Customer Reviews

Murasaki Shikibu's the Tale of Genji (Approaches to Teaching World Literature)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Murasaki Shikibu wrote "The Tale of Genji" more than a thousand years ago, but it has fueled criticism and even entire careers into the present day. Its fifty-four chapters contain a seemingly inexhaustible well of story, character, and nuance--so the average reader could be forgiven for feeling a little daunted.

"Approaches to Teaching the Tale of Genji," edited by Edward Kamens, helps to counter that feeling. The book contains more than twenty essays by a wide variety of authors. The essays are compact (few run longer than ten pages), and cover topics from the influence of Heian architecture on the lives of the characters, to the role of ladies-in-waiting in the Tale, to an especially masterful analysis of how the final chapter featuring Genji ever-so-subtly prepares us for the death of the Shining One.

The book is called *Teaching* the Tale of Genji, and its stated purpose is, ultimately, to provide university professors with ways to present the book to students. Some essays address this goal more directly than others, but no essay alienates those who are not teachers. (One or two do include a protective layer of jargon, but most contributors manage to make their work admirably accessible.) The book falls into three parts: Edward Kamens provides a brief overview of the texts and the related literature, then there are essays on understanding the text, reading the text, and comparing and contrasting it with other texts, in that order.

This book is not an introduction to Genji; readers should have at least a passing familiarity with the Tale before approaching Approaches. That said, Japanese language ability is not a requirement. The book uses Seidensticker's translation as its main version of Genji. ("Approaches" was published in 1993, and so refers only to Waley's and Sedensticker's versions--it was too early to include Royall Tyler's more recent translation.)

The sheer variety of essays virtually ensures that everyone will find something to interest them, including subjects they may never have thought about before. The book crams a huge amount of information into its short (less than 200 pages) length, and should provide both casual and long-time readers of Genji with new ways of looking at this oldest of books.

~