The Tale Of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

We frequently find, in ancient literary work (or even more recent work from pre-electronic years), that it's enormous. It often takes hundreds or even thousands of pages. Like many others, perhaps, I assumed that people wrote such huge books because the audience needed something to fill up the entertainment hours in the times when there was no television. Well, here's a lengthy work that offers a contrary possibility. The people of ancient Japan, like the characters in "The Tale Of Genji," which takes place during the period in which it was written - a little over 1,000 years ago - have plenty to occupy their time. In fact, their avocations consist of many things we might consider frivolous, such as perfumed papers, styles of handwriting, improvised poetry, picture competitions, adulterous affairs, and a genuinely frightening amount of gossip. Yet, they obviously had time for "Genji" and its very popular 1200 pages. So much for that idea.

The Tale offers commentary on several of the hobbies mentioned above, including, interestingly, prose fiction. About halfway through this work, the title character Genji launches into a description and defense of "novels" (although I can only suppose that works like this are called by some other name in the Japanese language). A skillful writer, he says, can put together the incidents of a plot such that a reader, knowing perfectly well that the whole thing is an invention, can't resist reading on to learn what happens next. And what's the value of such inventions? There are several, says Genji. It's an excellent way for readers to learn what life must have been like in previous ages in a way they can't find out from the raw events of history; it teaches moral lessons by showing the consequences both of virtue and of vice that religious documents cannot because those documents concentrate on virtue alone; and, of course, it's enjoyable. Thus we see that the function of prose fiction has remained pretty consistent for at least the last thousand years.

Murasaki Shikibu, or Lady Murasaki as her title reads in English, wrote "The Tale Of Genji" in the latter part of Japan's Heian Period, and set it during the same time. I was surprised to learn that these years predate the age of the Samurai, when Japan was not apparently as militant as we've come to see it. Murasaki herself, a lady of the Imperial Japanese court, certainly tells us almost nothing about the workings of the state - various characters have roles within the government and the military, and there's an Emperor (or actually several Emperors over time), but no description of their duties. The most we learn about their business is that it often interferes with their love affairs.

Or I should say with the love affairs of the male characters. Which brings me to the most disturbing aspect of this novel; the women, as was the case in many ancient cultures, are not only treated as property, they're subject to harassment that even in this day and age I found shocking. In one particular incident two courtiers find themselves in competition for the favors of one certain woman, and one of them goes to her one night, lies down next to her, and if my reading of the text is correct, simply rapes her. For all the reaction we see from anyone the next day, he might as well have brushed her teeth. Apparently, this sort of thing, in ancient Japan as unhappily in our own day, is of all things normal.

Whence this attitude toward women, other than plain old human nastiness? Several characters, including some women, express the opinion that women are not just inferior to men, but the source of all evil. We've seen that same attitude in the modern world - men commit terrible crimes against women, so of course it must be that women's mere presence is enough to precipitate a man's fall from his morally excellent state. Whether the Japanese Buddhism of the time actually said this I can't say, but one thing is for sure; as I write this, rape culture may at last be on its last legs, which only makes this aspect of "Genji" all the more painful.

In all fairness, this miserable state of affairs only gets really disgusting in the Tale's final third, after the title character has died. Prior to that, the story is a good deal funnier. Genji, born at the story's opening, is an unusually handsome and talented man, but he has a habit of falling in love with every decent-looking woman he meets and getting into terrible trouble because of it, despite the fact that he almost always interacts with them when they're behind a screen – typical for upper-class women of the time, whose modesty was imposed by social norms. In addition to that, like a good many other characters, he's continually bemoaning the fact that he's far too busy to retire to a religious life, which is, he says, what he really wants to do. Right, Genji. Pull the other one.

And then, as I say, you turn the page and discover that Genji is suddenly dead and there's about another 400 very dark pages to go. So why is this called "The Tale Of Genji"? Well, various subsequent events occur at least in part because of Genji's activities when alive, and happen to certain of his descendants, among others. They certainly don't happen to any ordinary citizens, although someone must be doing the farming and fishing and gardening and what have you. Lady Murasaki concentrates on the nobility and their generally useless pastimes.

So I can't say I exactly enjoyed "The Tale Of Genji". By today's standards, which I certainly ought not to use to judge the work, it's pretty scattered and confused, and often unpleasant. For Lady Murasaki's contemporaries, though, it seems to have been quite popular.

That being the case, I sort of wonder about her. The lives of the women in her work are generally unfair and miserable, it's true. I don't know how one could draw any conclusions on the subject, but I find myself thinking that Lady Murasaki, as a woman in that society herself, might have written this piece as perhaps the only way she had of expressing her pain about her status and that of other women around her. If so, she seems to have come pretty close to inventing an entire fictional form just so she could express herself. Wow. So much for the inferiority of women.

Benshlomo says, Try to stifle people's self-expression if you insist - let's see how far you get.