The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature.

• Author: Chance, Linda H.

The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature. By MICHAEL EMMERICH. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2013. Pp. xv + 494. $95 (cloth), $35 (paper).

These days, any book "between covers" brings a certain joy. To read with the smell of paper, not the glow of a screen, quickens the heart, especially of the premodernist. When the book, counting notes and online bibliography, is over five hundred pages, though, the blessing may seem mixed. So it was with a twinge of resistance that I opened Michael Emmerich's study on the Japanese classic Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji). Steeling myself with the notion that for the moment (of which I had no more than two free) I only needed to check the author's opinion on one thing, I followed the index to the proper page and scanned it. Scanning turned into absorption. Absorption blocked out the rest of the workaday world. Damn. (1) He got me. On I read, heedless of the passing hours.

It is not unusual for a tome on Japanese literature to divide my attention from every other duty, although curiously some of the best recent reads--Tomi Suzuki's Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (1996), Haruo Shirane's Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho (1998), David Barnett Lurie's Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing (2011), and now this book--come from individuals associated with or trained at Columbia University. (The back of the Emmerich dust jacket in fact gave me pause: is it appropriate for the author's mentor to dub his protege's monograph a "stunning tour de force"?) This volume is, however, quite simply extraordinary. Lest I be thought a paid endorser for the press or a member of the writer's circle, let me turn to the evidence for such an encomium (and in due course, some quibbles).

Following an uncommon path, I will begin with the format. Emmerich gives potent space to the way that Tsuruya Kiemon, publisher of the celebrated gokan (combined booklets) serial Nise Murasaki Inaka Genji (A Fraudulent Murasaki's Bumpkin Genji, 1829-42), lavished care on the production of elegant chapters. He details papers (including crepe with printed imitations of gold flecks) and the printing of subtly patterned back covers, which set the standard for over four decades of subsequent practice. This is neither antiquarian trivia nor simple due diligence, for as Emmerich explains, such sophisticated techniques as adding one or two shades of thin ink to select illustrations brought depth to the page and enhanced themes. It must be no coincidence that the frontispiece of each of Emmerich's chapters is printed atop a light ground of patterns from the gokan's back covers. Copious figures throughout (many from the author's personal collection) not only support the analysis but provide the reader an aesthetic immersion worthy of the subject. Emmerich thanks the press, as should we. He may not belabor the point, but by its very material incarnation the book counters any assumption that images matter less than words.

The overall project compassionately acknowledges others' labors over the text. Offering us the aid of "the late Mitani Kuniaki," who wrote that Genji monogatari "is literature that demands to be read again" (p. 1), Emmerich compares our reading selves to Ukifune in her boat or Genji about to cross to Akashi. Welcoming us into the layers of time and space that stretch from the eleventh century, Emmerich argues...