The Tale of Genji: story, chapters and transmission

The Tale of Genji is an extended Japanese court narrative from the early eleventh century, attributed to Murasaki Shikibu, who served Empress Shōshi. A diary entry dated the first day of the eleventh month of 1008 records Fujiwara no Kintō joking about “Young Murasaki,” showing that the story was already known at court. It does not establish when all 54 chapters were completed; the sequence and process of composition remain debated.

The standard sequence contains 54 chapters, from Kiritsubo to Yume no ukihashi. A common three-part division follows Genji’s youth and ascendancy in chapters 1–33, the losses of his later life in 34–41, and the next generation in 42–54. The final ten, beginning with Hashihime, are known as the Uji chapters.

Hikaru Genji is the son of the Kiritsubo Emperor and a consort whose family lacks strong political support. After his mother’s early death, he is given the surname Minamoto and made a subject rather than remaining an imperial prince. His affairs are bound up with court politics: his secret son by Fujitsubo later becomes the Reizei Emperor.

The women occupy very different positions. Aoi is Genji’s wife; Fujitsubo is his father’s consort and his secret lover. He takes the young Murasaki into his household, and she later becomes his central companion. His daughter by the Akashi Lady is raised by Murasaki and eventually enters the imperial court. Family standing, marital position and children’s prospects shape these relationships.

After his affair with Oborozukiyo is exposed, Genji withdraws to Suma for fear of political reprisals, then moves to Akashi. His relationship there produces the daughter who will later enter the imperial court. Back in the capital, he regains influence and builds the Rokujō estate, accommodating women connected with his household. Withdrawal, return and family alliances shape his rise.

Genji’s marriage to the Third Princess wounds Murasaki. The princess bears Kashiwagi’s son Kaoru, who is raised as Genji’s child—a situation echoing Genji’s own concealed paternity of Reizei. After Murasaki’s death, Maboroshi follows his grief and remembrance. When the next generation takes over, Genji has died; the narrative does not stage his deathbed.

The Uji chapters centre on Kaoru, Genji’s grandson Niou, and the daughters of the Eighth Prince. Kaoru loves Ōigimi, who dies; her sister Nakanokimi becomes Niou’s partner. Their half-sister Ukifune is later caught between the two men. Rescued after her disappearance, she becomes a nun and declines to answer Kaoru’s message. The tale closes without resolving his failure to understand her decision.

Waka poems help characters approach, answer or evade one another. In Yūgao, flowers presented on a fan reach Genji with a poem and prompt an exchange. The flower, the writing and the response all belong to the encounter. A poem’s surrounding scene reveals whether it is an invitation, a suspicion or a refusal.

At the start of Yūgao, Genji asks for white flowers growing by a house in Fifth Avenue. A fan arrives with the flowers and a poem linking them to “light” in the white dew, perhaps testing the visitor’s identity through his epithet, the Shining Genji. His answer plays on coming closer to recognise the flower barely seen at dusk. The exchanged words give two strangers a way to continue the encounter. Scholars disagree over whether the sender had already recognised Genji, so that guess should not be treated as a settled plot fact.

Murasaki’s autograph does not survive. Medieval readers copied manuscripts and compared their wording. The Aobyōshi tradition is associated with Fujiwara no Teika’s editorial work; the Kawachi tradition with Minamoto no Mitsuyuki and his son Chikayuki. Beppon groups texts outside those two traditions. Individual manuscripts may combine different textual affiliations chapter by chapter.

The University of Tokyo’s Genji manuscript does not follow a single textual tradition in every chapter. The library’s study identifies a passage in Momijiga where wording from the Kawachi tradition was crossed through and an Aobyōshi reading added nearby. Two readings thus meet on the same page. Collation asks how individual passages were copied and corrected, not just which broad label to attach to a whole 54-chapter set.

Surviving complete sets of all 54 chapters date from the Muromachi period onward. One Imperial Household collection set was supervised and checked by Sanjōnishi Sanetaka, with copying divided among several hands; he copied the short Kagaribi chapter himself. Character genealogies also helped readers follow marriages and parentage across generations.

The early-twelfth-century Tale of Genji illustrated scrolls alternate selected narrative scenes with passages of calligraphy on decorated paper. Only part of the work survives. Made roughly a century after the tale’s emergence, they show an early way of retelling it through interiors, figures and writing.

An eighteenth-century Yūgao painting by Sumiyoshi Hiromori, catalogued by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, chooses the moment when a young attendant hands Genji’s messenger a fan bearing a reply poem and flowers. The intermediaries and the carried objects make the start of the encounter visible; the painting need not show Genji and Yūgao face to face. It is a later, distinct work from the twelfth-century Genji scrolls, showing how another artist selected a scene from the same story.

Edo publishing brought Genji to a wider readership. An illustrated edition appeared in 1654, and Kitamura Kigin’s Kogetsushō in 1673 gathered earlier commentary around the text. Motoori Norinaga completed Genji monogatari Tama no ogushi in 1796; it was published in 1799 and developed mono no aware, sensitivity to the feelings aroused by things, as a way of reading the tale. Conduct books disagreed over whether women should read it.

The distance between classical and modern Japanese has made modern-Japanese translations an important route into the work. Yosano Akiko’s Shin’yaku Genji monogatari appeared in 1912–13. Suematsu Kenchō’s English version of 1882 covered only the opening portion; later translators differ in selection, chapter titles and narrative voice. Royall Tyler’s two-volume English translation appeared in 2001.

Meiji textbooks selected passages from several chapters. Selection declined in the Taishō era, while prewar Shōwa secondary textbooks often concentrated on Suma. National elementary textbooks of 1938 and 1942 presented Wakamurasaki in modern language. Under the post-1947 education system, Kiritsubo and Wakamurasaki became recurring high-school selections, alongside other chapters; questions increasingly addressed motivation and interpretation as well as description.

The tale has also circulated through painting, crafts, prints and manga. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2019 exhibition brought together works from the eleventh century to the present, including calligraphy, clothing, lacquer and modern manga. Each medium selects and reshapes the story, while the 54-chapter literary work remains a point of reference.