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Paper short abstract

The reception of the Tale of Genji through its poetry included a centuries-long tradition of making manuscript copies of all of its waka, to study and appreciate them through textual performance. This paper explores that tradition with a focus on an anomalous print edition of the poems from 1698.

Paper long abstract

The reception of the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, ca 1010) has produced an extensive secondary literature, covering a huge range of approaches and interests, with special importance in the arena of Japanese poetry. The 795 poems credited to its characters mean that the Tale is also a substantial waka anthology, one that remained influential until modern times. The most common method of engaging with the Tale through its poetry involved a mere 54 poems: these are the so-called chapter-title poems (kanmeiwaka), with one verse from each chapter serving as representative, mnemonic, and model. But for the serious poet the practice developed -- sometime in the late medieval era -- of copying out the entire set of Genji poems in order, arranged under chapter title headings. The existence of such manuscripts suggests that the act of copying out the hundreds of poems Murasaki Shikibu wrote for her characters served as a form of personal engagement with the tale, an act of apprenticeship through which poets could engage with the great classical text.

Most of the numerous surviving manuscripts of this sort are unsigned and undated, adding a challenge to any systematic analysis of the corpus, and given their general similarity and lack of additional original content they have attracted very little critical attention. Yet they contain vital information both about the practices of reading and composing poetry and about engagement with Genji monogatari in the early Edo era, just when print editions began to displace manuscripts and make texts available to a much wider readership. The appearance in Genroku 11 (1698) of a printed version of the Genji poems -- Tōyama Korekiyo’s Mirror of Genji Poems (Genji uta kagami) -- complicates the picture of this lineage of Genji monogatari reception: what was the goal of such a book, and how did it interact with existing manuscript practices? In this paper I explore the significance of Tōyama’s work in this context, based on an analysis of two surviving editions, and with reference to his other published contributions to waka scholarship.