Murasaki Shikibu – Can a Woman Write?

The words, semantics and style used to write a book usually give away lots of clues about the author’s character. Yet in the Heian Japan (794 – 1185 CE) there was a unique tool that pointed to the gender of the author – women used the phonetic alphabet Hiragana, whilst men pursued their writing in Chinese scripts Kanji.

The Genji Monogatari Emaki or The Tale of Genji Scroll is a famous illustrated handscroll of the Japanese literature from the 11th century. The original scroll is believed to have comprised 10–20 rolls and covered all 54 chapters. The extant pieces include only 19 illustrations and 65 pages of text, plus nine pages of fragments. This is estimated at roughly 15% of the envisioned original. They belong to the series “The Tale of Genji”, sometimes called the world’s first novel or the first novel still to be considered a classic. It was authored by Murasaki Shikibu and written in an archaic Heian court language that was already unreadable a century after it was published; therefore, whilst regarded as a masterpiece, its precise classification and influence in both, the East Asian and Western canons has been a matter of debate. Featured are two of the 1000+year-old original scrolls.

The Tale of Genji covers a 70 year period, at the time of the height of the Fujiwara clan’s power in Japanese politics and is rich in dramatic reversals. The protagonist Hikari Genji, who was partially modelled on Fujiwara no Michinaga, the leader of the Fujiwara clan of the time, was born the son of the emperor and a heartthrob. He has his imperial status stripped away as a means of protecting him from court intrigue. His supernatural charisma leads him to a series of love affairs ranging from numerous extramarital entanglements with aristocratic ladies and even with the empress, the wife of his father. His encounters challenge religious and age taboos, yet are fully garnished with pleasures and troubles.
The Genji Monogatari was translated into modern Japanese by Yosano Akiko and into many English versions, the latest and most palatable for current readers, by Dennis Washburn, which allowed a massive increase in its readership.

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

Apart from the fact that the author was a noblewoman who lived in the Emperor’s court and a possible relation to the almighty courtier – Fujiwara no Michinaga – we know very little about the person who authored the work. For over one thousand years she moved in the literary world with the moniker Murasaki Shikibu; however, this was not her real name. The original manuscript written by Shikibu no longer exists. Numerous copies, totaling around 300 exist with differences between each. It is thought that the author often went back and edited early manuscripts introducing discrepancies with earlier copies.

One remarkable feature of the Genji, and of Murasaki’s skill, is its internal consistency, despite a dramatis personæ of some four hundred characters. For instance, all characters age in step and the family and feudal relationships maintain general consistency. The novel also gives us a flavour of what court manners of Heian might had been, as almost none of the characters in the original text is given an explicit name. It was unacceptably familiar and blunt to freely mention a person’s given name. Hence, the characters are instead referred to by their function or role (e.g. Minister of the Left), an honorific (e.g. His Excellency), or their relation to other characters (e.g. Heir Apparent).

Yet, the good news is that we now know a bit more about this magnificent literary work, as in 2018, a manuscript containing a missing part of The Tale of Genji has been found among the heirlooms of the family of a former feudal lord. Experts have confirmed the authenticity of the material found as being one chapter of a five-chapter section called “Aobyoshibon” (Blue Cover Book).

Murasaki Shikibu – Can a Woman Write?

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