Literary Imagination

The eleventh-century Japanese masterpiece The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) features a number of what one might call “literal” ghosts: characters who die leaving some unfinished business in the world and come back to take care of it.¹ Genji’s father, the Kiritsubo Emperor, who dies in Chapter Ten, appears as a ghost in Chapter Thirteen to admonish his successor to bring Genji back from exile.² In Chapter Thirty-Six, a young man named Kashiwagi has an affair with one of Genji’s wives and subsequently dies, consumed by shame and dread. He later returns as a ghost to make sure his cherished flute is passed to the secret son that resulted from this adulterous affair.³ And, of course, in the world of The Tale of Genji, one need not die to become a ghost. The most famous specter in the Tale is that of Lady Rokujō, one of Genji’s lovers, who is so consumed with jealousy that her spirit leaves her living body and kills her rival, Genji’s wife Aoi. In this essay, however, I will not be talking primarily about such “literal” ghosts. I want to consider instead the role played in the Genji by literary ghosts. I argue that one cannot really understand or appreciate the Genji without realizing the crucial role that such ghosts play in its narrative and poetic discourse.

But first, any discussion of ghosts and The Tale of Genji must begin by acknowledging that the term designating the genre to which Murasaki’s book belongs, the monogatari, means not just a “tale,” but a “story about ghosts.” Mono means “things” and gatari is the nominal form of the verb kataru, meaning “to narrate.” But mono can also mean “ghost” [End Page 19] or “wandering spirit,” so the word monogatari can also be translated as a “ghost story.”⁴ The word Genji in Genji monogatari, is, moreover, a surname given to former members of the Imperial family who have been removed from the line of succession, as Genji himself is at the beginning of the Tale. The title Genji monogatari, then, could also very well be translated as “A Ghost Story About a Genji.”

And indeed, one theory holds that the title refers to exactly that: a fictional story having to do with the ghost of an actual historical figure belonging to the “Genji” clan. The character gen 源 can also be read Minamoto, and this was the surname taken by such demoted royals. According to this theory, the powerful courtier Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1028) commissioned Murasaki Shikibu, then serving as a lady-in-waiting to his daughter, Empress Shōshi, to write this “Ghost Tale of a Genji” in order to appease the angry ghost of a courtier named Minamoto no Takaakira (914–983), whom Michinaga’s own father had wronged by sending him into exile.⁵ Fearing that Takaakira’s ghost might take revenge on his family, Michinaga is thought to have commissioned Murasaki to write a story glorifying Takaakira's memory as a way of making amends for his father’s actions. The fictional Genji does indeed resemble the historical Takaakira in several ways. The name “Takaakira” contains the character for “bright,” 明, which may have inspired the notion of Genji as the “shining Prince”; and, like Takaakira, Genji is banished from the capital in Chapter Twelve. To underscore the parallel between her fictional creation and his historical model, Murasaki Shikibu even has Genji depart the capital for Suma on the very same date, the twentieth of the third month, when the historical Takaakira was packed off to Kyūshū.⁶ Unlike his historical predecessor, however, who never regained his former prominence, Murasaki’s fictional hero comes back from exile as a divinely sanctioned figure whose enhanced prestige and powerful alliances propel him to a level of transcendent authority that eventually surpasses even the reigning emperor.⁷ Such a reading of the origins and purpose of the Tale raises the fascinating possibility of thinking of literary composition not only as a pursuit of aesthetic ends or a critique of social norms, but as a means of healing rifts in the social fabric. In the case of Heian Japan, this was an activity pursued mostly by women in response to the damage caused by the political ambitions of men.⁸

In any case, if The Tale of Genji has thus been said to be a book capable of quieting literal ghosts, it is also a text that is replete with literary ghosts. The Genji is built, one might say, on haunted grounds, a mansion where the ghostly voices of earlier literary works [End Page 20] make their presence known, and also make presences known and felt. The voices emanate from earlier tales and from the vast corpus of poems that Murasaki Shikibu and her peers had stored in memory. The Tale's characters, I argue, emerge from matrices of poems that Murasaki Shikibu and her readers knew by heart—and they continue to exist after their fictional deaths, reabsorbed into the very lexicon from which they sprang. But the Genji does more than animate these literary ghosts; through the stories of characters like Yūgao and her daughter Tamakazura, it asks what it means to be constituted by such inherited materials. Yūgao, beautiful and short-lived, is possessed by poetic tropes without knowing it. Her daughter Tamakazura, by contrast, develops a sophisticated awareness of the power of literary precedent—an awareness that does not save her from the constraints of her world, but allows her to tend the roots connecting her to the past without demanding that the past return. In tracing this arc from unconscious embodiment to reflective persistence, the Genji offers not a story of triumph over literary ghosts, but a meditation on how to survive among them.

The central role of poetic allusion in the Genji is one aspect in which this text is different from the modern novels it is so often said to resemble and anticipate. For the Genji is much more than a fictional story written in prose. The characters speak to each other and commune with themselves in a total of 795 poems that appear throughout the Tale, and the prose itself is saturated with words and phrases from the classical poetic lexicon. These phrases, known as kago （歌語）, constantly trigger associations in the minds of literary readers and in the minds of the characters. Spangled and braided over more than a thousand pages with this highly allusive poetic language, the prose of the Genji is constantly threatening to turn into poetry. Or rather, it is threatening to turn back into poetry, since poetry is its source.⁹

Many of the major plot lines of the Genji are essentially gigantic expansions in prose of images and motifs that derive from much shorter poems or “poem tales [uta-monogatari].” The most prominent of these sources is the Tales of Ise. The entire Wakamurasaki chapter, for example, can be read as an expansion of Ise's brief opening episode, where an unnamed man glimpses two beautiful sisters through a hedge and, lacking paper, tears off his sleeve to write a love poem. Joshua Mostow and Royall Tyler translate the poem as follows.

Young MurasakiSprung from Kasuga meadowsYou impress my cloakWith such Shinobu tanglesThey will never come undone.¹⁰ [End Page 21]

春日の若紫の摺衣しのぶの乱れ限り知られず

Kasuga no / waka-murasaki no / suri-koromo / shinobu no midare / kagiri shirarezu.

In telling the story of how her protagonist Genji first encounters his great love, Murasaki Shikibu expands on this compact poem and its brief prose context.¹¹ She preserves the hedge, the glimpse, the sudden passion, and makes each of the poem’s keywords into a sustained motif. Shinobu is a highly polysemic term. It is a place name in Northern Japan and the name of a fern used in a dyeing technique involving pressing leaves into cloth to create patterns. It is also a verb meaning “to praise,” “to yearn for,” “to call to mind,” “to suppress,” and “to keep secret.” Murasaki (‘purple’), the color of dye used “secretly” (shinobu) to dye the man’s cloak and his heart with passion for the girl he meets, becomes the name by which readers know this girl who will become Genji’s great love, and the author of the Tale of Genji herself. Finally, the “tangled” (midare) patterns in which the robe is dyed suggest the entanglement of Genji and his love.

This is just one of countless examples of how Murasaki Shikibu develops clusters of poetic images into more elaborate prose narratives. Over and over, as one reads the Genji, one has the uncanny feeling that she has taken a scrap of a poem or two along with some stale tropes out of the dusty scrolls where she found them, added connective tissue, and breathed such life into them that they become full-fledged, three-dimensional characters talking, feeling, falling in love, and walking about in a stunningly realistic novel. Readers need only to look closely at these creations to see them quickly crumble back into their constituent poetic parts, revealing the poetic words and phrases from which they are made. And yet, somehow, they still strike us as fully realized characters, with many layers of conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings.

The Genji not only conjures complex, three-dimensional realities, and fully-formed characters out of a few poetic words and images, it also seems to want the reader to see it doing this. It wants to show its readers how it works. By constantly contrasting the realism of its characters to the stock figures in “old tales” (furumonogatari), The Tale of Genji shows off its superior ability to conjure mere words into reality, a metafictional technique that has the effect, paradoxically, of making the world and the people it evokes seem even more real.

If characters in the Genji emerge and take on life out of a matrix of preexisting poetic tropes and images, these characters also continue to exist after their deaths, clinging to the same scraps of poetry from which they emerged, until they are finally reabsorbed into that matrix, where they continue even then to trigger associations—consciously for those who remember them, and unconsciously for those who access the poetic lexicon that has now been reshaped and enriched by their fictional existence. In other words, characters in the Genji preexist their own births and outlive their deaths. They are ghosts in two directions.

To show how this works, I’d like to discuss the example of one of the most memorable of Genji’s ladies, whose story is told in the fourth chapter. She dies tragically in the middle of that chapter, not long after Genji meets and falls in love with her, but she exists as a [End Page 22] tissue of words, images, and memories almost from the start of the book and long after her death. Her real name is never revealed in the Tale, but she is known to readers as “Yūgao,” by association with the flower by that name: a species of bottle gourd that puts out white flowers only at night. The two characters comprising the word (夕顔) mean “evening faces,” and she is sometimes called “The Lady of the Evening Faces.” But names such as these are only grafted onto her metonymically and retroactively, in a process that is paradigmatic of the way poetic language functions in the Genji.¹²

Yūgao’s arrival in the text is anticipated and prepared first in the form of a somewhat hackneyed trope, that of the “mugura no kado” (葎の門) or “tumbledown house choked with vine weeds.” In earlier tales such as the Tales of Ise or the Tale of the Hollow Tree (Utsubo- monogatari), the heroes were apt to come across a beautiful woman quite unexpectedly in such a place. In the Genji, the trope appears first in the second chapter, when Genji is still in his late teens. On a rainy evening in the fifth month, he is stuck indoors, listening to several of his male friends tell stories about their misadventures with a variety of women. Among all of the stories he hears, his imagination is fired especially by what starts out as a kind of fantasy described by one of his friends.

What if, this friend asks, in one’s search for the perfect woman, one were, one day, purely by accident, to stumble across her in a place one would never have expected to find her?

What if . . .

behind some gateway overgrown with vine-weed, in a place where no one knows there is a house at all, there should be locked away a creature of unimagined beauty —with what excitement should we discover her! The complete surprise of it, the upsetting of all our wise theories and classifications, would be likely, I think, to lay a strange and sudden enchantment upon us.¹³

さて、世にありと人に知られず、さびしくあばれたらむ葎の門に、思ひの外にらうたげならむ 人の閉ぢられたらむこそ、限ぎりなくめづらしくはおぼえめ。いかで、はたかかりけむと思ふ より違へることなむ、あやしく心とまるわざなる。

Sate, yo ni ari to hito ni shirarezu, sabishiku abaretaramu mugura no kado ni, omoi no hoka ni rōtage naramu hito no tojiraretaramu koso, kagiri naku mezurashiku wa oboeme. Ika de hatakakarikemu to omou yori tagaeru koto namu, ayashiku kokoro tomaru waza naru.

It is a beautiful, famous passage, exquisitely rendered here into English by Arthur Waley. Two poetic words in the Japanese text might be said to begin the process of beckoning Yūgao into the story. First, the aforementioned mugura no kado or “gateway overgrown [End Page 23] with vine-weed” will trigger readers’ memories of various earlier stories of just such a woman hidden away in an out-of-the-way, tumble-down house. Second, there is the word ayashi(ku), meaning “strange” or “uncanny,” which appears here for the first time, in the Genji’s second chapter. In the fourth, or Yūgao, chapter, it will reappear twenty times. It is what the great Edo-period Genji scholar Hagiwara no Hiromichi (1815–1864) calls the “primary word” (ganmoku) of the Yūgao chapter.¹⁴ As introduced here in the second chapter, it lays the groundwork for the apparition of Yūgao herself in the fourth chapter, and also the appearance of the ghost that will murder her.

The future Yūgao’s next (pre-)appearance comes in an anecdote told just a few pages later, still in Chapter Two, by Genji’s friend and brother-in-law, Tō no Chūjō. In this anecdote, we learn that Tō no Chūjō has been carrying on a secret affair with a woman who has no parents or other means of support. This woman has had a child with him, but now she and the child have gone into hiding because of threats from his primary wife. To escape the baleful effects of jealousy, she has hidden herself away.¹⁵

Tō no Chūjō then recounts an exchange of three poems with this woman.¹⁶ In the first, she implores him to continue to support the child they have together:

Though tattered be the hillman’s hedge, deign sometimes to look with kindness upon the Child-flower that grows so sweetly there.¹⁷

山がつの垣ほ荒るとも折々にあはれはかけよ撫子の露

Yamagatsu no / kakiho aru to mo / ori-ori ni / aware wa kake yo / nadeshiko no tsuyu

In his reply, he reassures her of his steadfast love, not just for the child but for her as well.

No bloom in this wild array would I wish to slight But dearest to me of all is the wild carnation.¹⁸

咲きまじる色はいづれと分かねどもなほ常夏にしくものぞなき

Sakimajiru / iro wa izure to / wakanedomo / nao tokonatsu ni / shiku mono zo naki

She then responds with a third poem expressing her anxiety through the image of fierce autumn winds. [End Page 24]

Autumn arrives and rough winds shakeDew from wild pinks and tears from sleevesThat wipe dust from my lonely bed¹⁹

うち払ふ袖も露けき常夏にあらし吹きそふ秋も来にけり

Uchiharau sode mo tsuyukeki tokonatsu ni arashi fukisou aki mo ki-nikeri

Woven through these three poems is a set of poetic words that will appear repeatedly in association with the character Yūgao: yamagatsu no kakiho, a rough, rustic hedge or fence (Waley: “Though tattered be the hillman’s hedge”); two names for the same flower at different ages, the tokonatsu (“wild carnation” or “pinks”) and the nadeshiko (“child flower”), representing the woman and her infant daughter; and finally tsuyu, or “dew,” symbolizing evanescence and tears. Although Yūgao herself has yet to appear in the world of the novel by name, her presence and fictional existence are being prepared by these words. One might say that her “pre-ghost” emerges here.

When, in the opening of the fourth chapter, Genji arrives at a house very much like the mugura no kado, readers are primed by this earlier account, and by the repetition of these key words, to imagine that he might find a beautiful woman hidden away there, just as it happens in the poetic trope. During the lingering heat of late summer, Genji makes his way to visit his old wet nurse, who lives in a modest house on the outskirts of the city. The neighborhood is crowded and somewhat plebian: not the kind of place where a courtier like Genji would expect to find anyone of elegance or refinement. But then, just next door to his wet-nurse’s house, he notices a small dwelling, half-hidden behind a “wattled fence over which some ivy-like creeper spread its cool green leaves, and among the leaves were white flowers with petals half-unfolded like the lips of people smiling at their own thoughts.”²⁰

In the Japanese text, the flowers are said to be blooming “alone,” signaling that we are in late summer, when other plants have stopped flowering. This phrase, onore hitori, and the phrase used for “bloom” (emi no mayu hiraketaru), which contains the word used for human eyebrows (mayu) and can also mean “smile,” have the effect of personifying the flowers. Waley’s lovely phrase, “petals half-unfolded like the lips of people smiling at their own thoughts,” a line that caught Virginia Woolf’s eye and that she quoted in her early review of his translation, is his invention.²¹ And yet, as is often the case with Waley, he has captured the spirit of the passage. The narration in Japanese does not use a simile: it does not tell us that these flowers are like the lips of people. And yet, having “eyebrows” (mayu), and blooming/smiling as they emerge, white and bright, from the shadows, they start to seem like people. [End Page 25]

But what kind of flowers are they? Genji wants to know. Rather than ask directly, he routes his question through poetic discourse, uttering the first line of a famous poem in which the speaker goes on to ask the name of certain white flowers.²² A retainer accompanying him, clearly a well-read man, catches the allusion, and answers his master’s implied question.²³

“They are called Yūgao, ‘Evening Faces,’ ” he says, in Waley’s translation. In Japanese, he continues, “The name of these flowers makes them sound like people.” And then (again in Waley’s translation), “How strange to find so lovely a crowd clustering on this deserted wall.” The name “Yūgao” sounds human because it contains the word for “face” (kao).²⁴

Genji finds it strangely moving that such beautiful flowers should be growing in such an unexpected place, and he asks his servant to pluck some of them. Just then, a little girl emerges from the house and presents his servant with a white, incense-perfumed fan, suggesting that he use it as a tray for the blossoms. Later, after visiting with his wet nurse next door, Genji notices a poem written on the fan. Although the handwriting is casual and written as if to conceal the identity of the writer, Genji can tell that whoever wrote it has “breeding and distinction.”²⁵ This unexpected glimpse of hidden elegance serves as the catalyst for a new romance, as Genji becomes determined to uncover the identity of the woman behind the “evening faces.” The trope of the woman concealed behind “some gateway overgrown with vineweed” (mugura no kado) has manifested itself before his very eyes.

In Tyler’s translation, the poem on the fan reads,

“At a guess I see that you may indeed be he: the light silver dew  brings to clothe in loveliness a twilight beauty flower.”

心あてにそれかとぞ見る白露の光そへたる夕顔の花

Kokoro-ate ni / sore ka to zo miru / shiratsuyu no / hikari soe-taru / yūgao no hana

Genji replies, again in Tyler’s translation,

“Let me then draw near and see whether you are she, whom glimmering dusk Gave me faintly to discern in twilight beauty flowers.”

寄りてこそそれかとも見めたそかれにほのぼの見つる花の夕顔

Yorite koso / sore ka to mo mime / tasokare ni / honobono mitsuru / hana no yūgao [End Page 26]

Throughout this exchange, we never learn the name of the author of the poem. She never introduces herself, nor does anyone call her by a personal name. But she continues to be associated with the flowers. Like them, she seems to loom out of the darkness. In the reader’s mind, she becomes “Yūgao”—not through any act of self-identification, but through a process of gradual accretion, as the flowers, the poems, the fan, and eventually the woman herself coalesce into a single poetic constellation. The name “Yūgao” adheres to her not as a label affixed from the start, but as the residue of this chain of associations: the white petals emerging from shadow, the anthropomorphized “faces” blooming alone, the hidden elegance glimpsed through a fence. She has not been named so much as she has crystallized into a presence that can be referred to, even as her actual identity remains as veiled as it was at the beginning.

This is how characters emerge in the Tale of Genji: not as individuals who enter the narrative fully formed, but as figures who materialize gradually from within the very fabric of poetic language, taking shape at the intersection of conventional tropes and specific textual moments, until they acquire enough density to be perceived as persons rather than merely as atmospheres or moods.

On this first evening, Genji leaves to visit his nurse without meeting this mysterious woman. When his wingman, Koremitsu, finally manages to arrange for Genji to visit her house a few days later, her appearance is not described and the night they spend together is only implied between the lines. Eventually, however, wishing to be alone with the woman, Genji takes her to a deserted mansion where they plan to spend the night together. There, a malevolent spirit appears at their bedside in the guise of a beautiful woman. The spirit murders Yūgao, and she dies in Genji's arms. Most readers have assumed that the spirit who kills Yūgao is the living ghost of Lady Rokujō, Genji's older, jealous lover—a conclusion drawn retrospectively from the later “Aoi” chapter, where Rokujō’s spirit unambiguously kills Genji’s wife. In that episode, the evidence is incontrovertible: Rokujō’s spirit, departing unconsciously from her body, returns soaked in the smoke of poppies used by the exorcists trying to expel her spirit from Aoi’s body, providing clear physical proof of her guilt. And yet the murderous ghost who kills Yūgao is never named in the text.

The aforementioned Edo-period Genji scholar Hagiwara Hiromichi argued that it was not in fact Lady Rokujō who killed Yūgao.²⁶ To assume that the culprit in the earlier death must be the same as in the later one, he insisted, “amounts to nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy, an investigation driven by foregone conclusions.”²⁷ The Yūgao affair occurred suddenly, in secret; there is no way Rokujō could have known about it, and therefore no grounds for her to hold a grudge. Moreover, Hiromichi drew on Genji’s own [End Page 27] testimony: when Genji sees the apparition, he describes her only as an “exceedingly beautiful woman”—not as the noblewoman living at Rokujō whom he would certainly have recognized. “If the version offered by the earlier commentators was correct,” Hiromichi reasoned, “then Genji would never have said she was an exceedingly beautiful woman, but would have described her simply as the noble woman who lived in the Rokujō area.” Reading the text through the psychology of the protagonist, attending closely to how “situations unfold in relation to Genji’s mind,” Hiromichi concluded that the culprit was an unidentified wandering spirit—a mono—that haunted the desolate villa where Genji took Yūgao for their tryst.²⁸

But Hiromichi was less interested in solving the mystery than in understanding how Murasaki Shikibu’s language had conjured this apparition in the first place. He observed that the word ayashi—meaning “strange,” “mysterious,” “uncanny”—appears some twenty times in the Yūgao chapter, functioning as the “primary word” (ganmoku) of the narrative. From the ayashiki kakine, which Tyler calls the “pitiful fence,”²⁹ where Genji first glimpses the yūgao flowers, through the “strange” manner of the woman he meets, to the “mysterious” atmosphere of the ruined villa, this single word accumulates force with each repetition, gradually saturating the chapter with an atmosphere of foreboding until the apparition finally materializes. Hiromichi traced these repetitions as a “string of words” (gomyaku) that foreshadows and ultimately produces the climactic horror.³⁰

For Hiromichi, this patterning was not simply a matter of technique but evidence of how poetic language functions in the Genji. Words do not merely describe preexisting realities; they call apparitions into being. The spirit that kills Yūgao emerges from the same verbal matrix as Yūgao herself—conjured by the accumulation of kago, the poetic words that give shape to mood, atmosphere, and finally presence. “Because all made-up tales are by definition things that are created,” Hiromichi wrote in his annotation to the chapter, “apparitions which take astonishing forms are numerous in them.”³¹ Ghosts belong in fiction not because fiction represents a world where ghosts exist, but because fiction is the conjuring of apparitions through language. The beautiful woman who appears at Genji’s pillow may wear the face of Rokujō—Hiromichi acknowledged that “the Rokujō lady casts a lingering light (nihoi) over the scene”—but she is ultimately a creature of words, summoned into being by the same poetic mechanisms that animate Yūgao herself.

Insofar as they are made of words, moreover, characters can survive their fictional deaths. In Yūgao’s case, she might be said to acquire a solid identity only after her death, as, gradually, the tropes and images from which she is made form the outlines of a person in a way that parallels the way her author turns poetry into prose, and back again. For example, Chapter Six opens with a sentence describing Genji in mourning over Yūgao’s death. At first, the sentence appears to be prose, but, when read closely, it can be seen to break down into the [End Page 28] syllabic pacing of a poem, into phrases alternating five and seven syllables. Not only that, but this poem-passing-as-prose also contains two kago that appear in poems from the first Imperial Anthology, the Kokinshū. Both poems also have to do with the soul leaving the body, and these allusions add depth to Genji’s ongoing grief at the death of Yūgao.

In Dennis Washburn’s English translation, the sentence in question is indistinguishable from prose:

“No matter how much time passed, Genji could no longer forget the woman who had died, her life as fleeting as the dew on evening faces.”³²

Looking at the sentence in Japanese, however, reveals the first four phrases breaking into syllable counts of 5-7-5-7, almost forming a complete 31-syllable waka poem, before a set of four syllables yields to two additional phrases of seven:

思へどもなほあかざりし夕顔の露に遅れし心地を年月経れど思し忘れず

Omoedomo / nao akazarishi / yūgao no / tsuyu ni okureshi / kokochi o, / toshizuki furedo / oboshi wasurezu.

The first poetic word (kago) in the Japanese text is omoedomo, meaning, “You are so dear to me, but.” The phrase calls up poem #373 in the Kokinshu, which also begins with that phrase. Written by one friend when parting with another, the poem reads, in my translation,

“You are so dear to me, but as I cannot split my self in two so I shall send my unseen heart along with you!”

思へども身をしわけねば目に見えぬ心を君にたぐへてぞやる

Omoedomo / mi o shi wakeneba / me ni mienu / kokoro o kimi ni / taguete zo yaru

The phrase “my unseen heart” here most likely refers to the poem itself that the friend will take with him.

The other kago in this poem-passing-as-prose is akazarishi, meaning “not having tired of,” or “not getting enough of” the company of a friend or lover. This word calls to mind Kokinshū poem #992, which comes with the headnote: “Sent by one female friend to another when they had to part after a lively conversation”:

“I did not get my fill from talking to you. I feel so empty inside. / Has my soul stowed away in your sleeve and left me, soulless, here?”

あかざりし袖の中にや入りにけむ我が魂のなき心地する

Akazarishi / sode no naka ni ya / iri-nikemu / waga tamashii no / naki kokochi suru [End Page 29]

As the Genji scholar Tamagami Takuya has pointed out, sentences like this that quiver between prose and poetry, making full use of the resonance of the poetic tradition for the purposes of a novel, are what earned Murasaki Shikibu the reputation of having elevated narrative fiction, previously derided as the scribbling of women, to the level of a highly refined art, eventually making the Tale of Genji itself into an indispensable resource for anyone wishing to write poetry in Japanese.³³ The Yūgao chapter proved especially rich in this regard. Ichijō Kanera’s Renju gappekishū, a fifteenth-century handbook of yoriai (associated words used by renga poets to link verses), lists fifty-four yoriai deriving from the Yūgao chapter alone, out of a total of 886, the most of any chapter of the Genji—making the chapter a “canon within the canon for renga poets.”³⁴ In other words, the chapter that tells the story of a woman who emerges from poetic tropes and is killed by a spirit conjured from words became, after the fact, one of the most fertile sources of new poetic language in the Japanese tradition. Yūgao’s literary afterlife demonstrates Hiromichi’s insight: words call apparitions into being, and those apparitions, once animated, generate still more words.

But if Yūgao, like other Genji characters, is in a very real sense made of poetry, she is also a creature of prose; a novelistic character who lives and breathes.³⁵ One of the great pleasures of reading the Genji is to be found in tracing this process of animation, whereby bits of poetry are turned into fleshed-out novelistic characters. In Yūgao’s case, the final stage of her becoming a fully animated character occurs long after her death, in the opening of chapter 22, which tells the story of her daughter Tamakazura, the nadeshiko or “Child flower” that we heard about in her mother’s exchanges with Tō no Chūjō way back in the second chapter. It is here that the Japanese text uses the word “Yūgao” in a way that can clearly be understood as a personal name for the first time.

I might translate the first sentence of the Tamakazura chapter like this: “Though many months and years had passed, he had not forgotten Yūgao in the least, Yūgao who had left him wanting so much more.”³⁶ The phrase “in the least” (tsuyu) is a homophone with the word for “dew,” calling back to the complex of images associating the character Yūgao with the flower bedecked with dew, both of which vanish so quickly, like her brief life. [End Page 30] The phrase I have translated as “who left him wanting so much more” is the same kago, akazarishi, that appears in the poem above about the two women friends who must part before they get their fill of talking together.

Finally, seventeen years after her death, as the story of her daughter commences, “Yūgao,” the flower whose name sounds like a person, has become a person whose name sounds like a flower. She may be dead, but she continues to exist powerfully in the minds of the characters in the Tale. Genji has not forgotten her, not even a little bit (tsuyu mo). And her former nursemaid Ukon, who lives in Genji’s great Rokujō estate, is said to be “constantly appraising the relative positions of the great ladies who ruled the house, and deciding what place her dear mistress would now be occupying were she still alive.”³⁷

If Yūgao continues to exist as a literary ghost because she emerged from poetic tropes, she never seemed to know it. Animated as she was by the kago, brought to life by Murasaki Shikibu’s prosimetric art, she remained unconscious of her own textual constitution. She was the evening face blooming on the tumbledown fence—beautiful, evanescent, and vulnerable precisely because she had no distance from the poetic script she was living out. When the malevolent spirit appeared, she had no resources to resist. She died as she lived: a tissue of words that couldn’t recognize itself as such.

For Yūgao’s daughter Tamakazura, the situation is different. Unbeknownst to Genji or to Ukon, she was taken to Kyūshū as an infant soon after her mother died. Now, in her own namesake Chapter Twenty-Two, she has found her way back to the capital as a young woman. The following ten chapters, known as the “Tamakazura Cycle,” tell the story of this young woman, who resembles her mother in some ways, but turns out to be very different in others.

Just as we do with her mother, we come to know Tamakazura through repeated tropes in poetic language. Throughout her poems, Tamakazura returns obsessively to images of drifting, floating, and rootlessness—figures that capture her sense of disconnection from the stable origins that would anchor her identity.³⁸ Her first poem in the Tale, composed on the boat returning from Kyūshū, is translated by Seidensticker as:

“We sail vast seas and know not where we goFloating ones, abandoned to the winds.”³⁹

行く先も見えぬ波路に船出して風にまかする身こそ浮きたれ

Yuku saki mo / mienu namiji ni / funade shite / kaze ni makasuru / mi koso ukitare

Tamakazura is adrift on waves whose destination she cannot see, her body given over to the wind, “floating” (uki) in a condition of radical contingency. The word uki carries its characteristic double meaning here of “floating” and “sadness,” so that her physical unmooring on the water is simultaneously an emotional state of sorrow and vulnerability. [End Page 31]

After arriving in Kyoto, Tamakazura encounters her mother’s maid Ukon by chance at the temple at Hase. Ukon recognizes her, and they have a joyful reunion in which they exchange poems. In her poem, Ukon references the “twin cedars” (futamoto no sugi), drawing upon Kokinshū poem #1009, which links those trees to a certain “old river” (furukawa).

Had I not come to the place of cedars twain,How should I have met you here beside the old river?⁴⁰

二元の杉のたちどを尋ねずは古川野辺に君を見ましや

Futamoto no / sugi no tachido o / tazunezu wa / furukawa nobe ni / kimi o mimashi ya

In her reply, Tamakazura picks up on this geographical and literary thread by opening with a mention of the Hatsuse River (Hatsusegawa), the very body of water that appears in the poem about the “twin cedars” to which Ukon’s poem alludes.⁴¹

What in the old days the Hatsuse River was, that I hardly know,But my tears of joy flow on, meeting you this way today⁴²

初瀬川はやくのことは知らねども今日の逢ふ瀬に身さへ流れぬ

Hatsusegawa / hayaku no koto wa / shirane-domo / kyō no au-se ni / mi sae nagarenu

Tamakazura also incorporates sophisticated wordplay building on images from Ukon’s poem—specifically the pivot word (kakekotoba) ause 逢ふ瀬, which means both a “fated meeting” and the “shallows” of a river, and the associated word (engo) nagare 流れ, or “flow,” which can also mean “crying” 泣かれ. In doing so, she responds to Ukon’s poem with a complex allusive variation, an advanced technique wherein one poem builds upon the “ghost” of a previous poem. This display of deep poetic knowledge strikes Ukon with wonder; she cannot fathom how a young woman raised in the wilds of Kyūshū could have acquired such a polished literary education, proving that Tamakazura’s innate nobility has survived her rustic upbringing.⁴³ In Washburn’s translation, the passage continues as follows:

Ukon marveled at how well the old nurse had raised her charge. The young lady’s mother had been so young and gentle, so compliant and yielding, but her daughter possessed a refined dignity that made others feel ashamed in her presence, and, as her poem indicated, she was well trained.⁴⁴

The encounter with Ukon ends up bringing Tamakazura back into touch with Genji, who sees her mother in her—and who wants to keep seeing her mother in her. Rather than [End Page 32] inform Tō no Chūjō that his long-lost daughter has been found, Genji decides to keep Tamakazura for himself. He installs her in his household and announces to the world that she is his own daughter, the child of a secret affair from years ago. This lie serves multiple purposes. It allows Genji to keep Tamakazura close, to gaze upon her face and see Yūgao reflected there, without interference from her actual father. It also creates a perverse intimacy: because the world believes she is his daughter, their closeness appears natural, even filial, while Genji privately savors the erotic charge of a relationship that is not what it seems. He can play the role of devoted father in public while reliving, in secret, his lost relationship with the mother. For Genji, Tamakazura is not so much a person in her own right as an allusion to Yūgao, a living echo of the woman he lost. Just as a kago in a poem triggers the memory of earlier poems in which it appeared, Tamakazura’s face, her manner, her very presence calls up the image of her dead mother in Genji’s mind. In making Tamakazura his fictional daughter, Genji essentially scripts her into a narrative of his own devising. She becomes a character in his private fiction, a living substitute conjured to fill the void left by Yūgao’s death. He wants to collapse the distinction between mother and daughter, past and present, the dead woman and the living one. In the poem from which her name derives, Genji uses the image of a tamakazura, meaning a garland or wreath, and also a wig or hair extension, to figure her relation to her lost mother. In Washburn’s translation, his poem reads:

What connection binds us, like stems bindingA lovely garland, bringing you to oneFated always to yearn for lost love⁴⁵

恋ひわたる身はそれなれど玉かづらいかなる筋を尋ね来つらむ

Koi-wataru / mi wa sore naredo / Tamakazura / ika naru suji o / tazune kitsu-ran

Tamakazura, however, experiences her relationship to her mother very differently. Her poems to Genji develop this through botanical figures, as in this poem, in Washburn’s translation:

If there is a connection that binds me to youWhy did I, like humble stems of mikuri reedTake root in this world of sorrow⁴⁶

数ならぬ三稜や何の筋や何の筋なればうきにしもかく根をとどめけむ

Kazu naranu / mikuri no suji ya / nani no suji nareba / uki ni shi mo kaku / ne o todome-kemu

She is a mikuri (a water plant), a “rootless” thing of no account (kazu naranu), wondering why her roots became lodged in such “sad” and “floating” (uki) circumstances. The word suji—thread, stem, lineage—appears as something she lacks or cannot trace.⁴⁷ And yet roots persist as a preoccupation: in another poem she asks whether there will ever come a time when she might seek out the roots (ne) from which she, like young bamboo (wakatake), first began to grow. The image suggests both longing for her mother and uncertainty—the [End Page 33] roots exist somewhere, but she cannot reach them; she has grown up severed from her origins, a shoot without secure grounding.

These poems register Tamakazura’s consciousness of herself as unmoored, a figure defined by broken connections. But they also reveal her persistent attention to the question of lineage and transmission—the suji that might, if she could find them, link her to something beyond her own drifting existence. What Tamakazura mourns is not the absence of her mother per se, but the absence of connection to her mother—the thread that would allow her to understand who she is and where she came from. Genji’s solution to this problem is no solution at all. By treating her as a substitute for Yūgao, he offers not connection but collapse: the erasure of Tamakazura’s own identity in favor of a ghostly repetition. What Tamakazura needs is something more difficult: to be herself while still maintaining a living relationship to the past, to acknowledge the roots from which she grew without being swallowed by them. She needs, in other words, to be a new shoot rather than a revenant.

If Tamakazura is one of the best poets in the Tale, she is also its most sophisticated reader. Having no mother herself to teach her how to survive in a world of men, she looks to poems and to fiction for guidance and for entertainment. This aspect of Tamakazura’s character comes most prominently to the fore in Chapter 25, “Fireflies.” In an echo of Chapter Two, when Genji and his friends sat around telling stories about women, the “Firefly” chapter takes place in the rainy season, when there is little else to do but read. At one point, Genji comes upon Tamakazura as she is reading old tales. She is utterly absorbed in her reading and he chides her for allowing herself to be deceived by outlandish fictions. “Here you are on this hot day,” he observes, “so hard at work that, though I am sure you have not the least idea of it, your hair is in the most extraordinary tangle.”⁴⁸

Genji concedes that there are some skilled storytellers in the world, but that “such tales must come from the mouths of people accustomed to spinning lies.”⁴⁹ To this, Tamakazura responds by saying, essentially, “You should know, being a liar yourself.”⁵⁰ Presently, Genji changes course and begins to argue for the value of fiction, comparing it to the use of hōben in Buddhist scriptures: stories which, though false, can lead to salvation. What follows is an extraordinary passage cut by Waley, but preserved in the other translations. Washburn renders it as follows:

“Tell me then,” he concluded, “have you found any stories of piously foolish old men like me among all your old scrolls? There couldn’t possibly be any fictional princesses in this world who are as extremely aloof and heartless as you . . . who pretend not to notice anything. So how about it? Shall we make a story unlike any other that has ever been told and pass it on to later generations?”

Genji sidled over to her.⁵¹ [End Page 34]

Playing the role of both guardian and predator, Genji is proposing a transgression—a “new story” of incest that would exploit the fact that the world believes her to be his daughter. Tamakazura’s rebuff is as much a literary critique as it is a moral one. She turns away, and replies that such a story would be so “bizarre and unbelievable that it will never become the subject of court gossip.” It would bankrupt the very believability of fiction itself.

When Genji attempts to shame her, claiming, in a poem, that he can find in all the ancient tales “no daughter as unfilial as you,” he is trying to trap her within a traditional role. But Tamakazura’s poem in reply turns the weight of literary history back upon him with devastating force.

Although I searchedOld records for a trace,I too found none—Nowhere in the world a heartOf any parent like to this.⁵²

古き跡を訪ぬれどげになかりけりこの世にかかる親の心は

Furuki ato o / tazunuredo ge ni / nakarikeri / kono yo ni kakaru / oya no kokoro wa

As Edwin Cranston, whose translation I cite here, has noted, this poem is “the most pointed statement a woman makes to a man in this narrative, and it stops the false father from committing ‘incest,’ even if it does not truly bring him to his senses.”⁵³

Ultimately, it is through Tamakazura’s search for self-representation that the Tale’s metafictional layers truly coalesce. As she pores over old stories to find a model for her own life, she cannot find a narrative that matches her own. This realization is Murasaki Shikibu’s most daring claim of originality. By having her character search for—and fail to find—her likeness in the clichés of the past, Shikibu announces that the Genji has moved beyond the fictions of old. She is writing a story that is utterly unprecedented, one that refuses to follow the predictable arcs of earlier monogatari.⁵⁴

And yet, for all her metafictional sophistication, Murasaki’s character Tamakazura cannot write her own story. Six chapters after this exchange with Genji, she is married off abruptly to a man she despises—Higekuro, whose name means “Black Beard,” a figure as far as possible from the shining prince she might have imagined for herself. The literary awareness Tamakazura possesses does not translate into power over her own life. In this, she is not so different from her mother after all: both women are subject to forces beyond their control, buffeted by the desires of powerful men.

But Tamakazura persists. She keeps reading books. And, in this persistence, she embodies an insight that no other character in the Genji quite achieves: that words can conjure apparitions, and that knowing this is both a burden and a resource. She cannot escape the [End Page 35] literary ghosts that haunt her—the suji, the threads and roots that tie her to her mother’s story—but neither is she consumed by them. Where Yūgao was possessed by poetic tropes without knowing it, and where Genji tries to possess those tropes in order to resurrect what he has lost, Tamakazura learns to tend them. She honors the connections to the past without demanding that the past return.

Genji himself never learns this. The metafictional wisdom Tamakazura embodies is offered to him, but he cannot receive it. He continues to seek substitutes for what he has lost until, devastated by the death of his most beloved wife Murasaki, he loses all desire and fades away, with thirteen chapters still remaining in the Tale.

In Chapter Thirty-Four, “Spring Shoots I” (Wakana jō), years after the drama of her unhappy marriage has subsided, Tamakazura reappears one final time. By this point, she has settled into a life that is not what she might have wanted, but that is not unbearable either. Having “matured very handsomely and acquired a new weightiness of presence,”⁵⁵ she comes to Genji bearing a gift: a basket of new spring shoots to celebrate his fortieth birthday and wish him continued vitality. Her poem reads, in Washburn’s translation:

I have brought along the pine seedlings I plucked in the fieldWhere early spring greens are shooting forth . . . and I pray todayThat the craggy rock where they took root may last for ages.⁵⁶

若葉さす野辺の小松を引きつれて元の岩根をいのるけふかな

Wakaba sasu / nobe no komatsu o / hikitsurete / moto no iwane o / inoru kyō kana

The “little pines” are also her children, whom she brings to honor Genji as their elder. The “early spring greens shooting forth” crystallize what the Tale has taught us about literary ghosts. The young shoots grow from ancient roots; the new is nourished by the old without being identical to it. Tamakazura does not try to resurrect her mother, and she does not pretend to be free of her mother’s legacy. She brings what is genuinely new—wakana, spring growth—while acknowledging the deep roots (moto no iwane) from which that newness springs.

Tamakazura is not able to write her own story as she wants it to be. But, as a character, she demonstrates that the most powerful ghosts are not those that haunt the night, nor those we try to summon back from death. They are the ones we live with—the poetic words and inherited images that constitute us, the suji that connect us to what came before. To know that you are made of such materials, and to go on reading, and writing, anyway, tending the roots while watching for new growth: this, The Tale of Genji suggests, is what it means to survive among ghosts. [End Page 36]