lush, graceful visuals that are borrowed from shojo manga, or girl’s comics. The men are at least as effeminately attractive as the women, and there’s no shortage of gorgeous artwork (characters and backgrounds alike) throughout the whole of the book. The book is worth reading strictly for the artwork; comic fans will have no end of treasures to savor here. That it is all in black and white makes it all the more striking; it’s one of the few stories of this variety where I remembered colors that weren’t on the page, thanks to much of the magnificent original prose remaining intact. However, much of the story is told in internal monologue and visual asides rather than straight-out action, which makes it move far more slowly. It’s not a book for impatient or uninvolved readers, and the sheer size of the cast can make keeping track of the story difficult. 

The best way to read Genji, as manga or in its original form, may be at least twice: once for flavor, and then again for the actual plotting. That was how I experienced it, and even on subsequent readings I felt that the environment, the milieu, was the real main character of the story. These people we see are just passengers on the train. The same thing happened when I read Samuel Delaney’s Dhalgren: the characters were backdrop and setting. The real main character of the story was the strange city they were trapped in, or maybe even the peculiar construction of the story itself, was a protagonist. The same goes for Murasaki’s court, a place where time seems to have been stopped by the sheer force of human longing.