The Tale of Genji Scrolls

Judged scene by scene, since the whole is gone. Within a scene, removal fails. In Kashiwagi III Genji holds the infant Kaoru, who is not his son: take away the women at the curtain’s edge and the court is no longer watching; take away the diagonal of the dais and Genji floats, where it is that diagonal that crowds him into his corner. In Minori the bent autumn grasses outside cannot go either. Each picture is one chosen moment set beside text excerpted for it, and the pairing is exact. What yields is the set: two or three scenes from one chapter sometimes repeat a single interior with little gain, the Yadorigi pair among them, and the choice of a quiet moment before or after the event is a convention as much as a necessity.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Disclosure through image is credited as fully as disclosure in words, and three things can be stated. The inner life of these people is unreadable from the face and readable only from position: who sits where, behind which screen, how far from whom. The near-blank faces are not a failure of likeness but a claim that feeling, in this society, lives in arrangement. The women of the court live enclosed, glimpsed from above and cut through by the diagonals of curtains. And the viewer is placed as an intruder, looking down into rooms from a point no one in them could see from. What holds the axis is that much of the meaning is the novel’s, carried by the pictures more than uncovered, and that their own disclosure is partly a convention of the court.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Elevation is of one register, the hushed melancholy the tradition calls mono no aware, and it recurs. In Suzumushi II the Reizei Emperor and Genji play music in a moonlit hall on a night of bell crickets. In Minori three figures sit in a room while the grasses bend in the wind outside. In Kashiwagi II Yūgiri visits his dying friend, both nearly lost in the hangings; in Yokobue there is a flute and a man’s grief. The height is real and steady. What holds it is kind and condition: no grandeur and no terror, on sheets made to be held close; and the losses dim it, the silver of moon and water black, so that how high the first surface rose is partly inference.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Built where the surviving scenes cluster. The chapters that survive best, Kashiwagi to Minori, carry the novel’s archetypal structure of a sin returned in the next generation. Genji’s own transgression with his father’s consort, Fujitsubo, comes back to him in Kashiwagi’s with his young wife, and the child of that union lies in his arms. Kashiwagi III puts the shining prince, emblem of the court’s perfection, into a cramped corner of his own house, holding the evidence. The Uji scenes carry the later book’s darker figure: love divided between two men, the river, the drowning to come. The particulars stay particular. Held below the gate because the structure is the novel’s: the scrolls realise it and choose where it shows, and chance chose which scenes survive.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The inheritance is the painting the Heian court knew: the Chinese-derived kara-e, the native yamato-e of screens and sliding doors, and the illustrated tale, which existed before these scrolls (the Tale itself mentions picture contests and illustrated stories) but whose earlier examples are almost entirely lost. The departure, as far as the survivors show, is a fully made pictorial grammar of interior feeling, with viewpoint, diagonal, colour and the suppressed face working together to carry a psychological novel, and text and picture alternating at the scale of a book in the hand. Held well below the gate: against lost precursors, invention cannot be told from inheritance; most scholarship treats the conventions as established and used here at their height; and a court commission of the most admired tale of its age risked little.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Would a different form change what the work knows? In large part. The handscroll is held and unrolled by one reader at arm’s length, a stretch at a time, text first and then picture, so the encounter is private and paced, as the reading of a tale in the women’s quarters was. The removed roof, fukinuki yatai, is a form of knowledge: the viewer sees what the figures cannot, and commits the intrusion the novel’s narrator also commits. The steep diagonals carry the eye with the unrolling and against it, and the decorated paper sets the words as objects of the rooms’ refinement. Held a step below because each scene is a single tableau: the scroll’s power to unfold time is used between scenes more than within them, where Along the River During the Qingming Festival (8.8) uses it throughout.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence over promise: some nine centuries of survival and about a century of modern scholarship, and the questions stay open. Who made it, and how was the work divided between painters and calligraphers? Was the set made for a woman’s reading or for presentation at court, and for whom? Is the picture illustration, commentary, or a second reading of the novel in which the painters chose the quiet moment over the event? What did the colour look like, when the modern reconstructions have been read both as revelation and as invention? How far are the faces convention, and how far a way of seeing in which the viewer supplies the feeling? The sheet yields on return too: a patterned robe, a hand at a curtain, an attendant’s face more individual than her mistress’s. Held below the top because many of the questions concern the making and the lost whole more than the meaning.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The field is Japanese painting of the twelfth century and the narrative handscroll in East Asia. The intrinsic force: the earliest surviving monument of Japanese narrative painting, and the fullest statement of the court style of illustrated narrative, the native manner seen complete in technique, in viewpoint and in its treatment of figure and feeling. The discount: the precursors are lost, so how much is reorganisation and how much the best survivor of a practice cannot be known. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the scrolls were held privately for centuries, so their reach ran largely through the tradition they stand for, which by way of Tosa painting, the Genji albums and screens and the Rinpa painters governed how Japanese painting showed the court for seven centuries; in the modern period they became the emblem of Heian art.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Nine centuries would place a whole form high on the scale. Form: what survives is legible scene by scene, and the programme of paired text and image is still evident; but most of the set is lost with its texts, and the scrolls are no longer scrolls, so the defining form, a cycle across the whole novel, survives only in part, and is charged in proportion. Fabric: pigment has flaked across large areas, the silver has blackened, and the underdrawing shows where colour lay. Presence: continuous in collections and in reproduction, though the sheets are rarely on view. The loss is of most of the cycle as well as of surface, and the figure sits a step below centuries with heavy loss, above The Ajanta Caves (7.8), whose paintings had no outside viewer from their abandonment until 1819.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing. The tsukuri-e method, “made picture”, lays mineral colour in layers over an ink underdrawing and then draws the line again over the colour, and it builds figures of planes of robe, so that the body is a mass of patterned silk and the posture reads through the fall of the cloth. The geometry is exact: parallel diagonals of beam and veranda organise every room, and screens and curtains set at angles fix each figure in its isolation. Where colour survives, in the robes of Minori and the Azumaya interiors, it is calibrated and rich. The calligraphy, in varied hands on paper decorated with gold and silver, is a second craft of the first rank. The costs: the hands vary in quality, some placements are stiff, and the full surface can no longer be judged.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the open garden of Minori, with wind in the grasses and the sky above, and the closed interior of Azumaya, where a woman reads aloud while Ukifune looks at pictures and has her hair washed or combed. They obey one law. Every space is seen from above at an angle, every figure is a mass of colour with a nearly blank face, and feeling is carried by placement and pattern. Several groups of painters and calligraphers worked within one grammar, and nothing in the survivors contradicts it, from music to death, moonlight to lamplight, emperors to servants. Held below the top because the variation of hands is visible, a seam though not a breach, and because the territory, the interior life of one court, is wide in mood and narrow in kind.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The orders held are several, integrated by the room: the state, in emperors and retired emperors and rank in every seating; the family, in paternity, marriage and jealousy, as when in Yūgiri Kumoi no Kari creeps up to snatch her husband’s letter; the sacred, in Onna Sannomiya taking the tonsure in Kashiwagi I and the Buddhist rite of Minori; death; art, in music, letters and the reading of pictures; nature, in garden, season and the insects that name Suzumushi; and consciousness, carried through every arrangement. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour except service, no world beyond the court and its retreats, no history but the novel’s. And the fragments now hold a part of the novel’s world, where the whole once held all of it.

Score: 7.8 / 10