Paper short abstract:

The recognized role of rengashi in expanding Genji readership is misunderstood as one of mere cultural facilitation. Evidence of rengashi teachings in fact demonstrates their break with earlier Genji tradition. This is particularly clear in their newly "literary" treatment of the Uji chapters.

Paper long abstract:

In the later medieval period, the Tale of Genji became common property of a larger audience than ever before in Japanese history. It has long been recognized that rengashi, itinerant masters of linked verse (renga) of largely commoner extraction, played a leading part in this expansion of readership. For just as long, however, their role has been broadly misunderstood as one of cultural facilitation. In previous studies they figure primarily as pan-regionalist, cross-class mere conveyors of a literary order pre-existing them. Yet such a narrative finds little support in the documentary record of the very Genji lectures through which it was ostensibly accomplished. On the contrary, surviving evidence of rengashi teachings on the Genji--in commentaries, lecture notes, even manuscript marginalia—shows a sharp break with the earlier Genji traditions of the Capital. This degree of thematic and stylistic difference demonstrates, I argue, that rengashi interpretive expansion of the text was in no way less extensive or substantial than any geographic gains they secured for its reading public.

The chief of many points of departure in the Genji as taught by rengashi can be found in a fundamental shift of exegetic stance. Broadly speaking, the Tale of Genji is a work of fiction which earlier interpreters had approached more historically and scholastically, and which their rengashi successors now approached more literarily and analytically. The distinction is never absolute. It is also more opaque for the earlier chapters, where Murasaki Shikibu herself makes the most liberal use of her historical models. As we approach the famous concluding Uji chapters, however, with characters like Kaoru, Niou, and above all Ukifune, whose share of invention far outweighs their historical sourcing, the growing comparative silence of traditional Genji criticism is striking. The venerable Kakaishō (River and Sea, 1367) commentary and Kachō yosei (Lingering Florescence, 1472) display little of the lively interest the many rengashi commentaries abundantly evidence towards these characters, and towards what might today be called the "psychological realism" of their stories. This more "literary" Genji was not conveyed from the Capital by the peregrinations of the rengashi, it was fostered on their road.