One of the more idealized aspects of the Nijōin, the Nijō Tōin, the Rokujōin, and the inner palace as described in the Genji is their longevity. Historically, house fires were frequent occurrences in the Heian capital; the inner palace of Murasaki Shikibu’s day, as well as the Tsuchimikado, Empress Shōshi’s natal home, suffered repeatedly from destruction or damage by fire.1 Written in the heart of a city where catastrophic fires were common, it is striking that the Genji mentions only two mansions that burn, in two adjacent Uji chapters. Both fires occur offstage: in chapter 45 (Hashihime), we learn that the Eighth Prince leaves the city for his villa at Uji because a fire destroys his palace in the capital; at the end of chapter 46 (Shii ga moto), the Third Princess’s Sanjō mansion burns, causing her to move temporarily to the Rokujōin.2 The symbolic significance of these conflagrations might be lost on modern readers, but it is likely to have resonated strongly with Heian audiences among whom the story of the burning house (kataku 火宅) from the third chapter of the Lotus Sutra was well known. In this “parable” (Skt. upāya; Jpn. hōben 方便; “expedient device”), the figure of a large, decaying mansion in flames encodes the sufferings of birth and death in this world. The children dwelling in the mansion are too caught up in their amusements to heed the cries of their father and flee. To save them, he promises to give them three carriages he knows will lure them out of the house (the carriages are
The Uji narrator’s mention of the two house fires is made in an offhanded way that seems to deliberately mute their metaphysical significance, normalizing them as links in a chain of events already in motion. The Eighth Prince has long been disillusioned with the world by the time his mansion burns. Because of his youthful alliance with the Kokiden Consort’s faction, he lost standing at court after Genji’s return from exile; then his wife died, leaving him with two daughters to raise. The fire prompts him to remove to his villa at Uji, not “leaving the world” in a religious sense but literally going to a liminal place where he may divide his time between attending to his daughters and making retreats to a nearby monastery. The primary effect of the fire at the Third Princess’s mansion is to further impede the already dilatory pace of Kaoru’s courtship of Ōigimi. The burning house at Sanjō affects the hero temporally. His preoccupation with rebuilding the mansion as a future home for Ōigimi delays his visits to the lady herself for months, intensifying the princesses’ isolation and the elder sister’s decline. Both house fires join the inventory of images whose symbolic richness might overburden the narrative were their literal significance not so much insisted on instead: the roar of the Uji river, the mists that often shroud the path to Uji, the several unfinished houses where Ukifune is lodged, the drifting boat that lends her a sobriquet. It is as if all the Uji characters, including the narrator, were sleepwalking or tone-deaf to the meaning of signs whose significance would otherwise be clear. Epistemically, the Heian reader might well find herself in the position of the father in the parable: sympathetic to the plight of the characters caught up in the house of fiction and frantic to arouse them from their oblivion.
As a reading of the Tale of Genji, this book has explored the meaning of the aristocratic house, a fictional figure whose centrality to the Genji has always been recognized but seldom systematically probed. The tale’s imaginary houses embody culturally specific ways of knowing
The unreal houses of the Genji offer an abundance of content about the mid-Heian experience of domestic spatiality, some of it grounded in realistic detail. We may assume that these storied houses modeled ways for readers “to understand and think through their own spaces,” but can we infer from such complexity what the narrative “thinks” about the mansions and lineages that make up its framework?5 By probing the intersections between specific characters’ wishes and the plots that organize their stories, we have seen that overall, the house plots of the Genji expose what is cruel about polygyny even as they celebrate a vision of unparalleled harmony in the image of the Rokujōin. Although the tale implicitly critiques the society it evokes, today’s reader may be struck by the fundamentally decorous nature of its polemic. In fact, “polemic” may be too strong a term to describe the critical perspectives that ebb and flow through the stories of Genji’s marital ties with women socially beneath him, Tamakazura’s early apprenticeship as a great lady and late transformation into a female householder, and Kaoru’s comic-pathetic hesitations.
The Limits of the Possible: Gender, Status, and Maternal Agency
Yet the conservative nature of the tale’s critique may be seen in the degree to which gender, social rank, and pedigree determine the limits of the possible, even where fictional designs clearly deviate from Heian social realities. The Rokujōin, one of the tale’s least realistic houses, appears to be a house that talk built, but consider whose talk governs its construction: Genji and the highest-ranking women of his youth, Lady Rokujō, Fujitsubo, and Akikonomu. On one hand, maternal authority is privileged in the story of Genji’s house-building. As Haraoka notes, although Genji once planned to make the Nijō Tōin, “the legacy of his late father,” even grander than the Nijōin, he eventually abandons that vision. The story of his lineage foregrounds the Nijōin and the Rokujōin, both representing maternal legacies that persist beyond Genji’s death.6 As property, the Rokujōin originated in the estate of Lady Rokujō and her daughter, Akikonomu. Both it and the Nijōin are passed down in the female line from the Akashi Empress to her daughters, and from Murasaki to Prince Niou. The mid-Heian coresidential house as the Genji envisions it confirms what William McCullough concluded about real Heian houses: “The household, in short, was essentially matrilineal and failed to coincide with patrilineal clan groupings.”7 However,
Status differences between Genji and his wives reinforce a gendered hierarchy. Until Genji marries the Third Princess, his wives occupy the lower end of a vertical relationship with him. As his social dependents and inferiors, Murasaki, the idealized mid-ranking wife who enjoys an unrivaled position as Genji’s favorite for a time, and Hanachirusato, her desexualized counterpart, speak mainly to acquiesce, both ladies rewarded for their cooperation by being made surrogate mothers who may critique the master from the sidelines. Birth mothers in the Rokujōin, however, occupy peripheral positions in terms of the amount of narrative attention they receive regardless of their social status. The Akashi Lady, mother of Genji’s only daughter, remains silent and sequestered, and even her later participation in her lineage’s triumph is undernarrated. Those birth mothers who also have high social status are presented as inimical to the equilibrium of Genji’s house: Aoi, Lady Rokujō, and Fujitsubo all die before the Rokujōin can be built; Akikonomu remains childless; the Third Princess’s accession to motherhood heralds the dissolution of Genji’s stewardship of the place. In Genji’s lifetime, the Rokujōin resists the centrifugal forces of births and deaths; its provisional master orchestrates a centripetal harmony that depends on limiting maternal agency as well as Genji’s potential as progenitor of more children.
Among the second- and third-generation characters, constraints imposed by gender and class continue to define the limits of the possible, but they become, if anything, more oppressive. Tamakazura’s marital alliance is socially horizontal. She moves into a virilocal house where she will reign as her husband’s only wife, but her monogamous marriage is founded on the callous displacement of his original principal wife. Although Tamakazura metamorphoses into a householder who makes her own way as an authoritative birth mother, she can do so only as a widow. Kaoru—neither the staid gentleman Tamakazura imagines him to be, nor the amorous hero he sometimes wishes he might be—turns away from the ambition to construct a prosperous house that preoccupies earlier characters. He marries up, although with little enthusiasm,
Female discontent with polygynous marriage and the limits of feminine agency within households persists across the tale, becoming one of the most prominent themes explored in the Uji chapters. In the world the Genji evokes, the aristocratic house subsumes mothers, wives, and daughters, constricting the range of their influence while physically enclosing them. Despite Murasaki’s ideality and Genji’s appreciation of her; the cautious, courtier-like agency exercised by Tamakazura; and the truncated fugues pursued by Ōigimi and Ukifune, none of the heroines escapes the limits imposed on her by gender. Their destinies are clearly defined: there are unhappy consequences for them whether they accede to the house via even a fortunate marriage (as does Murasaki, for a time) or whether they make no marriage at all (Yūgao and Ukifune). Murasaki’s resolve to take Buddhist vows and renounce her ties to Genji intensifies with each of his episodic pursuits of other potential wives, but she is thwarted in her final wish. She may leave the Rokujōin at the end of her life to return to the Nijōin, but there will be no exiting the house of her marriage except by death. Murasaki’s life is the tale of the house-bound heroine writ large, but its template is already there from the beginning. The life and death of Genji’s mother, the tale’s instigating heroine, inscribes the same psychospatial trajectory, and reaches the same house-bound impasse, all within the first chapter of the tale. Ōigimi’s tale carries the trope to its logical extreme: she dies an orphaned virgin, resenting the man who only anticipated marrying her.
Since at least the time of Motoori Norinaga, readers have been told that the Tale of Genji may be understood as a compendium of mono no aware, “the poignancy of things.” A heightened awareness of how figures of domestic space organize the Genji allows us to be more precise about the range of affective thinking the tale performs and about one of the
The Genji portrays abandonment by one’s spouse or lover, on the other hand, as a characteristically feminine variety of domestically generated loss. Within the framework of the aristocratic house, none of the Genji heroes suffers from marriage or the pursuit of romance in the totalizing ways its heroines do. All the major heroines may be categorized in terms of their awareness that erotic engagement with men will always be painfully transient. Almost all are shown anticipating their own abandonment if they do not already find themselves alone. How they respond defines them as heroines. Murasaki simply fears it, bears it, and struggles to hide the pain Genji’s polygynous ambitions cause her. Humiliated, Lady Rokujō preemptively withdraws and later turns vengeful. Ōigimi anticipates it so keenly she wills her own death, and Ukifune, despite her youth, rejects erotic engagement in favor of nunhood. Among the Genji heroines who are not merely minor characters, Tamakazura pursues perhaps the most viable avoidance tactics: resisting a high-stakes career in the Rear Court with an emperor who excites her desire and countenancing marriage with a man who does not engage her emotionally. As heroines who might otherwise have been absorbed into hero-centric house plots, Tamakazura, Ōigimi, and Ukifune become protagonists of their own self-determined tales that enfold stories about feminine agency which the Genji refrains from pursuing at length, even as it gestures toward them.
Students, most of whom are reading the Genji in translation and for the first time, often ask: “Why does Ōigimi resist marrying Kaoru?” The question is not without reason: with Ōigimi and Kaoru, the marriage plot meets its most intriguing impasse. As chapter 45 (Hashihime) ends, everything seems to be in place for their marriage and a secure outcome for the Uji sisters. Conventional responses to the question of
The Significance of Leaving the House
The word “house” (ie 家), embedded in the Buddhist term for the practice of lay renunciation or “leaving the home” (shukke 出家), emphasizes the necessity of relinquishing attachment to the social ties that
Many of the Genji heroines, however, embrace the practice of shukke, most acting in accordance with social expectations as they enter a later stage of life or feel the approach of death (the Akashi Nun, Lady Rokujō, Princess Ōmiya, Gen no Naishi, Asagao, and Oborozukiyo). Four heroines undergo shukke at an early age out of their need to expiate grave sins or as a means of erecting a barrier against undesired sexual advances (Fujitsubo, Utsusemi, the Third Princess, and Ukifune). The relative youth of these heroines renders their actions emotionally charged and generally lamented by the characters around them. With its focus on romantic and marital relationships, the Genji, like other court narratives before it, highlights the emotional impact of female shukke by presenting it as an irreversible state. Outside the pages of court fiction, however, women who cut their hair and took Buddhist vows could and sometimes did return to secular life.12 Thus, although real Heian mansions might physically accommodate the continued, daily presence of former wives and mothers as nuns (and in some cases, even their return to secular life), Heian fiction was slower to incorporate shukke as anything beyond a pious act carried out by minor characters off stage, or, for characters playing larger roles, a lamentable plot turn signaling their desperate exit from the drama of social life. What the Tale of Genji foregrounds is the emotional
As an event that alters the plot and attracts sustained narrative attention, shukke comes late in the Tale of Genji. It is not until the penultimate chapter (chapter 53, Tenarai) that a heroine’s transformation into a lay renunciant commands more than a few paragraphs of narrative space. The Genji breaks new ground with its portrayal of Ukifune’s tonsure because the account incorporates the experience of tonsure from her perspective. Ukifune’s embrace of nunhood instigates a trajectory decidedly in conflict with house plots, complicating her characterization and allowing experimentation with a different kind of narrative. Her newly forged identity as a nun, tenuous though it may be, prevents the advancement of the marriage plot. It also poignantly motivates her disavowal of ties to her younger half-brother and her mother, for whom she earnestly yearns despite everything.14 Besides detailing Ukifune’s manipulative efforts to bring about her own tonsuring, Tenarai takes the measure of her days in its aftermath,
The act of shukke contributes dramatically to Ukifune’s transformation from reactive minor heroine to self-reflective protagonist. At the same time, the tale’s belated sequencing of Buddhist nunhood as a plot-altering event positions shukke as a trope that further deromanticizes the house-plot. The story of Ukifune’s entrapment in an overarching plot of male rivalry ruthlessly unmasks the motives of her would-be pursuers: two noblemen whose attitudes toward her are openly condescending (Kaoru) or merely libidinal (Niou). More scathing still is the Uji chapters’ unsentimental depiction of Ukifune’s mother, who, leaving her favorite daughter adrift in the capital, isolates Ukifune and unwittingly helps precipitate her suicide attempt when she harshly avows that she would disown her daughter should she fail to honor the domestic arrangements Kaoru offers.15
The Afterlife of Genji Characters
Of course, it is not at all certain that the account of Ukifune’s experience of nunhood was intended as a conclusion to the Tale of Genji as a whole. The tale’s brief final chapter, Yume no ukihashi, may simply signify the attenuation of the author’s interest in her story of an imaginary Minamoto house. It is also possible that more chapters were written but subsequently lost, or that Murasaki Shikibu died before she could bring the tale to a different conclusion. In any case, the scholarly consensus is that the Genji (at least most of it) was probably written incrementally, in chapter-length installments, with the idea that chapters should end in ways that left them open to continuation; certain characters’ stories seem meant “to be continued.” And so they were: recognizable reprises of Tamakazura, Kaoru, and other Uji characters live on in the tales and memoirs that survive from the decades following the Genji’s appearance. Kaoru produces no children within the
Less literal-minded efforts to continue Kaoru’s story also survive. As the fictional ladies of Mumyōzōshi note with approbation, “Captain Kaoru’s type” (Kaoru taishō no tagui) reappears as the protagonist of Hamamatsu Chūnagon monogatari (Tale of the Hamamatsu Middle Counselor, late eleventh century).17 In several ways, the transgendered female protagonist of Torikaebaya monogatari (If Only I Could Transpose Them, late eleventh–early twelfth centuries) strongly reprises Kaoru.18 This heroine-cum-hero-cum-heroine embarks on a Kaorulike search for relief from doubts about personal identity, finding in the reclusive Yoshino Prince a kind of surrogate father who resembles the Genji’s Eighth Prince. In Torikaebaya, the issue of the protagonist’s identity takes center stage for most of the tale. The protagonist is seeking answers to the mystery of personal and social identity, as Kaoru did, but this character’s search has nothing to do with hidden paternity. Instead, the tale literalizes a trope borrowed from the waka lexicon: disharmony between a person’s mi (body/social status) and kokoro (interiority). The narrative possibilities latent in disconnections between social roles and an anatomy (mi) at odds with an inward spirit (kokoro) that does not correspond to gender norms were apparently irresistible to late Heian and early Kamakura readers and writers. Female-to-male transgendering of a Kaoru-like protagonist resurfaces at the center of plots in Ariake no wakare (Partings at Dawn, late twelfth century) and Wagami ni tadoru himegimi (The Princess Who Relied on Herself, between 1268 and 1271).19 The focus on the figure of the aristocratic house, however, remains in place as an organizing framework. In all three tales, the protagonist’s accession to and/or abandonment of a transgendered identity is deeply imbricated with the fortunes of the natal house.
Among the several long fictional narratives surviving from the century or so after the appearance of the Genji, thinking about houses
A number of late Heian court fictions feature heroines who reprise Ukifune before and after her tonsuring, among them the lengthy and
The elite women writers and readers of mid-Heian fiction were engaged in a long conversation about the vicissitudes of polygynous marriage and what might be done to ameliorate and aestheticize both married life and fiction about marriage. It has become common to acknowledge that the tales and memoirs they produced furnish us with telling details excluded by Heian histories and annals. Even Genji admits as much to Tamakazura during their conversation on that rainy day in chapter 25 (Hotaru): “‘How insensitive of me to speak so dismissively about your tales! They have set down everything that’s happened since the age of the gods. The histories—the Chronicles of Japan and the like—they preserve only a fragment of that. It is fiction that contains all the details that clarify how things happen.’”23 Modern interpreters have been rightly nervous about the usefulness of these details as history, though they do not always resist using them. Genji’s purposes in making this observation were patently frivolous, even if his author’s were not. He delivered his patronizing remarks with a smile, hoping to seduce a young woman by indulging her admiration of fiction. But in his haste, he overlooked something crucial. As one scholar-turned-novelist put it, “to read fiction is to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that have happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world.”24 To this I would add: fiction is fascinated with the counterfactual. We write it to invent, and read it to discover, what might have happened but did not.
Genji himself is clearly on the side of the not-yet-realized, but he is so bent on nudging Tamakazura toward his own fantasy that he fails to suspect she may be envisioning a house of her own making. The imaginary houses that Heian women created are to be taken seriously despite their narrators’ disavowals. The figures of Genji and his women, Tamakazura and the noblemen she outfoxes, and Kaoru and the loves