Tale of Genji Museum 源氏物語 ミュージアム

Silently waiting
Gazing up from the depths
Red leaf submerged

So last year was the '1000th' anniversary of the writing of the Tale of Genji. I won't go in to too many details about the book. Wikipedia actually has a very good site on it. It seems very consistent with the other information I have come across. As with anything of any greatness there is always some controversy; who wrote what, when was it really written, was it really the 1st 'novel'? Does it really matter?

Genji Monogatari was written by Murasaki Shikibu in the early 11th century. The current belief is that the book was started in 1008 and finished in 1021. It's funny because I can barely keep focused on a project for more than a week, let alone 13 years!　　The rough and tumble of the plot is this; Genji is a son of the Emporer, but not in the line of succession. So he has all the money with none of the responsibility. He spends his days wooing women and composing poetry.

The book is tremendously long and even in the abridged form is a fairly grueling read. The abridged version contains a few key chapters spead out in the story. The original was 54 chapters I think.

While in Uji my friends took me to the Genji Museum. It was pretty interesting. If you have the option of Japanese or English for the movie portion of the tour.... Go with the English. I didn't understand a word! The tour is self guided with a pair of headphones. And if you happened to driver there, parking is easy, either in the lot or on the street. The museum is across the foot bridge from Byodoin, (for those of you heading that way.)

My favorite part about the Tale of Genji was the poetry. I think you can buy books that just have the poems. From the story, the characters recite poems to each other as a way of showing their wit, cultural accuity, and affection etc. Oftentimes the characters would be using references to other popular poems of the day, (either Chinese or Japanese), a historically accurate past=time.

The photo is of a display of Genji sitting in his wheeled carraige. Many thanks to Marika S. and Yoshie M. for making the photo possible!

Also check out a previous post on Byodoin here.



All photo's, original works, and comments are my personal property. Please be respectful of the effort I've taken.

Your comments are welcome, be polite:
No throwing pebbles in my pool of zen.