The Tale of Genji

The Tale of Genji: A Kamakura Manuscript of the World's First Novel

Of the fifty-four chapters that make up the Tale of Genji, this manuscript preserves thirty-two. They were brushed by hand during the Kamakura period (1185–1333), at a time when Japan's great court romance had already slipped beyond the living memory of its author. Murasaki Shikibu wrote the work around the year 1000, in the service of an empress, yet not a single page in her own hand survives. What reaches us instead is a long chain of copies, and this set of thirty-two chapters in Chiba Prefecture is one link in that chain, designated an Important Cultural Property in 1959.

The story follows Hikaru Genji, the Shining Prince, through love, exile, and the slow reckoning of a life, before turning in its final third to the troubled generation that comes after him. It is often called the world's first novel. For a Japanese reader, the quiet surprise is not that the tale endures, but how it endures at all: every version anyone can read today descends from manuscripts like this one, written out chapter by chapter, hand after hand, across eight centuries.

Why a Hand-Copied Genji Was Designated

Before printing, a book lived only as long as someone was willing to copy it. The Tale of Genji is long, and writing out all fifty-four chapters took many brushes and many years, so volumes were shared out, lost, and recombined over generations. The plain consequence is that the oldest surviving Genji is not Heian at all. The earliest copies in existence were made in the Kamakura period, two centuries after Murasaki Shikibu set down the original.

That is what gives a manuscript like this its weight. By the thirteenth century, scholars had grown uneasy about how far the circulating texts had drifted apart, and two great efforts set out to fix a standard. Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241), the poet and critic, produced the recension known as the Aobyoshi-bon, or blue-cover text. Minamoto no Mitsuyuki and his son Chikayuki, both governors of Kawachi, spent more than thirty years on a rival collation completed in 1255, the Kawachi-bon. The literary scholar Ikeda Kikan later sorted the three hundred-odd surviving texts into three families: the Aobyoshi line, the Kawachi line, and the beppon, the variant copies that fit neither.

A Kamakura copy preserving thirty-two chapters is not, then, a curio to admire from a distance. It is evidence. Each surviving volume carries readings that editors weigh, line against line, when they try to recover what Murasaki Shikibu actually wrote. The 1959 designation recognized exactly that role: a primary witness to a text the rest of the world reads only in translation.

A Chiba Thread in the Story

The manuscript's home prefecture has its own small place in the history of reading Genji. A thousand years ago, a girl grew up in Kazusa, the old province that covers much of present-day Chiba, far from the capital and its books. She is known only as the daughter of Sugawara no Takasue, and the diary she left, the Sarashina Nikki, opens with an ache familiar to anyone who has waited for the next volume of a story. She had caught fragments of the Tale of Genji, and she longed for the whole of it.

When she finally reached the capital in 1020 and was handed the complete set, she shut herself away and read by day and by lamplight, happier, she wrote, than if she had been made an empress. That a provincial girl from the land now called Chiba should have hungered after this exact book lends the prefecture's quiet, privately held manuscript an unexpected depth.

Where to See a Genji Manuscript Today

This particular set is held privately and is not on public display, and the official record lists no owner and no viewing facility. Anyone hoping to stand in front of an early Genji can still do so, and several of the finest examples sit within easy reach.

The closest in spirit is in Chiba itself. The National Museum of Japanese History in Sakura holds Kamakura-period Genji fragments and rotates manuscript material through its galleries. For the Kawachi line, the Hosa Bunko in Nagoya keeps the oldest complete Kawachi-bon, fifty-four chapters in twenty-three booklets, once owned by the Kanazawa Bunko and by Tokugawa Ieyasu; a facsimile is shown in its entrance hall. Next door at the Tokugawa Art Museum hangs the painted counterpart, the twelfth-century Genji Monogatari Emaki, a National Treasure brought out only in brief seasonal openings. The Tenri Central Library near Nara mounts periodic Genji exhibitions drawn from its own designated holdings. Checking each institution's calendar before a visit is worth the effort, since the most fragile pieces appear for only a few weeks a year.