Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I apply contemporary research and theories on the production and consumption of fan fiction and on fandom communities to late Heian period court tale Yoru no Nezame, in order to analyze its relationship to its illustrious predecessor, The Tale of Genji.

Paper long abstract:

All across the world, fan communities, often composed predominately of women, consume, comment on and transform their favorite popular novels, TV series, movies, anime or manga, producing works of fan fiction that reinterpret and rewrite the original canon, giving it new meaning and form in the process. While fandom communities and their corpus of fan fiction are contemporary phenomena, this paper will argue that by examining their particular modes of reception, one can better understand similar reader communities and their engagement with canonical texts, despite the significant cultural and historical distance between them.

In particular, using the research on transformative fan fiction, I will examine the eleventh century monogatari or court tale Yoru no nezame attributed to Sugawara no Takasue's Daughter. I will argue, in this paper, that this court tale is a transformative work of fan fiction of the Genji monogatari, Murasaki Shikibu's early eleventh century masterpiece. By comparing two episodes in the two court tales, Genji's encounter with Utsusemi in the second chapter of Murasaki's tale and Nezame's attempt to escape the emperor's attention in the third book of Nezame respectively, I will demonstrate that Takasue's Daughter's approach to the Genji, like that of contemporary fan fiction writers, challenges and rewrites her favorite work to convey a different message and serve her own agenda. In the case of Nezame, the transformation of the canonical Genji scene into the Nezame episode is of particular value, not only to show how late eleventh century Genji readers read and understood Murasaki's tale, but also to draw attention to how they engaged with one particular aspect of the Genji: its episodes of sexual violence.