Post-Genji blues

[muckefuck]

Yesterday morning, I finished reading 源氏物語 (The tale of Genji). This would be a more impressive accomplishment if I hadn't started reading it something like six or seven years ago. To be fair, I read fairly steadily up until Genji's death. After that come the "transitional chapters", those which--in Seidensticker's words--are "mostly likely to be inauthentic". And they do seem to lack the polish of those before them. They're also--as I discovered upon rereading them--stuffed with fairly tedious exposition. At least a dozen new characters are introduced, only a handful of which are key to the narrative line connecting the so-called "Uji Chapters".

There are pluses and minuses to reading the Uji Chapters as an independent novel. The length is very manageable (about 400 pages in Seidensticker's translation) and the tone and setting is so very different from the rest of the book that this helps avoid confounding your expectations (my trouble the first time around). On the other hand, all the major players are either carried over from the body of the larger novel or related in some way to those figures, and having let so much time go by from reading those sections, I found myself constantly having to refer to the Dramatis Personae in the front material--mostly because I immediately forgot whatever I read there. (In particular, some mental block keeps me from remembering Kashiwagi's role and relationship to Genji.)

But probably the biggest downside is that it ends so unsatisfyingly. There's apparently some debate on whether Murasaki finished her novel or not. On the one hand, the last chapter apparently has an atypical title with a grand resonance which could imply a culmination of some sort. But on the other, the narrative seems to be gearing up again at the very moment where it comes to a halt. Why resurrect a character from the death which seemed the only possible resolution to the dilemma of her existence just to strand her in that exact dilemma again? For this very reason, it's seems likely that Murasaki could simply have written herself into a corner. Several authors over the centuries have given into the temptation to continue the story, of which Liza Dalby is only the most recent. Her Tale of Murasaki ends with such a "lost chapter", and it's not surprising that her solution is dependent on an a literal act of god. (It's also not surprising that it isn't particularly well-written or worth reading. As any Austenphile must know, reading the master makes it very hard to accept substitutes.)

The beginning and ending aside, I found that once I got reading, surrendering to Murasaki's delicate prose became as easy as ever. It still amazes me how I sweep through tens of pages where, it seems, very little happens and yet still feel fulfilled by the experience. Seidensticker calls Kaoru, the chief protagonist of the Uji Chapters, "literature's first antihero" and he's got a point. But I never found his irresoluteness frustrating. I don't think that he talks rather than doing (although he is guilty of that) as much as he tries too hard to please everyone and so ends up making several difficult situations worse. I ultimately felt a good deal of sympathy for him, but not as much as I did for Ukifune. I was annoyed by her infidelity, but to her credit she feels remorseful about it in a way that her lover (who is far more culpable) never does. Having settled on renunciation of the secular world as the only respectable way to escape her impossible position, she finds herself thwarted again and again by the very people who should be coming to her aid.

There are a lot of powerful themes which emerge from the novel, but I think few more strongly than that of male entitlement. At some point, it's hard to see what short of stabbing a suitor in the ear would be interpreted as something more than playing hard to get. And though there's a lot of clucking about the consequences for the men's gross offences against propriety, we never really see any worth mentioning. (One hopes that Niou is denied the imperial throne on account of his indecency, but without much confidence.) In any case, I look forward to reading the whole thing through again in one go, so that it's easier to see how the two halves (or, rather, the the three thirds, given the break between the earlier escapades and the maturing character development in the first part) all hang together and relate to each other.

***

In other reading news, I whipped through Dazai Osamu's 斜陽 (The setting sun). I didn't hate it and I didn't really enjoy it either. It seems studded with pretentious namedropping, but I suppose some of the wilder bits were avantgarde back in 1947 when it came out. Still, it's hard to believe it would've garnered quite so much attention through the years if he hadn't offed himself the following year. I'm still willing to give his magnum opus 人間失格 (No longer human) a try, but I'm in no particular hurry to either.

Comments

[gasterea.livejournal.com]

How curious. I must confess I don`t remember much - read Genji in Russian (by a very reputable translator) more than 15 years ago. Was your last chapter called somthing like cloudy/floating bridge of dreams? I seem to have no recollection of the later protagonists you mention at all (could it be that those chapters were left out, hmmm). I remember the girl Murasaki line a bit and all those delicate letters after unexpected trysts. Also trying to envisage what all those exotic sounding flowers paulonia etc.looked like (there being no internet to speak of back then). And yes the male entitlement thing - that made me really uncomfortable even in such a delicate watercolour-bagatelle setting..

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

In the original, Murasaki generally refers to characters by title only. This can be very confusing to the Western reader who can easily forget from one page to the next who's "the general" and who's "the prince". Some translators (notably Royall Tyler for English) are faithful to these designations whereas the more common solution (and that used by both Waley and Seidensticker) is to replace them with nicknames. Kaoru and Niou both mean "fragrant" because they are each described as "fragrant" in much the way that Genji is called "shining". Your Russian translator, on the other hand, might've used "the general" for Kaoru and "the (crown) prince" for Niou. Or s/he might've found some other solution.

And, yes, the final chapter is famously called "夢浮橋" ("Floating Bridge of Dreams"). Tanizaki--who produced his own Modern Japanese version of Genji--borrowed the name for the title of one of his later works. Seidensticker's name for the female protagonist, Ukifune, means "floating boat", and is a reference to how she feels unmoored in life.