Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Ryūtei Tanehiko transformed annotational knowledge of The Tale of Genji into a creative resource for composing Inaka Genji, focusing on his manuscript Ryūtei zasshū, which features excerpts from the Kogetsushō, and illustrated Genji commentaries from the early Edo period.

Paper long abstract

This presentation examines how Ryūtei Tanehiko(1783–1842) closely read The Tale of Genji through Kitamura Kigin’s annotated edition Kogetsushō and transformed the acquired knowledge into a creative resource for composing his bestselling Nise murasaki inaka Genji. To explore the relationship between Tanehiko’s philological essays and his literary works, I focus on Ryūtei zasshū, the manuscript notebook in which he excerpted and organized annotations from Kogetsushō.

The presentation first analyzes how Tanehiko used various annotations that he excerpted in Ryūtei zasshū from the Usugumo through the Fujibakama chapters of Kogetsushō in the creation of volumes 28 to 38 of Inaka Genji. Tanehiko showed a strong interest in the annotation of Kogetsushō concerning matters such as relationships among characters, their ages, and the timing of events, and he incorporated his own knowledge of these issues into the text of Inaka Genji. The configuration of characters in the work and the relationships of events across the volumes are clearly reorganized within the text as the result of philological examination based on the various annotations presented in Kogetsushō.

The presentation further argues that annotational knowledge also served as the creative resource of illustrations in Inaka Genji. The illustrations of Inaka Genji were strongly influenced by the visual models of Yamamoto Shunshō’s Eiri Genji Monogatari, an illustrated popular edition of The Tale of Genji published in the early Edo period. At the same time Inaka Genji exhibits pictorial designs that differ from those found in Eiri Genji Monogatari and other early Edo period popular commentaries and digests of The Tale of Genji. This presentation argues that such differences arose because Tanehiko conducted close textual examination of The Tale of Genji by consulting annotations in Kogetsushō and other commentarial works such as Genji Monogatari Tama no Ogushi, and then reflected the results of this philological investigation in the Inaka Genji illustrations. In this way, while referring to the visual conventions of the popular illustrated editions of The Tale of Genji, Tanehiko devised scene compositions in response to textual revisions and new interpretations of The Tale, thereby creating a mode of expression distinctive to Inaka Genji.