ABSTRACT
First published in J.Thomas Rimer, Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, pp. 200-244
NOTHING prepares us for a masterpiece. All the other novels so far discussed in this study were created, consciously or unconsciously, under the shade of this great tree, The Tale of Genji. Lady Murasaki’s novel made possible, very early in the long Japanese tradition, a degree of psychological introspection and a concern for aesthetic and, by implication, philosophical truths that set high standards for Japanese narrative. Indeed, some critics have suggested that the long and sophisticated history of Japanese fiction owes its very existence to the presence of a text of this quality, created toward the very beginnings. Traditions, of course, may exist only to be broken; yet even at moments of greatest change in the Japanese cultural and literary scene, Lady Murasaki’s novel reasserts itself. Tsubouchi Shōyō, for example, in his 1885 literary manifesto The Essence of the Novel, cited the values of Genji as consonant with the values of nineteenth-century English literature.
