Aoi, the daughter of a high minister of the emperor. The marriage was arranged, as was proper, with a careful eye to the disposition of power in the court. A certain uneasy distance always prevails between Genji and Aoi. She is several years his senior when they marry, and Genji is then still young enough to find the difference in age disconcerting. As time goes by and Genji begins spending more and more of his nights away from her father’s palace (highborn women of Heian lived under their fathers’ roofs and received their husbands as guests), Aoi, in her turn, retreats from Genji into a mood of jealousy compounded with despairing yearning.

If the compelling power of beauty is one theme that is introduced early in the novel, another and more vivid one is jealousy, quite intertwined with the first. Aoi’s jealousy is perhaps mitigated by her awareness of the circumstances of her marriage to Genji, but for another of Genji’s early amours, the Rokuj lady, jealousy becomes literally a murderous passion. The first to suffer is Ygao, the lady of the “evening faces” (a kind of flower), who is a mysterious woman of lesser rank who passively succumbs to Genji’s courtship and allows him to spirit her off to a deserted mansion; a dreamlike interlude of lovemaking and deepening intimacy—the lovers engage in one of the subtlest poetic exchanges in the novel in trying to uncover each other’s secrets—is shattered by Ygao’s sudden, inexplicable death. The second death is that of Aoi herself, less violent but no less devastating to Genji.

It becomes clear that both deaths resulted from possession by the avenging spirit of the Rokuj lady, whose jealous passion at her felt neglect by Genji is so strong that it has effected, quite without her knowledge, a separation of body and soul in life. In this respect, The Tale of Genji reveals itself to be something of a cautionary tale: Although love and sexual relations are a natural part of life, and a man, at least, need not restrict himself to a single partner, the bond between lovers is of such strength and durability that it must not be taken lightly.

The moral has its roots in Buddhism, specifically in the concept of karma. In this instance, the intense emotional attachments formed in sexual union constitute a karmic bond of great strength; the stronger the emotion, the tighter the bond. In Buddhism as it was known to Murasaki, emotional attachments of any kind translate into karmic ties that bind the individual to the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, an undesirable state but one that is the common human lot. Normal emotional ties may keep the unassisted individual from Nirvana, final liberation from the cycle of rebirth, but they cannot be avoided. The lesson of the horrific tale of the Rokuj lady, however, is that passions of an abnormal intensity are dangerous. In common belief, they not only impede a gradual progress, lifetime by lifetime, toward the goal of liberation but also can actually tether the soul of the departed in a limbo between this world and the next, hovering as a ghost near the object of the passion. The Rokuj lady had not died, but her jealous passion was so strong that it drew her soul from her body into destructive encounters with its objects, Ygao and Aoi.

Genji himself recognizes that he bears some responsibility in these deaths, but he is not shown to mend his ways, for, in the world of the novel, they are not in any particular need of repair. His subsequent conquests, however, are not so much conquests as they are, in a sense, adoptions or quasi marriages in which he is scrupulously attentive to his lovers’ material and—insofar as possible—emotional needs. The maturing Genji, chastened by Rokuj’s excesses and sobered by his responsibilities to the young Murasaki, does not embrace monogamy, but he is careful to see that his attentions are spread among his dependent women in accordance with their respective expectations; none is simply ravished and then abandoned. Throughout his part of the novel, Genji remains a creature of his time and place, a man whose sex, social position, and physical and intellectual gifts allow him to make almost any woman his own, but he is almost invariably portrayed as a paragon of Heian virtue.

Genji’s behavior does not by any means escape censure—he is banished for a time from Kyto to the wild coast of Suma (near the modern city of Kbe) for a particularly indiscreet liaison—but his character is his redemption. He is sincere in his remorse and steadfast in fulfilling his responsibilities to his growing harem; above all, he matures into a gentleman of immense sensitivity to what the eighteenth century scholar Motoori Norinaga identified as the central aesthetic and spiritual value of the court subculture, mono no aware. The term has no precise translation, but to “know” mono no aware is to understand the sweet pathos of things, to realize that the only unchanging reality is that all is change and transience, that beauty is the most ephemeral of all phenomena and for that reason is all the more precious and profoundly moving. Mono no aware is thus congruent with the Buddhist metaphysical vision of the phenomenal world as absolute illusion, as nothing more than an arbitrary projection of consciousness; to feel this “pathos of things” as profoundly as Genji does, then, is to reveal a sensibility that is fundamentally akin to religiosity, and that is what makes him something other than an imperious swaggerer whose wealth, power, and sexual attractiveness grant him sway over the women of his choosing. Modern Western readers sometimes find those virtues unredeeming. Genji is not a cad, but neither do his sensitivities keep him from imposing himself on women in ways that are no longer quite acceptable.

Nevertheless, as Genji and Murasaki age, and as they mature in their ability to sympathize with their surroundings, the reader can begin, at least, to enter respectfully into their world of values. Among Genji’s women, Murasaki in particular is a graceful model of adjustment to an awareness of the mutability and fragility of life; in her last appearances in the novel, she is on the verge of middle age, a gentle but somewhat troubled woman whose concern for the next life leads her to a nunnery to begin the necessary process of weakening and then severing the worldly bonds of karma that will otherwise impede her movement toward rebirth on a higher plane. Genji himself remains something of an abstraction to the end, a bit too good to be true, perhaps. The reader can nevertheless share his grief at losing Murasaki, and his death, which comes unheralded (its abruptness suggests to some a lacuna in the text) some three-quarters of the way through the novel, leaves a void that is felt by the reader almost as strongly as by Genji’s survivors.

The Uji chapters

The world Genji leaves behind seems sometimes to be inhabited by a diminished race. It is a place of muted colors, dark, moody, and sometimes tormented. Its principal male characters are the young Niou and Kaoru, whose names translate as “glow” and “be fragrant,” respectively—allusions, surely, to the “shining” Genji himself, so often described as possessing an ineffably sweet natural fragrance. The young nobles appear in the novel as products of a very complicated web of sexual liaisons and deceptions involving Genji and the boon companion of his youth, Middle Captain T no Chuj, who was the brother of Aoi. They seem to split between them the vanished, larger-than-life Genji: Niou is impetuous, more than occasionally irresponsible, and inclined to force himself on women; Kaoru is old beyond his years, sensitive to mono no aware to a painful degree, and so far from being impetuous as to be nearly paralyzed in his dealings with women. A trio of sisters, the protected, unworldly daughters of an aged and reclusive prince, are the primary female characters in this part of the novel, called the Uji chapters for the location of much of the action, in and around the old prince’s villa by the Uji River outside Kyto.

The principal overt plot action in the Uji chapters centers on the conflict between Niou and Kaoru, which in turn revolves around their relationships to the sisters. A subtler theme, however, is once again the matter of coping with the radical inconstancy of the things of this world—love, beauty, life itself. The theme is more starkly presented here than in the pages devoted to the life of Genji himself. There, the physical world is for the most part benign; except for a few interludes—such as Genji’s exile to Suma and his harrowing expedition with Ygao’s corpse to a mountain temple—nature is seen at a distance or in the confines of an elegant garden. Here, the primary symbol of the natural world is the swirling water of the Uji River, the sound of whose roaring current is a constant feature of life in the prince’s villa. It is into these waters, the name of which poets have always associated with the adjective ushi (sorrowful), that the most sensitive of the prince’s daughters throws herself; the daughter’s name, in the traditional reading of the novel, is Ukifune—“floating boat,” but containing also uki, the attributive form of the same mournful word, ushi.

Appropriately enough, the Uji chapters end inconclusively. There is no wrapping up of the multiple stories of the scores of characters whose lives intersected with those of Genji and his dilute reincarnation in Niou and Kaoru, no resolution, really, of the latter’s inability to choose between life in the world and in the cloister; the novel seems to end simply with a drawing of the blinds. The title of its final chapter is probably not Murasaki’s own, but it is apposite: “the floating bridge of dreams” (yume no ukihashi), taken from a poem in the chapter that belongs to a long tradition of contrasting while still conflating “dream” and “reality.” A floating bridge (uki yet again) or pontoon bridge (hashi) offers only insecure footing, and this one is more insubstantial still, seen in or made of dreams; it is a metaphor here both for the tenuous links between people in this world and for this world in its insubstantial entirety, which is a mere fantasy connecting the next life with the ones that have gone before. Some scholars argue that the tale is unfinished, that its ending has been lost or that Murasaki was for some reason unable to continue it; others find the indefiniteness of the ending, whether it was intentional or not, to be wholly satisfying.

The Uji chapters are of a gray and melancholy cast, and it is certainly possible to see the work as a whole as embodying a decidedly uncheerful and pessimistic statement of the futility of any but the contemplative life. There is, in fact, a world-denying ideology that underlies The Tale of Genji, that of mapp, or the “end of the law,” in Buddhist doctrine the name of an age in which humankind has become entirely estranged from the teachings of the historical Buddha. This estrangement results in an absolute human inability to perceive clearly the metaphysical truth or law (Sanskrit dharma) regarding, among other things, the utter insubstantiality of the phenomenal world; the spiritual life becomes a never-ending but ultimately futile struggle to escape the delusive certainty that the concerns of this world are of genuine moment while at the same time recognizing the responsibilities that go with participation in human society. Mapp ideology shares with millenarian thought a conviction that the present age is essentially corrupt, but the era of mapp is open-ended, not to be climaxed in any human comprehensible future time by a new order of existence. The Tale of Genji is the product of a time, then, of a kind of religious radicalism, when the only escape from an effectively infinite cycle of painful rebirths was offered by a relatively new doctrine of salvation through faith in Amida (Sanskrit Amitabha), a disciple of the Buddha who relinquished his claim to Nirvana in exchange for his vow to bring salvation to any sentient being who sincerely invokes his name.

Here, in the radical pessimism of mapp ideology and the promise of Amida’s vow, are to be found some, at least, of the motivations underlying the behavior of the principals of The Tale of Genji: The ineluctable drift toward the cloister shown by so many is symptomatic not only of a yearning for monastic simplicity as an aid to severing worldly bonds of karma but also of efforts to demonstrate a single-minded faith in the redemptive power of Amida to effect one’s salvation. It has been noted also that mapp ideology may account in part for the backward-looking tone of the latter chapters of The Tale of Genji—the past can only have been better if the earthly future, at least, is so devoid of promise.

It should not be imagined, however, that reading The Tale of Genji is a grim experience, for the novel is also a colorful artistic tapestry of life in a world that achieved a uniquely fine appreciation of the satisfactions of the life of the senses, even if the aesthetic pleasures of color, fragrance, the calligraphic line, and the magic of poetry and of the changing seasons are conventionally called only “consolations” in the face of the unavoidable sorrows of existence. Like any novel of substance, The Tale of Genji deals with serious and sometimes unpleasant truths, but like the best of her modern counterparts, Murasaki Shikibu was an author who knew as well the importance of a well-told tale. Her novel is a literary achievement of the highest order, worthy of inclusion in any short list of masterpieces of world fiction; it is also a precious document that preserves a vanished way of life of astonishing refinement with a degree of detail and three-dimensionality that is simply not to be found in any fictional work of remotely comparable antiquity.