Reading ' The Tale of Genji' : Sources from the First Millennium.

• Author: Watanabe, Takeshi

Reading " The Tale of Genji" : Sources from the First Millennium. Edited by THOMAS HARPER and HARUO SHIRANE. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. Pp. xx + 610. $65.

This impressive anthology presents translations of texts--some well known, others less so--that trace the reception history of the canonical work of Japanese literature, The Tale of Genji. The collection's appearance marks the growth of non-Japanese interest in the Genji and its now assured place in world literature. Whereas Shirane's previous edited volume on Genji reception (Envisioning "The Tale of Genji": Media, Gender, and Cultural Production, Columbia Univ. Press, 2008) examines the tale's impact in visual and popular culture through scholarly papers, this volume gathers sources focused on the readerly engagements from the tenth through twentieth centuries. Many of the materials have never appeared in English translation. Even in Japanese scholarship, I am hard-pressed to identify a single, convenient volume that brings together a comparably rich, vast array of Genji reception history. Indeed, even among scholars of Genji, everyone is bound to make some discoveries, whether in the texts themselves or the astute editorial comments.

While there are a number of individuals involved, roughly three-quarters of the book consists of translations and commentary by Thomas Harper. His unpublished dissertation on Mootori Norinaga's (1730-1801) A Little Jeweled Comb (Univ. of Michigan, 1971) has been a major resource for English-language scholarship on Norinaga's influential work on the Genji. To see Harper's work made more widely available, and updated, is thus gratifying. Harper tellingly changes his translation of monogatari from "novels" to "romances" or "tales," which aligns with current scholarship. Indeed, his explanation about his choice of terminology (pp. 12-13), and his comparisons with the Western literary tradition (pp. 416-17), are tantalizing. They present one gateway for readers with backgrounds besides Japanese literature to begin placing Genji in a comparative, global context.

It is on this note about the volume's readership, however, that I have some questions. In discussing the significance of Norinaga's work, Harper observes: "every shift in literary perception and opinion that accompanied 'the rise of the novel' [in eighteenth-century England] is echoed in Norinaga's treatise" (p. 417). This coincidence is fascinating, and it is not the only stated reason why we should pay heed to The Little Jeweled Comb. In the global context to which this volume...