Section 3b, Pre-Modern Literature | Session 1, Panel
Chair: Haruo Shirane (Columbia University)
Presenters: Lewis Cook, Yoko Miyakawa, Michael Emmerich
Few texts in the history of Japanese literature have had such pervasive force in defining the historical contours of Japanese culture as The Tale of Genji. From very shortly after the first manuscripts went into circulation, and ever since, diverse recensions and editions of Genji have been taken as the starting point for the widest variety of scholarly and popular interpretations, literary and poetic reprisions, visual and plastic representations, transmutations in many genres.
Such responses to the canonical text are conventionally described under the rubrics of 'transmission' or 'reception', emphasizing the locus of agency at one end or the other of an activity of "sending / receiving" (denju) modeled, tacitly, on fictive ideals of unmediated communication. We venture instead the term "iteration," shifting the focus from the transaction to its mutant products, and emphasizing that while frequently conceived of as re-productive, the processes of transmission / reception are more regularly allied to deviation than to repetition.
This panel aims to explore aspects of iteration, in this sense, of The Tale of Genji by examining three distinctive instances from the Muromachi period to the late Edo period. The first is a study by Lewis Cook on the difficulties early commentators on Genji faced in reconciling the "realistic" effects of allusion, reference, and historical precedent with the undeniable evidence that the text was a work of fiction, and one with little credible precedent qua monogatari.
The second paper, by Miyakawa Youko, is a study of kuge and buke cultural transaction in early 18th c. Edo, centered on the activities of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu and his "realization" of the fictional Rokujou Palace from The Tale of Genji , based on largely unexplored material in the diary of Oogimachi Machiko.
The third paper is a examination by Michael Emmerich of Ryuutei Tanehiko's early 19th c. Nise murasaki inaka genji, a "pastiche" of Genji which was both a publishing sensation and a text of immense complexity. Mr. Emmerich argues that questions of transmission of the literary canon in Tanehiko ' s work entail important theoretical questions about the pertinent systems of text and genre.
Lewis Cook (Queens College, C.U.N.Y.)
One obstacle in the way of a attaining a historical grasp of the long and convoluted tradition of medieval commentary on Genji is that even if we are confident that we know what the business of commentary ought to be, it is unlikely that the late Heian and Kamakura-era authors of Genjishaku, Okuiri, Shimeishou,Kakaishou, etc., the earliest extant commentaries on the text, shared our certainties. An effective solution to this obstacle, I believe, is to approach the question inductively, examining the topics Medieval readers and scholars writing in the margins of Genji felt compelled to address, and asking: why those particular topics among others?
Four of the most distinctive such topics are poetic allusion (hikiuta), precedents (tameshi and junkyo), narrative structures (comprised of chronology, toshidate, and genealogy, keizu), and parabasis (soushiji). The hypothesis of the present paper (part of a larger work-in-progress) is that the underlying thread joining these four topics describes with some precision the intersection of the concepts of genre and fictionality, in turn suggesting why so much of what interested commentators on Genji could not be accounted for by means of the exegetical apparatus - notably the use of allegoresis to support typological and anagogic readings - brought to bear on the already securely canonical Kokinshuu and Isemonogatari.
One problem here is that "monogatari" is a genre defined by formal features which have no direct bearing on the question of fiction ality . I n this respect it is significant that Genji is both a monogatari and a fiction but is a work without decisive precedent, earlier fictional monogatari being clearly marked as such by emphatic reliance on motifs of fantasy.
The difficulties of assigning Genji a genre without erasing its re calcitrance to classification as historical or poetic narrative, on the one hand, or as fantasy on the other, may help explain why early commentar ies seem to push Genji towards one well-precedented genre or another (history, biography, utagatari, uta-nikki) . This kind of taxonomic pressure becomes, by the mid-14 th c. if not earlier, a leitmotif of the emerging dominant tradition of Genji commentary, a tradition that tends by sheer force of continuity to obscure the differences among successive readings of Genji.
If our objective is to understand the history of medieval Genji commentary, rather than its participation in tradition, we must look at the foci of contention, prominently located around the topics mentioned above - poetic allusion, historical reference or precedent, narrative structure, and parabasis - and examine how each impinges on larger questions of genre and fictionality.
徳川五代将軍綱吉は、柳沢吉保（１６５８－１７１４）を寵愛して、吉保は、低い身分から大老（将軍を補佐した最高の役職）格に至った。 彼は側室に迎えたのが正親町町子（１６５３－１７３３）。町子の父母 ( 正親町公通・水瀬氏信の女) は共に霊元院に親しい環境にあった。 町子を側室にしたことで吉保は公通を仲介役に公家文化の吸収を図る。霊元院や公家に和歌添削を願い､古典席の下賜にあずかり、吉保が設計した和歌の庭「六議園」に勅撰名所を願い、 江戸下向の公家や将軍家関係者の来訪を得て和歌を読み交わすのがその代表例である。中でも吉保が切実に願っていたのは、堂上風の和歌詠作の能力を磨くことであった。 そうした実感を『源氏物語』の文体をまね、吉保を光源氏に、柳沢邸を六条院に見立てて描くのが町子の『松陰日記』である。
ところで、総じて柳沢家の評判がよくない。吉保の出世を妬んだ世間が、吉保生前から様々の逸話を作り上げ、よしやすを悪者に仕立てたからである。 そのため、柳沢家が齎した公家と武家の文化交流など重要視されないで来た。ここに綱吉の時代、吉保が培った公家と武家の文化交流の姿を、 江戸期における唯一の公家出身の女性作家町子の日記を手がかりに、報告したいのである。
Michael Emmerich (PhD candidate, Columbia University)
Texts dealing with Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji) were written, published, and staged throughout the Tokugawa period (1600-1867), but none achieved anything like the popularity of Ryuu tei Tanehiko's (1783-1842) Nise Murasaki Inaka Genji (A Fake Murasaki and a Rustic Genji, 1829-42).
This lavishly illustrated adaptation (hon'an) of the eleventh century classic, which is said to have sold as many as 15,000 copies in an age when successful writers might expect to sell 5,000, touched off a "Genji boom" that swept through all segments of society, traces of which lingered until the end of the Meiji period (1868-1912). But while Inaka genji's popularity makes it central to any history of the early modern reception of Genji monogatari, the hybrid nature of Tanehiko's narrative, which he himself describes as "kabuki, puppet play, and tale: all three rolled into one," reminds us that the reception of Genji can never be separated from the discursive vehicles on which it rides: Inaka genji was popular, not because of its connection to Genji, but because it skillfully connected Genji to contemporary generic conventions, settings (sekai), and fads.
This paper examines the complex interweaving within Inaka genji of narrative layers and visual elements, highlighting the slow shift toward faithfulness to the text of Genji that took place over the fourteen years of its publication, as Tanehiko adapted his style in response to the "Genji boom" his work spawned, and at the same time addresses the broader issue of how we should theorize the "reception," or to use the terminology I prefer, the "transmission" of canonical works. A case study of a particular text, my paper nonetheless suggests that all recreations of classics necessarily entail a realignment of the existing system of textual and generic relationships.
Inaka genji was such a popular success, I argue, less because it created a new kind of Genji than because it managed to transform the popular literary field, resituating Genji within it.