Questions tagged [the-tale-of-genji]

Questions about 'The Tale of Genji' (源氏物語, Genji monogatari), a novel written in the early 11th century by Murasaki Shikibu. Use this tag with the tags [murasaki-shikibu] and [japanese-literature].

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Why did Waley choose to transcribe the titles of some chapters as opposed to translating them in The Tale of Genji?

Arthur Waley seems to be a champion, practitioner, and repeat offender of domesticating translation. This Q&A tells us his translation of Journey to the West significantly abridges the original ...
4 votes
0 answers
111 views

Where did the idea of mono no aware come from?

Piggybacking on this question, I am still curious about the mono no aware (物の哀れ) reading of The Tale of Genji. According to Wikipedia: Norinaga's most important works include the Kojiki-den (...
1 vote
0 answers
115 views

Need help in appreciating the significance of The Tale of Genji

While spending one complete year each on the study of Japanese and Chinese literature (in translation), it was a pleasure to experience the cultural differences among the Western body of writings and ...
3 votes
0 answers
133 views

Buddhist interpretation of The Tale of Genji

The search for literary sources has been inspired largely by the difficulty scholars have experienced in imagining that a work of the magnitude of The Tale of Genji could have been created without ...
2 votes
0 answers
31 views

What is the nature of the differences between the Kawachi-bon and the Aobyoshi-bon lines of the Tale of Genji manuscripts?

The original manuscripts of The Tale of Genji no longer exist. Royall Tyler writes in the introduction to his translation (Penguin 2003, page xviiii) that by the 13th century, the manuscripts of the ...
3 votes
0 answers
54 views

What exactly does Murasaki Shikibu say about The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter?

Donald Keene comments: [Murasaki Shikibu] dismissed as old-fashioned the kind of unreality present in The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter—the birth of a little girl inside a stalk of bamboo, or Kaguyahime’...
2 votes
0 answers
46 views

What manuscript or manuscripts was the first printed edition of the Tale of Genji based on?

The original manuscript of the 11th-century Japanese novel The Tale of Genji has been lost. According to the Wikipedia article Textual tradition of The Tale of Genji, "the number of manuscript ...
5 votes
1 answer
3k views

Which English translation of The Tale of Genji is the most accurate yet readable?

The Tale of Genji was originally written in an archaic form of Japanese, and has been translated both into modern Japanese and into English multiple times. Wikipedia says "The first English ...
2 votes
0 answers
140 views

Where in the Tale of Genji does it say Genji's affair offends Amaterasu?

From Doris Bargen, The Search for Things Past in the Genji monogatari: The beginning of the Genji, as established by literary tradition, is indeed deceptively matter-of-fact about events of grave ...