Reflections of the Shining Prince

When a race of disparate homo sapiens attains civilization, we learn in school, they develop the ability to read and write (or speak). When a civilization reaches the heights of greatness, our teachers tell us that they develop monumental works of storytelling, oral or written. And of these great civilizations, there are a few that develop so extraordinarily that a story or two of theirs may live on forever in the memory of the greater human race. However belatedly, critics have recognized for close to a century Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji as Japan’s contribution in the world’s 5000-year march up from illiteracy. 

In Dartmouth professor Dennis Washburn’s 2015 translation of Shikibu’s 11th-century tale, readers learn of a prince of the blood at the Japanese Court, then situated in the Chinese-styled capital city of Heian. There, members of familial clans jockey for rank and status, all in pursuit of growing closer to the man at the center of it all: the Emperor Kiritsubo. As a political and spiritual leader, His Majesty presides over a world of intrigue qualified by ritual, protocol, and the aristocratic worship of good taste for its own sake. It is in this world that the “Shining Prince,” known as “Hikaru Genji” in Japanese, must navigate the winding path of life. The Japanese culture later came to know this same path foremost by the concept of mono no aware, or “an intuitive sensitivity toward the sublime, sad beauty that inheres in mutable nature and transitory human existence” (see “Introduction”).

Although Washburn emphasizes this mono no aware as a post-Genji product of Japanese literary criticism, I cannot say that Shikibu’s monogatari or, calqued, ‘telling of things’ is not successful at communicating the idea of life’s tragedy. After all, Genji’s life begins with tears: his mother, an imperial consort, dies when the supernally beautiful Prince is only three. Washburn renders the aftermath of her passing beautifully, from the Emperor’s lament that “[n]o matter what, I cannot let you abandon me,” to the narrator’s observation that “[t]he death of loved ones is always a source of grief, but the little boy’s puzzled expression only added to the unspeakable sadness of it all.”

The vagaries of life remain a motif throughout the tale. As Genji grows, romance inflects his life. First, he falls in love with Fujitsubo, his own stepmother and the Emperor’s new consort, and his relationship with his own wife deteriorates. Then, right before Genji and Fujitsubo produce a bastard (whom the Emperor names as crown prince) in secret, the Shining Prince takes after a ten-year-old girl named Murasaki. The girl becomes his principal love interest following the death of his wife.

Following the death of Kiritsubo and the accession of Emperor Suzaku, Genji rides the waves of misfortune. The Court discovers his affairs, and Suzaku exiles the Shining Prince to a backwater province. There, Genji conceives a daughter with a village woman just as Suzaku’s mind and body begin to falter. Soon, Genji’s own bastard becomes Emperor, and the sovereign promotes Genji to the heights of court rank. 

As he leaves youth behind, however, the middle-aged Genji soon finds that the passions which consumed him have lost their vitality. He takes on another wife, but he and Murasaki drift apart. The woman who had once been his obsession later dies. 

Genji’s life ends underfoot the march of time. The months fly past, and the Shining Prince contemplates Chinese poetry: “But because my grief and sorrow are with me always / I can no longer distinguish between night and day.” He becomes “increasingly aware that the time was approaching when he must renounce the world.” The reader witnesses his last visit to court, gleaming “even more radiant than he had ever been in the old days.” The author pairs Genji’s final ponderings of his beloved grandson with a waka poem: “Having passed the time in mournful longing / I have lost track of all the months and days . . . / Have the year and my life both run their course.” The telling-of-things closes with Genji giving gifts for the New Year and a customary blank chapter.

Almost like a postscript, however, Murasaki continues the story: Genji’s daughter with the village woman becomes Empress, and just as individual lives end blankly, the world’s tale continues.

Heian-period Japan was a world with its own rules, ranks (thirty in all, as Washburn points out in the introduction), and realities. The New York Times questioned in a headline how the novel, with its more than 1000 years, maintains “lasting appeal.” It’s easy to question how any work from another time or place, especially one a continent away from familiar Europe, could hold relevance for someone in 21st-century America, let alone a Dartmouth student. But one could also ask the same question about Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, with its depiction of aristocratic love-mores in the Russian Empire, or Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, with its scenes of abuse in Victorian Britain.

But just as their content seems alien, books like Anna Karenina and Nicholas Nickleby talk about the familiar: be it the gauntlet of maintaining individual autonomy while constricted by family life in the former or the lifelong battle between honor, familial loyalty, and an often evil world in the latter. So too does The Tale of Genji make such themes incarnate. For how often do our lives close just like the prince’s: at the terminal end of a life of good or wasteful passions, with the time to contemplate the balance thereof, and thoughts of sons and grandsons also on the mind?

Professor Washburn’s translation is a mammoth 1205 pages, and I am no Comparative Literature major. I can’t begin to tell aspiring readers of Murasaki Shikibu’s tale what the lesson(s) of the work are. As the translator remarks, the story itself was subject to conflicting interpretations in Japan for centuries, from that of “feminist text” to “a marker of cultural literacy and national identity.” But perhaps it is that plethora of interpretations possible from Genji’s life that best indicates the tale’s—and this translation’s—value.

As a record of Classical Japan’s suffocating code of manners that yet made quotidian acts beautiful, the book is absolute reference literature. As a glimpse into the mind of Murasaki Shikibu—“a sensitive person who is talented and strong-willed enough to gain the affection and confidence of an empress, but who is also awkward and obsessive in her interests”—The Tale of Genji and its grasp of life’s tragedy tell of an artist’s worldview. As a novel, or what I consider a novel, Murasaki’s work (wrought in clear English by Washburn) made me want to keep reading. And at novel’s end, I found myself in thought: What, at the end of my life, will I be? Will I too give generously as my last act? Will I have tasted the bitterness of exile and the sweetness of high rank? Will my daughter have become empress? Will I renounce the world as quietly as a blank page can speak?

Japanese mythology tells a story of the Sun Goddess’ rage at her manic brother, the God of Storm and Sea. In her anger, she takes refuge in a cave, depriving the world of light. To coax her out, the gods of Japan gather in front of the cave and hang a mirror. Hearing their ruckus, the Sun peeks out of the cave. As swiftly as she left the world, the gods pull her out. Like Murasaki’s story, the myth is an old tale, yet the Japanese still tell it today. The Imperial Family supposedly owns that mirror of the gods. Like today’s Emperor might gaze into that mirror to gain wisdom in secret Shinto ritual, I wonder if in the reflection of transcendent, beautiful, and Shining Genji, the modern reader might be able to see himself.