Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I present a case study that uses quantitative measurements of orthographic similarity to investigate the history of an important group of Genji manuscripts associated with the literatus Sanjōnishi Sanetaka, shedding new light on their provenance and circulation.

Paper long abstract:

Despite advances in bibliographic studies, for any given full 54-volume manuscript of the Tale of Genji, we remain as yet unable to reliably answer the crucial question of textual filiation: “Who used what source text to produce this copy?” Especially considering the numbers of surviving Genji manuscripts, the rarity of clearly determined filiations is striking. One possible amelioration lies in a broadened scope for textual studies to include elements previously overlooked, above all the signature features of a text’s orthography. The grouping of manuscripts together by orthographic profile, by similarities in kanji/kana usage and kana jibo preferences, by trends in okurigana, by patterns in indicated phonetic assimilations, etc., has the potential to disclose textual filiations and shared provenances that have, to date, proven otherwise stubbornly undiscoverable. Because, however, such dimensions of the writing have little obvious bearing on interpretation of the text, and because the volume of manuscripts available for consultation remained until recently quite limited, studies centering such orthographic differences have been decidedly rare. It seems nonetheless clear that should the survey and comparison of characteristic manuscript orthographies become widely practicable, for clarifying questions of contemporary provenance and circulation, such analyses offer a promising new tool.

Precisely such an environmental change has occurred in recent years. With the publication en masse of facsimile editions, followed by an even more extensive release of images online to the general public, comparative orthographic studies of manuscript groups have at last become feasible at scale. In this paper, I present a case study that takes advantage of this new infrastructure to investigate, using quantitative measurements of orthographic similarity, the history of an important group of Genji texts. These are the multiple sets of Genji manuscripts associated with the literatus Sanjōnishi Sanetaka, a towering figure in the work’s reception. Despite the significance of these manuscript sets, much remains uncertain about the nature of the (slightly different) texts they transmit. I demonstrate that techniques of orthographic comparison reveal among this corpus a group of manuscripts of shared copyist provenance, and discuss the possibility this same methodology offers of determining even their common source text.