Reading Genji

From the ever-handy Wikipedia: The Tale of Genji (源氏物語, Genji Monogatari) is a classic work of Japanese literature attributed to the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu in the early eleventh century, around the peak of the Heian period. It is sometimes called the world’s first novel, the first modern novel, or the first novel to still be considered a classic. The issue remains debated among scholars. More.

I was in the middle of the Wakana II chapter of Genji monogatari the other night night when the power suddenly went out. It’s really odd how all the times I read Genji, I end up doing so by candlelight. It would be morbid and neurotic if it were deliberate, but it isn’t. The first time I read Genji (the Arthur Waley translation), I was staying in the Kamia dormitory in UP Diliman and there was a campus-wide blackout that night too. It was the middle of summer and there were very few people staying in the dorm. I shared a room in the second floor with a girl who worked part-time in NU 107, which meant I barely saw her at all. Kamia is one of the oldest dormitories in the university; it was built right before World War II, I think, and has barely changed since then. Renovations are mostly restricted to repairing (sometimes replacing) leaking roofs and disintegrating keyholes.

The rooms in the second floor are very big and high-ceilinged, the dormer windows opening out into the courtyard below and the Palma Hall and Zoological Institute in the street opposite. The second floor has the spatial structure of a ladies boarding house within the context of an old corrosive photograph, and you imagine that girls who live there ought to be sitting in their narrow beds, knees tucked up under starched dresses with cinched waists, eating packed lunches of dried fish, rice and tomatoes, afterward fanning themselves absently against the heat with cheap painted fans as they waited for their next class.

I mean, that dormitory has that sort of …. atmosphere, and of course it’s integrated into the cultural betting pool that passes for dorm life. Inevitably, the imagery invoked is transposed into selfsame girls slitting their wrists in the dusty rambling bathrooms, or being possessed by the ghosts of dead English majors leaping out of cavernous closets straight into the reflection of a young freshman, about to attend a lecture, combing her hair in front of the mirror that always, always hung at the door.

I am not really susceptible to dodgy ghost stories, but I am easily freaked by any hint of creepiness, whether structured as college-fare supernatural narrative or just as an actual physical impression. And that night when the power went out, there was a deal of creepiness to be had. I kept seeing small feet wearing mud-spattered slippers dangling somewhere out of the corner of my eye. My bed was facing the row of open windows; I couldn’t close them. I don’t think they had been closed since they were opened by those first fin-de-siecle colegialas and I really wasn’t about to try. I couldn’t hear anyone in the hallway outside, except for very distant and high-pitched laughter that seemed to come from somewhere down the corridor, and it was completely dark in the street below. So I lit a small candle, reached for a thin blanket to cover myself with despite the heat just in case, and reached for Genji monogatari. I guess it seems such disjointed reading material, considering the circumstances, but I couldn’t find more Saikaku Ihara in the Asian Center. I saw Genji instead, squashed between the Man’yoshu and William Beasley, and–feeling vaguely curious and restless–thought I should give long Japanese court tales a try (in lieu of yet another bunraku story and/or plowing through one more chapter of “Dream of the Red Chamber.”)

Needless to say, I read the whole night long. I fell asleep somewhere in the Aoi chapter. (I managed to get past Yugao without much incident). I’m sorry if I’m telling this experience badly–and in such tiresome detail–but there are some readings, of certain books, that taken together constitute… not exactly a life-changing moment, but an entirely distinct story in itself. Do you know what I mean? That’s what happened to me when I read Genji monogatari. And the story about it is like this frightful study in agitprop film scriptwriting or some weird meta-Bildungsroman.

The next time I found myself reading Genji monogatari–the (unabridged) Edward Seidensticker translation now–I was crouched over the grave of my great-grandmother, watching the candles and making wax figures in between chapters. It was All Saints Day in the Philippines and families trooped to the cemeteries to pay respects to their dead and held vigil over their graves all night long. Now we have quite a substantial number of dead kin to attend to every year, which actually shouldn’t be a problem because I belong to a very large family, dead or alive, but the fact is the graves of our dead are scattered indiscriminately throughout the cemetery. So plotting vigils usually becomes a matter of divide and conquer. At that time, I was assigned to my great-grandmother’s grave, and because it is farther and more solitary than usual compared to the other family-owned gravesites, I didn’t have any cousins to talk to nearby, and the people on either side of me were either reciting novenas or gambling. It was really an accident that I ended up reading Seidensticker; I had decided to take Seidensticker home from university because I was having some nasty thoughts about the Uji chapters after Waley but I really didn’t plan to read, contrast and compare in the middle of a cemetery. It wasn’t so much creepy as weird, but still.

And then I started reading the Royall Tyler translation. I was way outside my grandmother’s house when it happened, still within sight of the house itself, but bordering the part of the property leading to what Lola euphemistically calls ‘backyard’ but which is more like a tropical reserve. There is a small shack–the remnants of what was once a henhouse– straddling this line. My cousins and I usually sit inside in old rattan chairs, playing cards or drinking iced tea or reading during evenings. My uncle had installed good light fixtures and a ceiling fan, and the doorway of the shack gives out onto a nice view of a small fishing pond, so spending some time there after dinner has become something of a peaceful and comfortable routine for me when I stay over. I wanted to finish Volume 2 and was idly pondering Kashiwagi and that damn cat, when the whole place was plunged into darkness. Eat your heart out, Young Werther. Though I wasn’t about to go blundering out of the shack and make my way back to my grandmother’s house without a candle or a flashlight, so I stayed there, thinking a bit hysterically about something Murasaki said to Genji several chapters earlier, so I wouldn’t start imagining dead hens getting nasty ideas about ghost henhouses, I guess.

There are still other non-English translations to attempt. I wonder what’ll happen then. Hopefully I won’t be stuck in a ventilation shaft or something horrid like that.

In conclusion: What is your most memorable reading experience?