Thoughts on Japan

Kingaku kara no omoi - 金額からの思い

Thoughts on Japan from the National Institute of Japanese Studies. University of Sheffield

Last week, I outlined the differences in plot and resolution between Koishite Akuma and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, as a way of demonstrating how closely the former fitted with Japanese tastes. This week, I want to consider some of the reasons why this was necessary, and see what lessons we can draw from it.

As a first step, I think it’s yet more evidence, if it be needed, of the omnivorous internationalisation of popular culture. The vampire theme is perceived as being currently popular, and so the Japanese media ‘cash in’ with a version tailored to their own audience. That being said, however, it’s also evidence of how much plot-lines have to be adapted to be acceptable to that audience, or the sponsors, producing a version which closely follows the stylised conventions of the dorama form.

There is no doubt that dorama are highly formulaic: no matter what the programme is, one can predict, within certain limits, exactly how it is going to develop. I’m not saying the British or American dramas are not formulaic – just think of 24, now in its eighth season and still following the same arc as in all its previous ones – but it’s more obvious in dorama, as if all the TV writers were following the same ‘Bible’: first, the two main characters and the supporting group ensemble is introduced; second, a variety of external circumstances both push the protagonists together and pull them apart, while simultaneously affecting the dynamics of their relationships with the group. Events build to a climax, which is resolved by a cathartic, emotional confrontation, which leads to the final denouement, whether it be happy, or sad. There are other dorama plot staples, but I think the above is a reasonably summary which any fan could identify. Again, I can only speculate as to why there should be such a high level of repetition: the imposed conservatism of an entertainment agenda frequently dictated by commercial sponsors and major talent agencies; a limited pool of successful TV writers who come from similar backgrounds; or, maybe, simple, unintellectual tastes on the part of the audience – any and all of these could play a role.

Whatever the reason, the end result is that there are certain, set, scenes which occur regularly in dorama, and so must be included. For example, the cathartic final confrontation: here, the individual and the group face each other, confess their mistakes, and draw closer together through an outpouring of emotion. This reaffirmation of social bonds, presented in a highly sentimentalised fashion, provides the audience with a major emotional ‘hit’ from their viewing, and is so much a staple of the form that it has to take place, and does so again, and again, in programme after programme. Again, I can only speculate as to why this is so popular – possibly because such open displays of emotion are extremely unusual in public in Japanese society, and showing them in fictional form reassures people that their friends, families and work colleagues do, indeed, care, even if they don’t show it that often. It also provides reassurance that no matter what the crisis, the supportive network of intra-group ties can overcome it, allowing viewers to feel hopeful that their own networks will support them in their real lives.

Returning to Koishite Akuma and its differences from Twilight, a further adaptation and one of the most striking, I think, is in the identity of the heroine: from someone of the same apparent age as the vampire to an older woman. In order to understand why this is necessary and, indeed, imperative in Koishite Akuma, we need to consider the stereotyped images of and attitudes to women prevalent in Japan. Over the last twenty years – or even longer –Japanese opinion has agonised over ‘acceptable’ ideas of womanhood, women’s roles in society, and ideas of ‘appropriate’ teenaged, and older behaviour. In this it’s no different from many modernising, or post-modernising states, and many academic authors have written about it. Notwithstanding the undoubted eroticisation and fetishisation of the image of the high-school girl in some areas of Japanese popular culture, and the complicated realities of teenage sexuality and experience, television dorama tends to present teenaged female characters as two distinct character types: first, there is the ‘good’ girl – studious, quiet, possibly interested in a boyfriend, but entirely innocent and able to do no more than hold hands, if she’s particularly daring. Second, there’s the ‘bad’ girl – noisy, interested only in clothes, make-up, having a good time, and probably sexually active and promiscuous.

Example of both this character type are present in Koishite Akuma: there's the serious Kaori (Sakuraba Nanami 桜庭ななみ) and the lively Tomomi (Okamoto Rei 岡本玲). But neither would do as a heroine: the ‘bad’ girl because she’s a bad girl, and the ‘good’ girl because it’s inconceivable that she could ever let go enough to engage in the semi-sexual activity that being bitten by a vampire involves. Hamstrung by these conventions, the writers of Koishite Akuma had no choice, therefore, but to make the female lead an older woman, which provides greater leeway in acceptable behaviour. Makoto is presented as being ‘good’: she lives alone, socialises little – because she’s so committed to her work and the children in her care – and, despite going out with the vice-principal, has not even kissed him or held his hand. Nevertheless, because she’s in her twenties, it would not be problematic, or unusual for her to do so, and so the writers can build up the tension with suggestions that she may surrender herself to Luka, in a way that would be impossible with a girl of his own, apparent, age. Of course, her actually doing so would be a step too far, and so inevitably viewers know that the relationship must remain unconsummated, and that the dénouement will involve an element of tragedy, as indeed it does – Romeo and Juliet again, but with a semi-sad ending. This plays sentimentally on the heartstrings of the Japanese viewer, allowing them to be moved by the characters’ plight, while also reassuring them that the correct social norms have been upheld.

Thus, the bloodsuckers of the world may be united in their popularity, but also remain very much a part of their own cultural milieu.

Last week I mentioned that the recent boom in vampire-related fiction and drama reached Japan last summer with the broadcast of a prime-time drama series, Koishite Akuma, although it was far more rooted in the conventions of Japanese dorama than in any of the recent western productions. To illustrate this, let’s take a look at the plots of Koishite Akuma and its closest equivalent, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight.

In Twilight, lonely teenager Bella Swann moves to north-west of the US, and at her new school in a small town encounters Edward Cullen. She is struck by his attractiveness, and also by his aloofness – unlike most of her other new school-mates, he seems to want to have nothing to do with her. One thing leads to another, and Bella learns that Edward is, in fact, a vampire, but one who finds himself almost unbearably drawn to her, wanting to devour her and drink her blood. Despite this obstacle, the two fall passionately in love, and must overcome various dangers – disapproval from other vampires and werewolves – in order to remain together, which, in the end, of course, they do. In other words, the story is essentially Romeo and Juliet but with a happy ending.

In Koishite Akuma aloof teenage-seeming vampire Kuromiya Luka is brought to Yokohama to find his first victim, and is lodged while there with a small family consisting of a father, played by dorama stalwart Itō Shirō 伊藤四郎, his adult, widowed daughter, and her young son, all of whom have been mesmerised into believing that Luka is a distant relative. Enrolled at the local high-school, his mentor expects that Luka will swiftly bite one of his classmates, cement his immortality, and return to the vampires’ ‘beautiful, quiet, world’. Instead, Luka finds himself fascinated by his teacher, the beautiful and vivacious Natsukawa Makoto (played by Katō Rosa 加藤ロサ). Thus already difference between the two stories emerge: in Meyer’s work, despite the fact that Edward has been around since the 1900s, he appears to be a teenager, and so there are no obstacles – in human society at least – in him pursuing a relationship with Bella. In Koishite Akuma, Luka appears to be 16, while Makoto is 25, and their pupil-teacher relationship means that any romance between them will inevitably be scandalous, and bring them as individuals into conflict with the expectations of the group and society at large.

Eventually, in a somewhat unlikely plot twist, Luka finds that Makoto was, in fact, his high-school sweetheart before he died and became a vampire, and that she is his ‘fated woman’ (unmei no onna 運命の女) - the only one for whom his fangs will grow (much light relief is obtained by the fact that they tend to emerge involuntarily, and Luka has to frantically conceal their presence). If he does not bite her, he will die at the next full moon. Makoto, too, discovers his identity, and her unresolved feelings for him cause her to first become engaged to her current boyfriend, the school’s handsome vice-principal, and then to break it off. Scandal ensues and, in an attempt to force Luka to action, his vampire mentor, Katō, reveals Luka’s vampiric nature to both the people of his host family’s neighbourhood, and his schoolmates; he is forced to flee his family’s house when a mob attempts to storm it, although his adopted family remain firmly on his side. There follows a confrontation between Luka, Makoto and his class at the school, where he admits to his vampiric identity and original motivation for coming there, and apologises, and she confesses her love for him as her high school sweetheart. The class accept him and wish him well, and Luka and Makoto depart to watch the sunrise on his final day. He remains steadfast to the end in his refusal to bite her, and with a chaste kiss dissolves to dust. Over the closing credits, Makoto is shown having been accepted back into the bosom of her class, and it is suggested Luka and she continue to remain together in some ‘higher’ world.

You may have been able to work out from the above that Koishite Akuma formulaically follows the conventions of the standard deru kui plotline – of relations between an individual and a group – which I discussed in my earlier column on Japanese dorama. There are two groups of which Luka unwillingly finds himself a member: his class at school, and the family with whom he is forced to lodge. As the series progresses, he is drawn further and further into relations with both – through taking part in drama club activities; being an object of longing for most of the girls in class; through the warm, uncritical affection of his adoptive family, who also take Makoto to their hearts, and so forth. He thus gradually becomes aware of the ties of obligation that link him to the humans around him. At the same time, through the difficulties they have in adopting him, the groups change too, with the class learning some tolerance for an outsider, and the family drawn closer together by the presence of an elder brother/surrogate son in their midst.

Next week, I’ll consider what lessons may be drawn from the differences between the two programmes, and what they have to tell us about the media in Japan.

I thought I’d give the classical literature a rest this week and spend my next few columns talking about vampires – for reasons which will become clear shortly. The figure of the blood, or life, draining monster is a familiar one from tales of the supernatural the world over, with the nosferatu in Europe, the al-ghūl in Arabia, and the jiāngshī 殭屍 in China. Each of these has its own characteristics, and each has been adopted to a greater or lesser extent by a variety of media for fictional representation, which has often produced a mythology about the creatures which has more reality in popular imagination than the old folk-wisdom now does.

Without doubt, the most well-known of these is, of course, the vampire, which has enjoyed waves of popularity ever since Bram Stoker adapted tales of the nosferatu for Dracula in 1897. As I’m sure you know, there have been a series of cinematic tales about the Count, or his family (or even his dog – does Zoltan, Hound of Dracula sound familiar to anyone?), starting with Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, continuing in the 1930s with Universal Studios’ Dracula films, Hammer Horror’s versions with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and culminating in Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which converted Stoker’s cold-hearted monster into a passionate, and thwarted, lover. Simultaneously there have been any number of other films about vampires, ranging from straight horror to farcical comedy.

The vampire has also been influential on the small screen, too, with Joss Whedon’s Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) being the most famous example, and the first to use battling the supernatural as a metaphor for the journey from child to adult. More recently, Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries have been adapted for television as True Blood, which is aimed at a much more adult audience, and uses the plot theme of vampires going ‘public’ to explore concepts of racism and discrimination – as well as the steamy eroticism and barely concealed violence often stereotypically associated with the Deep South of the US. At the same time, there’s been a boom in vampire-related fiction, aimed at a whole gamut of age-ranges and readerships: there are literary descendants of Buffy such as Vampire Academy with teen angst converted to vampire angst, innumerable ‘paranormal romance’ titles, such as J. R. Ward’s tales of the Black Dagger Brotherhood about the difficulties of relationships with a vampire lover, and crossover works such as Laurell K. Hamilton’s long running Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series which began as relatively straight horror in a modern, twentieth century setting, and has morphed into romance and erotica, and back, as it has continued. Currently, of course, the single most popular vampire-related tale worldwide is Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, which has legions of, mainly teenaged female, fans, pining over the relationship between its protagonists: ordinary high-school girl Bella Swann and Edward Cullen, her vampire true love – Japan is definitely no exception to this, with the translations of Meyer’s books selling well, and the first film and second films in the series generating large audiences.

As you may have guessed from the above, I’m something of a fan of fantasy and horror in all its incarnations, and am always on the lookout for a new series to try out, whether it be on television, or in book form, so I was pleased to find out when I was in Japan last summer that one of the most popular new television dramas was a vampire tale, and I settled in to watch it with interest, wondering what the Japanese take on the story would be. The show was called Koishite Akuma Vampaia Bōi 恋して悪魔ヴァンパイアボーイ, and featured one of the latest teen heartthrobs, fifteen year old Nakayama Yuma 中山優馬 as the eponymous protagonist. The title is a play-on-words, as it’s both ‘He Loves and is a Devil – the Vampire Boy’ or ‘Love me, Devil – Vampire Boy’ – either way, you can get a good sense of the plot from the title, and it soon became apparent that this was, indeed, a school-set vampire love story, and can only have been inspired by Twilight’s success, I think.

That being said, however, the programme closely followed the standard conventions for Japanese popular television drama, which made it a very different animal from Meyer’s works, and it was illuminating to watch for that reason – seeing how the plot arc was developed across the ten episodes of the story (Japanese dramas are almost always short and self-contained) provided me with a number of insights into what the Japanese expect and find entertaining in a television programme, which in turn can provide a degree of insight into the national character – if one can talk of such a thing.

Now that I’ve whetted your appetite, next week, I’ll take a look at plots of both Twilight and Koishite Akuma and see how they differ in approach and resolution.

This week, I’m continuing my discussion of Genji translations with a consideration of the more recent versions of the work. Forty-four years after Arthur Waley’s version, the second complete English Genji translation, by Edward Seidensticker, appeared. In his preface, Seidensticker criticises Waley’s version, saying Waley’s ‘translation is very free…his excisions seem merely arbitrary…Waley embroiders marvelously’ (Seidensticker, 1981, xiv), making it clear that his motivation in retranslating the work was, at least in part, to correct perceived errors in the earlier version and, indeed, the points of difference between the two translations formed a major parts of the reviews of Seidensticker’s translation with, for example, Marian Ury claiming, ‘it is clear that the cuts and alterations that Waley made in his translation are such that it is no longer possible to take it as a faithful representation of the original. Waley's book is an intriguing hybrid; but we have not really had a Genji in English until now’ (1977, 201), and Helen McCullough going even further to say, ‘few who have access to Seidensticker's translation will feel inclined to re-read his predecessor’ (1977, 93).

So, what is this wonderful new translation like? Well, here’s Seidensticker’s version of the beginning of the tale:

The Paulownia Court

In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the emperor loved more than any of the others. The grand ladies with high ambitions thought her a presumptuous upstart, and lesser ladies were still more resentful. (Seidensticker, 1981, 3)

In fact, this is even more like a cup of amber tea than either of the previous versions, in some ways. The chapter title is translated, the sentence structure is simplified, and some of the imagery is cut, producing an English version which is easily comprehensible, but somewhat terse. This observation is not original – Edwin Cranston in his review of the Seidensticker translation for the Journal of Japanese Studies noted as much, saying that it was ‘drier, brisker, more quotidian’ (Cranston, 1978, 24), than Waley’s, while Roy Andrew Miller makes the comment that, ‘in place of the smoothly articulated, arching structures of the text, we are given…a paragraph of short, effective sentences…it offers nothing unfamiliar or strange; it does not confront the visitor with anything in the least unexpected or novel’ (Miller, 1986, 113) – both of these comments suggest that ease of reading for the target audience was paramount in Seidensticker’s translation strategy, although it is certainly true that his Genji is identifiably set in Heian Japan.

Moving on the fourth translation, Helen McCullough’s 1994 version is incomplete and consists only of ten selected chapters from the work. It was published in a book composed of the Genji excerpts and selections from Heike Monogatari 平家物語 (‘The Tale of the Heike’), another classical Japanese tale. Her intentions in making the translation were to provide a resource for ‘students in survey courses and others who may lack the time to read The Tale of Genji and The Tale of the Heike in their entirety’ (McCullough, 1994, ix), and as such it is not usually mentioned in considerations of English Genji translations, but for completeness’ sake, here is her take:

Kiritsubo

During the reign of a certain sovereign, it happened that one rather insignificant lady enjoyed far greater Imperial favor than any of the other consorts and concubines. She was regarded with contempt and jealousy by proud ladies of superior status—personages who had always taken their own success very much for granted—and her equals and inferiors among the concubines felt even more disgruntled. (McCullough, 1994, 25)

The most recent translation, by Royall Tyler, unfortunately, has failed to become much of a talking point: I have been able to locate only a single review appearing in an academic journal, framed in less than entirely glowing terms:

[I]t will not give rise to the rapturous transports or sensory revelations that readers of Woolf's…generation experienced through Waley's version; nor…is there much reason to look for the epochal revisions of scholarly protocols and the global shifts in interpretation that reviewers thought would follow from the publication of Seidensticker's. (Kamens, 2003, 339)

It is a sad fact that in academia today the publication of a new translation of a work often fails to excite much interest. Kamen’s review cannot be called negative, but it displays a denigratory attitude to translation as an academic activity, dismissing it as a ‘faulty but necessary medium’ (Kamens, 2003, 334). Thus, while simultaneously praising Tyler’s work, Kamen’s attitude can be summed up as implying that translations are only important or relevant insofar as they stimulate readers to read, or do research on, the original texts. As he himself says, ‘I hope it will invite at least some readers to look beyond translation to imagine what else may be done’ (Kamens, 2003, 339).

This isn’t the place to go into what I think of that in detail – suffice it to say that more than one colleague has said to me that the work that gives them most satisfaction, and of which they are most proud, is their translations, but that in order to comply with institutional priorities, and for the sake of their careers, they are obliged to write research article after research article. Leaving that aside, though, what about the translation itself? Here’s Tyler’s version:

KIRITSUBO
The Paulownia Pavilion

Kiri means “paulownia tree” and tsubo “a small garden between palace buildings.” Kiristsubo is therefore the name for the palace pavilion that has a paulownia in its garden. The Emperor installs Genji’s mother there, so that readers have always called her Kiritsubo no Kōi (the Kiritsubo Intimate), although the text does not.

In a certain reign (whose can it have been?) someone of no very great rank, among all His Majesty’s Consorts and Intimates, enjoyed exceptional favor. Those others who had always assumed that pride of place was properly theirs despised her as a dreadful woman, while the lesser Intimates were unhappier still. (Tyler, 2001, 1-3)

Immediately, one can see that this is a very different animal, indeed, from the previous versions. The rhythm is closer to that of the first two translations, and there is also a significant amount of editorial apparatus, leaving the reader in no doubt about the significance of the title. This is replicated throughout the text – ‘there are few pages…that do not have at least one if not several notes’ (Kamens, 2003, 336) – and there is a wealth of additional material contained in appendices and afterwords. The overall result, then, is that readers are constantly aware that they are reading a translation and being informed about Heian Japan. In addition, Tyler goes further in attempting to replicate in English, as closely as is possible, the experience of reading the original Heian Japanese. To this end he refers to characters with titles, rather than names, and blends, to some extent at least, narration and quotation which, again, leaves one in no doubt that one is reading a work written in a very different way from something written in the English tradition. It certainly is a cup of green tea.

To conclude, then: the reception of each of the major translations of Genji has been different, and reflects the period in which it appeared: Suematsu’s was a curiosity; Waley’s a romantic work of English literature; Seidensticker’s a correction of Waley’s errors and a major step forward in Japanese Studies; and, finally, Tyler’s which appears to have had only a limited literary and academic impact.

Which, then, should you read, if you want to get better-acquainted with Genji? Are you the amber-coloured tea type, in search of a fantastical and romantic reading experience? Choose Waley, then. Do you want to get a quick, yet faithful sense of the work’s content? Choose Seidensticker. Or, are you the green-tea type, wanting to get the closest possible equivalent in English to reading a classical Japanese work, while at the same time learning about its setting? Then, Tyler has to be your choice. Each has its strengths, and each its weaknesses, and perhaps the most important question to ask, is ‘Will I enjoy reading this text?’ and if the answer is, ‘Yes’, then that’s the translation for you.

References

Cranston, Edwin (1978), "Review: The Seidensticker Genji" Journal of Japanese Studies 4 (1), 1-25.
Kamens, Edward (2003), ""A Beautiful, Quiet World"? The Tale of Genji and Its English Translations" Journal of Japanese Studies 29 (2), 325-339.
Mccullough, Helen (1977), "Review: The Seidensticker Genji" Monumenta Nipponica 32 (1), 93-110.
Mccullough, Helen (1994), Genji and Heike Selections from the Tale of Genji and the Tale of the Heike Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Miller, Roy Andrew (1986), Nihongo: In Defense of Japanese London, Athlone Press.
Seidensticker, Edward G. (1981), The Tale of Genji Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Tyler, Royall (2001), The Tale of Genji Harmondsworth, Viking.
Ury, Marian (1977), "Review: The Complete Genji" Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 37 (1), 183-201.

The title of this column may seem a bit obscure, particularly as I said last time I was going to talk about the English translations of Genji Monogatari, but bear with me, all will become clear shortly.

As I mentioned in my last column, there are five English translations of Genji, three complete, and two partial. Here are the translators’ names and the dates of publication:

• Suematsu Kenchō (1882)
• Arthur Waley (1925)
• Edward Seidensticker (1976)
• Helen McCullough (1994)
• Royall Tyler (2001)

As you can see, the translations are widely separated in time and appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, in the early and latter parts of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, meaning that the translators’ purposes in translating, their readers, and the translations’ reception were bound to be different. This also means that each of them is a very different work, and will give you a very different idea of Genji depending upon which one you read now. I’m going to deal with the first two translations this week, and will discuss the others later.

Suematsu’s translation is incomplete, covering only the first seventeen ‘chapters’ of the original. It starts as follows:

The Chamber of Kiri[i]

In the reign of a certain Emperor, whose name is unknown to us, there was, among the Niogo and Kôyi[ii] of the Imperial Court, one who, though she was not of high birth, enjoyed the full tide of Royal favour. Hence her superiors, each one of whom had always been thinking—“I shall be the one,” gazed upon her disdainfully with malignant eyes, and her equals and inferiors were more indignant still.

[i] The beautiful tree, called Kiri, has been named Paulownia Imperialia, by botanists.
[ii] Official titles held by Court ladies. (Suematsu Kenchō, 1974, 19)

One could take issue with the translation of the title, the uninformative footnotes, and, now, the somewhat old-fashioned phrasing (‘gazed upon her disdainfully with malignant eyes’), but overall there if much to commend here: it is a faithful reflection of the original’s content, and goes some way to replicating its rhythm and style.

In his introduction Suematsu explicitly states his purpose in translating:

[It] is not so much to amuse my readers as to present them with a study of human nature, and to give them information on the history of the social and political condition of my native country nearly a thousand years ago. They will then be able to compare it with the condition of mediaeval and modern Europe. (Suematsu Kenchō, 1974, 17)　

Suematsu was a diplomat despatched to Britain by the Meiji government, and his translation was a way to emphasise that Japan, far from being a barbaric, peripheral nation, had equalled, and even exceeded, the cultural developments of the western powers. This was in keeping with the Japanese government’s major foreign policy aim of securing a revision to the ‘unequal treaties’ signed by the Tokugawa shogunate. It was a translation for a political purpose, in other words. The contemporary critical reception of the translation, however, was patronising, to say the least:

The story, if story it may be called, when there is not a vestige or anything like a plot, is exceedingly tedious…The best things in the book are the scraps of verse, which are sometimes really pretty. (The Spectator 1882)

Despite this seemingly negative reception, however, the translation was reprinted in 1898, at which time the following review appeared:

…the text carries with it innumerable verses, which are to us utterly meaningless…we now understand the wonderful art of Japan, but perhaps it will be never given to us to appreciate her fiction. (The New York Times 1898)

At this time the very existence of Japanese literature was an object of curiosity, and, it was never considered that it could be in any way equal to the literary achievements of Europe, or, not to put too fine a point on it, English. This should come as no surprise: Britain, in particular, was still in the grip of the self-confident Victorian assumption of its own superiority, and any work of world literature, not just those from Japan, was likely to be regarded in the same way. So, you could say that Suematsu’s translation was, and to some extent still is, a curiosity and not worth a great deal of attention.

The first complete translation of Genji, by Arthur Waley, and published in six volumes between 1925-32, however, was a different matter. It was widely read, and highly praised by the British literary establishment. On the cover of the edition which I own, in an excerpted quotation from the New York Times, it is described as being ‘as robust as “Tom Jones,” as discerning as “Don Quixote,” as untrammeled as “The Arabian Nights”’, clearly placing it in the company of other, more familiar, major works of English, European and world literature.

Waley begins his Genji like this:

Kiritsubo[i]

At the Court of an Emperor (he lived it matters not when) there was among the many gentlewomen of the Wardrobe and Chamber one, who though she was not of very high rank was favoured far beyond all the rest; so that the great ladies of the Palace, each of whom had secretly hoped that she herself would be chosen, looked with scorn and hatred upon the upstart who had dispelled their dreams. Still less were her former companions, the minor ladies of the Wardrobe, content to see her raised so far above them.

[i] This chapter should be read with indulgence. In it Murasaki, still under the influence of her somewhat childish predecessors, writes in a manner which is a blend of the Court chronicle with the conventional fairy-tale. (Waley, 1935, 7)

Setting aside the footnote – I think the last thing one would do nowadays when translating a literary work is insult one’s author on the very first page - you can see immediately, I hope, that this is a more literary version than the previous one. A reader is caught at once by the initial, long, sentence and swept away by its rhythm. This is easily done as Waley has decided, for example, to translate the terms nyōgo (女御) and kōi (更衣), which Suematsu simply transcribed, even if the translations themselves are somewhat opaque. He has, though, left the chapter title untranslated, and unexplained. How much you enjoy it, I suppose, depends on whether you like this relatively flowery style (an American student of mine once remarked that this could only ever have been written by an Englishman), but I have to confess to finding it enchanting, and I am not the only one: for example, writing in Vogue in 1925, Virginia Woolf made these effusive comments:

While the Aelfrics and the Aelfreds croaked and coughed in England, this court lady...was sitting down in her silk dress and trousers with pictures before her and the sound of poetry in her ears, with flowers in her garden and nightingales in the trees, with all day to talk in and all night to dance in-she was sitting down about the year 1000 to tell the story of the life and adventures of Prince Genji. (Woolf, 1966, 265)

With positive reviews such as this to drive it, Waley’s translation was read by many people and evaluated highly. Again, this is, perhaps, unsurprising, given when it appeared: in the early 1920s the First World War remained an unhealed wound upon the psyche of the British people, many of whom could perceive little hope for a better life in the immediate future. It seems unsurprising, therefore, that they should seize on Genji as offering an escape into a romantic and more civilised world, and that it should exercise a strong influence on the British literary establishment, with Aldous Huxley relating in later years that the Tale of Genji was ‘the essence of all tragedy, refined to a couple of tablespoonfuls of amber coloured tea in a porcelain cup no bigger than a magnolia flower’ (Huxley 1939: 156).

This brings us to the title of the column and the crux of the matter: it’s a fact that Japanese tea is, of course, green, and amber tea can’t help but seem foreign, or rather, un-Japanese (the Japanese word for Indian tea is kōcha 紅茶which literally translates as ‘scarlet tea’, as you probably know already). Although Huxley may not have meant it this way, Waley’s translation departs in both letter and spirit from the Japanese original in order to make the resultant English text more palatable to the English reader. The technical term for this in Translation Studies is domestication, and there’s no doubt that Waley’s Genji is thoroughly domesticated, with European furniture and other accoutrements inserted, changes in characterisation and motivation, and substantial deletions, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable, or influential.

Next week, I’ll talk about the more recent translations – those which are more akin to green tea.

References

Mccullough, Helen (1994), Genji and Heike Selections from the Tale of Genji and the Tale of the Heike Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Seidensticker, Edward G. (1981), The Tale of Genji Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Suematsu Kenchō (1974), Genji Monogatari Tokyo, Tuttle.
Tyler, Royall (2001), The Tale of Genji Harmondsworth, Viking.
Waley, Arthur (1935), The Tale of Genji Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company.
Woolf, Virginia (1966), "The Tale of Genji", 264-268, in Virginia Woolf (Ed.) Collected Essays London, Hogarth Press.

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• Japanese Literature (3)
• Japanese Popular Culture (6)
• Japanese Social Relations (2)
• Japanese Society (2)
• Musings (4)
• Traditional Japanese Culture (2)

• Bloodsuckers of the World, Unite? Part 3
• Bloodsuckers of the World, Unite? Part Two
• Bloodsuckers of the World, Unite! Part One
• Amber or Green Tea - Part Two
• Amber or Green Tea - Part One
• Does the Shining Prince yet shine?
• What can we learn from dorama?
• Dorama - What A Drama!
• Journeys Outside of the Bubble
• How Japanese Writers Make the Point

• Bloodsuckers of the World, Unite? Part 3
    - Christiano
  
• Bloodsuckers of the World, Unite! Part One
    - neil.m4
  
• Amber or Green Tea - Part One
    - Matt
  
• Does the Shining Prince yet shine?
    - Matt White
  
• Nonsense About Nihonjin
    - Neil McClelland
    - Jennifer Teeter
    - Mary
    - Mike Bagosy
    - Martin Dennis Molinary
    - KattyBlackyard
  
• Dorama - What A Drama!
    - Matt White
  
• You never know who's watching!
    - Wendy Uchimura
    - Christiano
    - AndrewBoldman
  
• Japanese Writers Do Stick to the Point!
    - Jennifer T
    - Kayoko Sakai
  
• Journeys Outside of the Bubble
    - Jess
  
• Why Can’t Japanese Writers Stick to the Point?
    - Jon Blundell
    - Jason B.
    - Gerard
    - Kayoko Sakai
    - Jennifer T
    - Matt Whie
    - Michael Iwane-Salovaara