ABSTRACT
On 11 February 2008, Yomiuri Shinbun (Yomiuri Newspaper) ran an editorial titled "The Tale of Genji: A Masterpiece of World Literature Turns 1000." This chapter sketches the history of the creation of this triangular field in the particular but certainly not isolated contexts of modern Japan and the Japanese language. It focuses on a literary figure whose importance to the history of Genji's modern canonization in Japan is only beginning to be recognized: the novelist, playwright, critic, and translator Masamune Hakucho. For Gakkai, as for Mokuro and other Japanese intellectuals throughout the premodern and early modern periods, the Chinese and Japanese traditions stood in a special, closed relationship. Kobayashi Hideo once suggested that apart from Motoori Norinaga, no major literary figure had praised Genji as enthusiastically as Hakucho. Akiko's first translation unquestionably did a wonderful job of making Genji accessible as a modernized classic.
