Results tagged “Lady Murasaki”

The Times has a nice little piece in their travel section about the anniversary of the authorship of the Tale of Genji. Memo to self: check out one of the museums in question if I ever get over there.

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As a general rule, the Classics Illustrated version of any story is going to be thinner than the original, and Waki Yamato’s comic adaptation of the immensely languid (and immense) Tale of Genji is no exception. The original remains surpassingly readable, if long and involved; there is a new translation by Royall Tyler that is far truer to the spirit of the original than the more-commonly read Edward Seidenstecker version (which was how I got exposed to the book). Lady Murasaki had, like so many other women in her age, all the time in the world to tell her story, and left nothing out. She was credited with writing history’s first modern novel as such, and that it can be not only read today but savored and seen as insightful and relevant is saying a lot.

The manga version condenses and omits, as you might imagine, but it does this with remarkable fluidity and vibrancy. I am only partly inclined to believe that Japanese readers are more innately familiar with the story than Western ones — that’s as naive as thinking all Americans are intimately familiar with the Bible — but things are so elegantly telescoped here that it’s hard to see how it hasn’t been internalized by the author. Published in four volumes of some 150 pages each, this retelling preserves almost all of the original story’s plotting and, most importantly, its nuances of character. So much of what happens in Genji turns on the smallest details of a person’s behavior, so this is critical. In its original incarnation it shows a strikingly modern sense of psychological acuity; this version brings that even more sharply into focus by showing rather than telling.