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The Disaster of the Third Princess Essays on the Tale of Genji

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The Disaster of the Third Princess Essays on the Tale of Genji The DisasTer of The ThirD Princess Essays on The Tale of Genji The DisasTer of The ThirD Princess Essays on The Tale of Genji royall Tyler Published by ANU E Press The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at: http://epress.anu.edu.au/third_princess_citation.html National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Tyler, Royall. Title: The disaster of the third princess : essays on the tale of Genji / Royall Tyler. ISBN: 9781921536663 (pbk.) 9781921536670 (pdf) Notes: Bibliography. Subjects: Murasaki Shikibu, b. 978? Genji monogatari.--Criticism and interpretation Japanese literature--To 1600--History and criticism. Japan--Social life and customs--794-1185--History Dewey Number: 895.6314 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Cover design by Teresa Prowse. Printed by University Printing Services, ANU This edition © 2009 ANU E Press Table of Contents Foreword vii Introduction 1 1. Genji and Murasaki: Between Love and Pride 15 2. Genji and Suzaku (1): The Disaster of the Third Princess 63 3. Genji and Suzaku (2): The Possibility of Ukifune 97 4. Genji and the Luck of the Sea 131 5. Pity Poor Kaoru 157 6. Two Post-Genji tales on The Tale of Genji 185 7. Feminine Veils over Visions of the Male 209 Abbreviations 229 Works cited 231 Foreword Four of these seven essays were published under different titles and in earlier forms between 1999 and 2006, and a fifth appeared in Japanese translation in 2008.1 The most recently written (“Genji and the Luck of the Sea”) dates from 2007. Its initial version, like that of all the others, has been extensively revised, re-titled, and updated for this publication. Sympathy for Murasaki in her struggle to hold her own in her relationship with Genji inspired the opening essay and led, through analysis of Genji’s marriage to the Third Princess, to further work on that theme and others. The standpoint throughout the collection is that of a translator intensely concerned with the text both in detail and as a whole. This gives the collection no special authority, a translator’s views on a work being as debatable as anyone else’s. It simply explains the essays’ character. No suppression of the first-person pronoun can hide their personal nature. To a degree, the collection resembles a preliminary sketch for a consecutively organized book. Although edited to fit together as well as possible, these separately written essays remain imperfectly integrated and still overlap at times. They cover topics that are important and worthwhile for any reader of the tale, but they also neglect matters that deserved acknowledgment or fuller treatment. However, passing time and changed circumstances now discourage any thought of developing the sketch further. If the essays sometimes contest the views of others, such is the nature of reading and understanding. Diversity of opinion on The Tale of Genji has a long history and is inevitable. 1 In their order here, “‘I Am I’: Genji and Murasaki,” Monumenta Nipponica 54:4 (Winter 1999); “The Possession of Ukifune,” Asiatica Venetiana 5 (2000, published May 2002); “Rivalry, Triumph, Folly, Revenge: A Plot Line through The Tale of Genji,” Journal of Japanese Studies 29:2 (Summer 2003); “Sagoromo and Hamamatsu on Genji: Eleventh-Century Tales as Commentary on Genji monogatari,” Nichibunken Japan Review 18 (2006); “Dansei no imēji o ou josei no bēru” (“Feminine Veils over Visions of the Male”), in Haruo Shirane, ed., Kaigai ni okeru Genji monogatari (Kōza Genji monogatari kenkyū 11), Benseisha, 2008. vii Introduction Rather than introduce The Tale of Genji in a general way, these seven essays offer a few fundamental perspectives on a work that has stood for a thousand years as a rich and varied masterpiece. They remain generally silent about the pleasures the tale offers (elegance, sensibility, wit, poignancy, and so on) and about many of the issues that it raises. No interested reader should find them unapproachable, but they admittedly assume a degree of familiarity with the work. Essential to each will be the widely recognized tripartite division of the tale into Part One (Chapters 1–33), Part Two (34–41), and Part Three (42–54).1 This Introduction will review each essay briefly and then summarize the principal reading developed in the earlier ones, concerning Genji and his brother Suzaku. Next it will discuss the provisional character of any approach to the tale, the inevitable emergence of incommensurable views, and the position of Hikaru Genji in the work as a whole. Finally, it will turn to an issue raised in several of the essays: the difference in character between Part Three of the tale and the rest. An overview of the essays The first essay (“Genji and Murasaki: Between Love and Pride”) follows Genji’s long relationship with Murasaki, the woman most important to him during the greater part of his life, while the second (“Genji and Suzaku [1]: The Disaster of the Third Princess”) emphasizes his even longer relationship with his elder brother, Suzaku. Both relationships intersect when Genji marries Suzaku’s favorite daughter, the Third Princess, at the beginning of Part Two. These two essays therefore view this turning point and its aftermath from different angles. “The Disaster of the Third Princess” also discusses the supernatural influences that encourage Genji’s triumph over the faction centered on his brother. Taken together, these two essays propose an underlying dramatic structure for what easily appears to be a fragmented, episodic work centered on love relations. However, they do not question the importance of these relations, which naturally and properly remain the principal focus of reader interest. Rather, they propose a background unity that leaves the tale’s main appeal intact and, at the same time, extends the range of the author’s achievement. The third essay (“Genji 1 On this division, see Shirane, The Bridge of Dreams, xx. 1 The Disaster of the Third Princess and Suzaku [2]: The Possibility of Ukifune”) discusses the nature and experience of the tale’s last heroine, her psychological condition, her likely future fate, and the significance of the exorcism scene in the penultimate chapter. It speculatively identifies the possessing power as the angry spirit of the late Suzaku, thus suggesting a possible thematic link between the first two parts of the tale and the third. The fourth essay (“Genji and the Luck of the Sea”) approaches the relationship between Genji and Suzaku in Part One from the perspective of myth. Genji’s exile and triumphal return hark back to the Nihon shoki story best known in English as “The Luck of the Sea and the Luck of the Mountains” and referred to below in this collection as the myth of Hikohohodemi. The essay develops this parallel and links the myth to the history of the Sumiyoshi deity, who plays so vital a role in this phase of Genji’s life. The fifth essay (“Pity Poor Kaoru”) discusses the main hero of Part Three. While many readers accord Kaoru psychological depth, “Pity Poor Kaoru” argues instead that the narrator’s chief interest in him lies in manipulating his experience so as to elicit the greatest possible sympathy for him. It also contrasts the portrayal of Kaoru with that of Genji and discusses in this connection the distinctiveness of Part Three. The sixth and seventh essays (“Two Post-Genji Tales on The Tale of Genji” and “Veils of the Feminine over Visions of the Male”) treat more restricted topics. The former analyzes passages from the mid-eleventh-century Sagoromo monogatari and Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari in order to shed light on how their authors read The Tale of Genji. It particularly discusses ancient and modern views of Ukifune’s failure to drown herself. The latter essay analyzes and attempts tentatively to explain a motif that has stirred the curiosity of many readers: that of a man or men wishing that a beautiful man were a woman. Genji’s rise and the collapse of his world The essays that consider Genji’s life and career differ with the view expressed by Norma Field in her book on the tale: “Now for Genji to qualify as a fictional hero, he must be free of the taint of political desire, and there is no more powerful antidote for this than erotic desire.”2 The discussion in them rests on the contention that “political desire” is fundamental to Genji as a fictional hero; that erotic desire 2 Field, The Splendor of Longing, 27. 2 Introduction is not for any man an antidote to political desire but belongs instead to an entirely different realm of life, even though the two may certainly become entangled; and that both are essential to Genji as a character and as a hero. Field conceded: It should be admitted that political ambition, even though unbecoming to heroes, can provide a fictional interest different from that of erotic anguish. And Genji is ambitious, as we shall see, but his political manipulations are usually masked, at times transparently, by erotic tension.3 Attentive readers certainly recognize that the tale’s love relationships play themselves out against a backdrop of political maneuvering and ambition. “Genji and Murasaki” and “The Disaster of the Third Princess,” supplemented by aspects of some of the succeeding essays, offer a reading of this background narrative. They suggest that tension between Genji and the faction represented by Suzaku (Part One), and then increasingly between Genji and Suzaku personally (Part Two), gives the work a veiled thematic continuity that Part Three may conceivably prolong, and that the Hikohohodemi myth may have first suggested.
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