Written in the eleventh century, this exquisite portrait of courtly life in medieval Japan is widely celebrated as the world’s first novel. Genji, the Shining Prince, is the son of an emperor. He is a passionate character whose tempestuous nature, family circumstances, love affairs, alliances, and shifting political fortunes form the core of this magnificent epic. Royall Tyler’s superior translation is detailed, poetic, and superbly true to the Japanese original while allowing the modern reader to appreciate it as a contemporary treasure. Supplemented with detailed notes, glossaries, character lists, and chronologies to help the reader navigate the multigenerational narrative, this comprehensive edition presents this ancient tale in the grand style that it deserves.
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About the Author
Murasaki Shikibu, born in 978, was a member of Japan's Fujiwara clan, which ruled behind the scenes during the Heian Period by providing the brides and courtesans of all the emperors. Lady Murasaki's rare literary talent, particularly her skill as a poet, secured her a place in the court of Empress Akiko. After the death of her husband, she cloistered herself to study Buddhism, raise her daughter, and write the world's first novel Genji Monogatari, the tale of the shining Prince Genji.
Royall Tyler was born in London, England, and grew up in Massachusetts, England, Washington D.C., and Paris. He has a B.A. in Far Eastern Languages from Harvard, and an M.A. in Japanese History and Ph. D. in Japanese literature from Columbia University. He has taught Japanese language and culture at, among other places, Ohio State University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Oslo, in Norway. Beginning in 1990, he taught at the Australian National University, in Canberra, from which he retired at the end of 2000. He will spend the American academic year 2001-02 as a Visiting Professor at Harvard.
Royall Tyler and his wife Susan live in a rammed earth house on 100 acres in the bush about seventy miles from Canberra, where they breed alpacas as a hobby.
Royall Tyler’s previous works include Japanese Noh Dramas, a selection and translation of Noh plays published by Penguin; Japanese Tales and French Folktales, anthologies published by Pantheon; and The Miracles of the Kasuga Deity, a study of a medieval Japanese cult published by Columbia University Press.
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For those who don't know much about the plot, the Tale of Genji is divided into two almost completely separate stories. The first part of the story is about Prince Genji, the son of the emperor and a low ranking consort who dies due to her rivals' jealousy. The emperor griefstricken marries another much younger and higher born woman who looks very much like Genji's mother, who Genji falls in love with. Their doomed love affair and its consequences is at the center of this novel. However Genji has many other love affairs some of them with very destructive consequences. Genji's story is both tragic and also light hearted at times as well. Although the story is about Genji, the memorable female characters far outnumber the male ones. Heian Japan was a mostly matrilocal society, where the court was controlled by the grandfather or the father-in-law of the emperor. Women had much more power than in later eras, however, their independence depends on their wealth and social status but the heroines are distinct and have their own thoughts, feelings and personalities.
The second part of the story are the grandchildren of Genji and it takes place after Genji has died. It is the story of the competition between Kaoru, Genji's "son" who is actually the son of Genji's principal wife and her lover, and Genji's grandchild, Niou, and their competition for the love of three sisters. It is very different from the first part of the story, much darker and obsessive. One reviewer described the two parts as Jane Austen and Wuthering Heights in the same novel.
Taylor's translation is well written, informative, and beautifully packaged. I highly recommend it.
I have read the entirety of all three of the complete English translations. To my mind, Royall Tyler's is clearly the best of the lot. Even though I can't compare it to the original, given what I know about Heian culture and the other reading I've done, this version somehow seems to capture the spirit of the age beyond what the others achieved. I vastly prefer the way Tyler has approached the matter of identifying the characters, for example. He uses their courtly titles, even though those change during the course of the story. He manages to keep the reader oriented by the straightforward listing of characters that appears at the beginning of each chapter.
Combined with Tyler's other strategies, I feel closer to experiencing the story the way I imagine it was experienced by Murasaki Shikubu's contemporaries. To me this suggests an approach to translation that strives to come to terms with what the text demands; it better conveys the inherent nature and complexity of the prevailing style. Yet Tyler's fluency as a writer nonetheless draws one deep into a character-based story.
I could go on and on, as this novel is one of my great loves. But I'll simply say it's an essential read and that this is the essential translation.
Waley's version:
Genji felt very disconsolate. It had begun to rain; a cold wind blew across the hill, carrying with it the sound of a waterfall--audible till then as a gentle intermittent plashing, but now a mighty roar; and with it, somnolently rising and falling, mingled the monotonous chanting of the scriptures. Even the most unimpressionable nature would have been plunged into melancholy by such surroundings. How much the more so Prince Genji, as he lay sleepless on his bed, continually planning and counter-planning.
Seidensticker's version:
Genji was not feeling well. A shower passed on a chilly mountain wind, and the sound of the waterfall was higher. Intermittently came a rather sleepy voice, solemn and somehow ominous, reading a sacred text. The most insensitive of men would have been aroused by the scene. Genji was unable to sleep.
Tyler's version:
Genji felt quite unwell, and besides, it was now raining a little, a cold mountain wind had set in to blow, and the pool beneath the waterfall had risen until the roar was louder than before. The eerie swelling and dying of somnolent voices chanting the scriptures could hardly fail in such a setting to move the most casual visitor. No wonder Genji, who had so much to ponder, could not sleep.
There is no doubt Waley embellished the text, but it was clearly in the interest of conveying a sense of the exquisite poetry of Murasaki's prose. His elevated diction lends just that touch of "class" we would expect to find in an author writing for an aristocratic audience for whom style was everything. Moreover, the sumptuous musicality of his phrasing continually underscores the melancholy atmosphere even as it seems to echo the sound of the waterfall and the chanting. Seidensticker's version has the virtue of concision, but his choice of words is often questionable: "reading," for example, suggests that Buddhist monks read the sutras in private meditation rather than chanted them as a group prayer. His "sacred texts," on the other hand, implies that Genji wasn't very familiar with Buddhism, which could hardly be further from the truth. It was as central to his life and worldview as Catholicism was to the Italian princes of the Middle Ages, as Waley's "scriptures" implies. The phrase "aroused by the scene" is even more ill-chosen, for it suggests that Genji found visits to mountain temples erotically stimulating, when in fact they tended to have the opposite effect, for they reminded him of the vanity of his secular pursuits, which were, by and large, erotic.
Tyler's version follows Waley's interpretation at this point and thus avoids these particular problems, but he has others that are even worse. His "a cold mountain wind had set in to blow," for example, is dreadfully clumsy and somewhat confusing, as is his "the pool beneath the waterfall had risen until the roar was louder than before". The latter illogically suggests that it was the increased height of the pool below the waterfall that made the roar louder rather than the increase in the volume of water flowing over the falls due to the rain that had passed. A good many phrases in the other passages I sampled from the Tyler volume had similar kinds of problems, which makes me wonder if Tyler's editors ever bothered to read the work they insist is so "stunning." If any version deserves that praise it is Waley's, which may be difficult to find, but it is well worth the effort.
