1 - The cultural background

Summary

Politics

The Tale of Genji is the product of an aristocratic culture that flourished in Japan in the eleventh century at the height of the Heian Period (794–1192), a period that takes its name from the capital, Heian-kyō. It is seen to be the greatest achievement not only of Heian culture, but indeed of Japanese literature as a whole. Japan had just emerged from a time of substantial Chinese influence and was going through one of its periodic stages of readjustment, during which alien concepts were successfully naturalised. The Genji is thus the product of a native culture finding a truly sophisticated form of self-expression in prose for the first time. Chinese forms and Chinese ideas still remained a touchstone, a kind of eternal presence in the Japanese mind, but China itself was temporarily on its knees and was geographically far enough removed to allow for the unhampered growth of an indigenous tradition. The Genji, when it did come, owed very little to Chinese literary precedents.

Politically, matters took roughly the same course. Attempts to impose a Chinese-style bureaucracy had failed to supplant native habits. Power remained by and large a matter of heredity, and what civil service there was never won a sense of identity for itself, so bound up was it with the aristocracy. The dominant political fact was that the Emperor, at the spiritual and psychological centre, was politically impotent and under the influence of whichever aristocratic family happened to be in a position to take decisions.