The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature

by Michael Emmerich

Michael Emmerich thoroughly revises the conventional narrative of the early modern and modern history of The Tale of Genji. Exploring iterations of the work from the 1830s to the 1950s, he demonstrates how translations and the global circulation of discourse they inspired turned The Tale of Genji into a widely read classic, reframing our understanding of its significance and influence and of the processes that have canonized the text.

Emmerich begins with an analysis of the lavishly produced best seller Nise Murasaki inaka Genji (A Fraudulent Murasaki's Bumpkin Genji, 1829-1842), an adaptation of Genji written and designed by Ryutei Tanehiko, with pictures by the great print artist Utagawa Kunisada. He argues that this work introduced Genji to a popular Japanese audience and created a new mode of reading. He then considers movable-type editions of Inaka Genji from 1888 to 1928, connecting trends in print technology and publishing to larger developments in national literature and showing how the one-time best seller became obsolete.

The study subsequently traces Genji's reemergence as a classic on a global scale, following its acceptance into the canon of world literature before the text gained popularity in Japan. It concludes with Genji's becoming a "national classic" during World War II and reviews an important postwar challenge to reading the work after it attained this status. Through his sustained critique, Emmerich upends scholarship on Japan's preeminent classic while remaking theories of world literature, continuity, and community.

Genres: Japanese Literature

512 pages, Hardcover

First published June 25, 2013

About the author

Michael Emmerich’s scholarly interests in Japanese literature range from the classical, court-centered prose and poetry of the Heian period to the popular printed fiction of the early modern age, and on from there to the prose fiction of modern and contemporary times. His engagement with the literary products of these diverse periods is informed by a sensitivity to the material and visual forms that writing takes, and by an academic commitment to translation studies with its potential for approaching literature in a manner relatively unconstrained by linguistic and temporal boundaries, both among and within nations. His book The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature (Columbia University Press, 2013) examines the role that translations of Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji) into early-modern and modern Japanese, and into English and other languages, have played in creating images of the tale over the past two centuries—reinventing it as a classic of both national and world literature. He is currently working on a project that explores the concept of “translation” as it relates to Japan and to various forms of the Japanese language.

In addition to his many publications in English and Japanese on early modern, modern, and contemporary Japanese literature, Emmerich is the author of more than a dozen book-length translations of works by writers such as Kawabata Yasunari, Yoshimoto Banana, Takahashi Gen’ichirō, Akasaka Mari, Yamada Taichi, Matsuura Rieko, Kawakami Hiromi, Furukawa Hideo, and Inoue Yasushi. He is also the editor of two books for students of the Japanese language: Read Real Japanese: Fiction and New Penguin Parallel Texts: Short Stories in Japanese.

Emmerich’s research has been generously supported by a number of grants, including a Fulbright Scholarship and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies. He was also the recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University’s Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, from 2008-2009.

Emmerich received a BA from Princeton University. After completing research in Japanese literature studies at Ritsumeikan University in Tokyo, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in Japanese literature from Columbia University. He was a member of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies department at UC Santa Barbara before joining UCLA in 2013.

Reviews

[Jessica Hooley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't quite like the focus on some of the side characters in the story. But did like it from the perspective of Genji, especially when discussing Violet, and his exile.