The Tale of Genji. A Japanese Classic Illuminated, the first major loan exhibition in North America devoted to this famous Japanese book, includes more than 120 works — paintings, calligraphy, silk robes, wedding robes, and some modern popular art. The Tale of Genji, created about a thousand years ago, was the world’s first novel. Its author, Murasaki Shikibu, a woman of high privilege, wrote in vernacular Japanese. She also knew Chinese, an unusual skill for a woman in her culture.
Enormously long, 1155 pages in the Arthur Waley translation, Genji was often interpreted by visual artists. Within the novel, there are numerous descriptions of pictures, but it would be a heroic exercise to reconstruct them because the earliest illustrations, handscrolls illustrating only a small portion of the text, date from mid-12th century.
However, most of the works on display date from at least 500 years after the novel, around 1650, when printing was developed and the text became much more accessible. Many of these paintings depict scenes in the novel, but some, like a 17th-century scroll by Tosa Mitsuoki, depict the author, Murasaki. And some others present Buddhist doctrines.
In some ways, Murasaki’s Japan was not entirely unlike some Western cultures. As a woman, she can’t, so she says, discuss politics. And so she shows a court that rules, but not the activity of ruling itself. Her courtiers are interested in perfumes, dream interpretation, poetry, music, and gardens; snobbish aesthetes, they are fascinated by male and female beauty. And like the English, they use umbrellas. The lower classes are generally in evidence only as servants. These courtiers are much concerned with religious rituals, and some of them are monks and nuns.
But since they are Buddhists, the names and nature of their ceremonies are in need of exegesis. Sometimes Genji, the eponymous hero, a handsome prince, seems spiritually akin to the aristocrats in Saint-Simon’s account of Louis XIV’s French court or, indeed, to the men in Louis Auchincloss’s novels of 20th-century Americans.
But the Japanese garments and interiors depicted in these visual works are very unlike those from European or American culture. One gets the sense of a self-confident world, closed off to most outside influences. In an exhibition of French images covering the same period, dramatic visual changes would be obvious. The stylistic development from medieval to the classicism of Nicolas Poussin and on to modernism would make it easy to date the representations. Here, however, such changes in style are not obvious. In Japan, the catalogue says, aesthetic innovation was not of prime importance.
Many of the very beautiful images in the exhibition can be appreciated aesthetically, without knowing Japanese culture. And seeing the opaque clouds, the blown-off roofs that allow us to look into interiors, and the golden backgrounds, it’s easy to understand why, in the 19th century, Japanese art spoke to Western modernists. It’s easy to admire the marvelous six-panel folding screen from the late 16th century, “Genji in Exile at Suma,” in which a solitary messenger, like a figure in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, who is coming to see Genji, seated in the distance on the far right. Or to appreciate the marvelously strange calligraphy by Konoe Nobotada (1565-1614), written over an abstract landscape.
But many of the pictures are puzzling, simply because it isn’t obvious what is going on. How, for example, can you fully appreciate the magnificent 14th or 15th century image of Genji in a carriage without knowing why the hero is in an ox-drawn cart?
Typically these paintings show tiny figures, often floating in a flattened space, without perspective. Who are they and what are they doing? To answer these questions just looking doesn’t suffice; you need to consult the novel. And the calligraphy raises more difficult interpretative problems. Mursaki’s characters are judged by the qualities of their handwriting, by their ability to write poems and draw, and for their connoisseur’s interest in fine papers. 