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“Rowley
draws on a wealth of evidence and her own detailed analysis of Akiko’s
writings to make the highly original argument that in negotiating between
art and life, Akiko identified so closely with Murasaki and saw so much of
her philandering husband in Genji that she made the text into her own
story, transforming both Murasaki and Genji in the process. . . .
A concise summation of Genji studies and how readers have interacted with
the text. . . . This book is well worth reading not only
for its fresh insights into a major modern writer, but as a model of what
can be learned from an array of close textual analyses.” “A
clear and incisive description of the cultural and historical contexts of
Yosano Akiko’s involvement with Genji monogatari as reader, translator,
and scholar. . . . This study’s detailed treatment of
Yosano Akiko’s activities concerning Genji and their background . . .
will be of definite value to students of Genji and of translation.” Yosano
Akiko (1878–1942) has long been recognized as one of the most important
literary figures of prewar Japan. Hitherto she has been renowned
principally for the passion of her early poetry and for her contributions
to twentieth-century debates about women. This emphasis obscures a major
part of her career, which was devoted to work on the Japanese classics,
and, in particular, the great Heian period text The Tale of Genji. Akiko
herself felt that Genji was the bedrock upon which her entire literary
career was built, and her bibliography shows progressively increasing
amounts of time devoted to projects related to the tale. This study traces
for the first time the full range of Akiko’s involvement with The Tale
of Genji. The
Tale of Genji provided Akiko with her conception of herself as a writer
and inspired many of her most significant literary projects. She, in turn,
refurbished Genji as a modern novel, pioneered some of the most promising
avenues of modern academic research on Genji, and, to a great extent, gave
the text the prominence it now enjoys as a translated classic. Through her
work Genji became, in fact as well as in name, an exemplum of that most
modern of literary genres, the novel. In delineating this important aspect
of Akiko’s life and her bibliography, this study aims to show that
facile descriptions of Akiko as a “poetess of passion” or “new
woman” will no longer suffice. Published by Center
for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan |
