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Paper short abstract

The Tale of Genji’s association with psychological depth was largely, I argue, the result of its encounters with print. Unlike in the more personalized medieval era, Edo commentaries like Kitamura Kigin’s Kogetsushō, published for an unknown readership, needed to make character psychology explicit.

Paper long abstract

In present-day Japan, surely no capsule characterization of the Tale of Genji enjoys broader currency than its fame as a work particularly profound in the depiction of human emotions. Yet as any survey of the work’s reception will reveal, such an understanding has not been, historically, something seen as self-evident. Genji studies of the medieval period, for example, while certainly much concerned to deepen readers’ appreciation of psychology in the work, understood that purpose’s ultimate aim to be a thereby improved facility in the composition of waka and renga. This would change only in the early Edo period, and then in particular under the complicated influence of the newly prominent medium in which such changed discourse came to appear: the printed book.

The seventeenth-century printed editions Eiri Genji monogatari and Shusho Genji monogatari reproduced the Tale’s full original text with brief marginal or interlinear annotations. For the most part, these served to identify either passages of direct speech by the work’s characters, or passages narratively describing those characters’ inner feelings. Crucially, as a rule such annotations eschewed further description, stopping at identification alone. Kitamura Kigin’s Kogetsushō, however, while fully these works’ contemporary peer, displays a far more ambitious approach. In particular, though often seen as mere compendium of earlier medieval commentaries, the Kogetsushō in fact offers many detailed psychological descriptions even on passages unremarked in prior Genji scholarship, at times notably on passages that its two printed predecessors had themselves also marked as depicting feelings.

Medieval scholarship, of course, had been inseparable from oral exposition: before an audience of courtiers and renga masters it addressed questions of psychology largely at listeners’ need. The Kogetsushō, by contrast, was a text published, in print, for an unknown readership, one whose anticipated needs it had to proactively pre-address. Spurred by circumstance, Kigin had pressing cause to make the logic and substance of character psychology, its inner reasoning as unfolded in the narrative, comprehensively explicit. That the Genji came to be so associated with psychological depth was thus appreciably, I argue, the result of just such encounters with the medium of print.