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A Woman's Weapon: Spirit Possession in the Tale of Genji

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I am compelled to write this review in order to correct the false impression given of this important study of Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji. To write a review of a serious scholarly study should demand that the entire work should have been read & re-read.... remember, "there are no readers, only re-readers." That another reviewer admits to not having read this book, even one time, should serve as a notice to anyone interested in The Tale of Genji & scholarly studies to completely ignore its limited ability to actually engage or respond to an unread work. One might also beware reviews of serous studies by those who can not manage to spell or proofread.

Doris Bargen has written, by all accounts, a pivotal study that explores a neglected area in Genji studies (outside of Japan). That Royall Tyler (among others) has praised this study for its exploration of "Spirit" and its relationship to social order should serve as enough of an endorsement to students, scholars & lay-readers to study, enjoy and be enriched by a scholar in love with her material.

After painfully getting through a good portion of this book, I came to the conclusion that there are two main points (concerning the Genji Monogatari anyway) that Bargen is attempting to make. First, she claims that Lady Rokujo's sprit possession of Aoi did not occur because Lady Rokujo was simply envious of Aoi and wanted to spite her. Instead, she states that the angry sprit of Lady Rokujo was using Aoi simply as a vehicle to attack Lady Rokujo's real tormentor, Genji. Second, she states that, as displayed by the Aoi episode in the tale, women used sprit possession as a way to vent bottled up social frustrations which are generated by the polygamist system. In my opinion, there are three main problems with this argument. First, it seems as if her arguments contradict each other. The first argument implies that Lady Rokujo's sprit is actually posing Aoi whereas the second argument implies that it is really Aoi who is putting on a show in order to vent her frustrations. Second, the scientific hypothesis known as Occums Razor states that usually the simplest answer to a problem is the correct one. By this logic, would not it be simpler to say that Lady Rokujo is simply envious of Aoi and thus attacked her that it would be to say that Lady Rokujo used Aoi as a vehicle to attack Genji in a round about way? Why not just possess Genji himself? Finally, Bargen seems to base many of the social problems of the era on the polygamous social structure as if engaged in a geopolitical attack on polygamony. There are two innate with an attack conducted in this fashion. First, we are discussing a literary text and not a historical reference. Thus any thoughts on how to change a fictional system are irrelevant for all one has to do is ignore the book entirely if ti bothers them so. Second, one simply cannot change the past. In conclusion, although many scholars have reacted favorabily to this book, I see many of the arguements that Bargen attempts to make to be self contradictory, and thus (for the most part) the book seems to discredit itself. For a more desirable review of sprit possession in the Genji Monogatari, I strongly recommend a book entitled "The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of the Tale of Genji" written by Shirane, H.