The
Tale of Genji, written by Lady Murasaki
Shikibu
around the year 1000, provides us with more than the world's first romantic
novel. In its psychological depth and social detail, it is perhaps our best
source on the cultural history of the aristocracy of the Heian period (794-1191).
It represents the sights, sounds, manners, and morals of a highly refined court
life that was its own world, virtually isolated from the rough life of the peasantry
living outside the capital and also quite alien to the culture and society of
today's Japan.
Lady
Murasaki's novel also represents the dominance of women in producing a more
domestically flavored literary art written directly in the Japanese language
of the time by the means of a relatively new phonetic script (kana)
sprinkled with Chinese-derived characters. (The background image of this page
is an example of this writing.) This type of writing contrasted with that
of male-dominated public court life and literature, where mastery of expression
in written Chinese was still the mark of culture and civilization. The psychological
subtlety and wit that works such as The Tale of Genji and Sei Shônagon's The Pillow Book is often attributed to this use of written Japanese
by court women who had plenty of free time to read and write about their rarefied
social world.
In
addition to the written text of the novel, there have been numerous graphic
depictions of the tale. In class we will be viewing a documentary about the
earliest extant (12th-century) Tale
of Genji Scroll.
In this Engaging Vision, we will be interacting with scenes from a 17th-century
album of paintings and calligraphy done in ink, colors, gold and silver leaf
on paper by Tosa Mitsunori (1583-1638) and various calligraphers.
Instructions
Engaging
Vision #2 is closely tied to Engaging
Act #2.
It consists of five famous scenes from The Tale of Genji, one scene
from each of five chapters that we are reading in this unit of the course.
The five scenes and their corresponding chapters are listed below. Click on
them to view.
First,
peruse all of them for a general sense of their make-up without worrying too
much about what each one depicts.
Then,
choose ONE scene for a more detailed investigation and your Engaging
Act#2
write-up. You should view the scene with an eye for both the content
(who and what's being depicted?) and the form (how is the scene depicted
in terms of composition, color, conventional elements, etc.?). Is their any
relationship (emotional, psychological, etc.) between the content
and form? How does the graphic representation compare with Lady Murasaki's
written representation? Is it a straght "translation" of the novel into pictures
or does it add to it or subtract from it?
The
goal of your investigation is simple: identify the scene being depicted
in order to write a commentary on it as described in Engaging
Act #2.
For you to be successful you will obviously need to examine the scene closely
and read the corresponding chapter carefully (having the text with you as
you view the images is a good idea). If you become utterly stuck, you may
push the 
for
clues which I will update from time to time (without providing the precise
answer).
Ganbatte!
