Haruo Shirane :: First
of all it's about love, it's a romance. It's a male hero [Genji] who encounters
many different women from many different social backgrounds. He himself belongs
to the highest echelon of society. He's the son of the emperor, a member
of the royalty. But the women that he encounters tend to be from lower ranks.
And this is the setting, the social setting, for the Tale of Genji.
It's stream-of-consciousness in a way that's not found until seventeenth-,
eighteenth-, ninteenth-century Europe. And that stream-of-consciousness,
this pursuing of psychological, emotional, delicate intertwinings of the
mind and emotions comes out of the women's literature. The men were more
concerned with public affairs, with history. For the women it was their
personal history, which was the ultimate history, and ultimately it was that
personal history, the psychological description, that survived. We never
read the histories by the men. |