Illustrated scroll from the Tale of Genji

0:06Dr. Steven Zucker: One of the most famous works of literature to come down to us is the Tale of Genji. Dr. Eve Loh-Kazuhara: The Tale of Genji, or Genji Monogatari, was written in Heian Japan by a court lady whose name is Murasaki Shikibu. Dr. Steven Zucker: Now she was, we think, a sort of mid-ranked noblewoman. That is, she would have been in the imperial court and highly educated. And as a result, she's able to give us access to court culture at this time in the 11th century. Dr. Eve Loh-Kazuhara: The Tale of Genji narrates the life and loves of Hikaru Genji, otherwise known as the Shining Prince.

0:47He's the son of the emperor and a low-rank consort. Dr. Steven Zucker: Some people have gone so far as to say this is the first novel. But more precisely, people say that this is the first psychological novel. This is the first novel that emphasizes what people are thinking, what people are feeling, and the social mores of this culture. And although we refer to this text as a novel, there is no single plot. It is instead a series of vignettes that follow the lives of the people of the imperial court and others.

1:22Dr. Eve Loh-Kazuhara: This is a really fascinating insider's account of what life was like for these women who lived within these palatial grounds. And Murasaki Shikibu was privy to many of these episodes that would happen within these grounds. Dr. Steven Zucker: But the original manuscript is lost. And what we're looking at is a set of excerpts produced about a hundred years after this was first written. And so it's important to understand the paintings as embedded in the text within hand scrolls that would have been rolled and unrolled section by section in order to be read. These paintings and these written excerpts were produced with meticulous care on extremely fine paper with lavish decoration and a kind of elegance

2:14in the script that has been celebrated for centuries. This image is similar to almost all of the surviving paintings in that it is showing an interior scene. It's using a technique called the roof blown off. That is to say that we seem to be hovering somehow above the building looking in. We have this privileged view of this domestic scene that is taking place within a palace that we should not have access to. Dr. Eve Loh-Kazuhara: Exactly, and we have to remember that women during this time in Heian, Japan, aristocratic women in particular, were very much secluded from public life, from socialising, and a lot of these women were often not seen by anyone else other than their husbands or their fathers and their inner circles.

3:03So this really is a very private scene which we have stumbled onto. Dr. Steven Zucker: The painting is over a thousand years old, and so it has deteriorated. These are paintings that do not use the Western tradition of linear perspective, and so there is a kind of flattening as a result that can be a little bit hard to read initially.

3:21Dr. Eve Loh-Kazuhara: That's right. When you first encounter this scene, you get a sense that you are looking at the various points throughout the composition, but when you do settle down, you see that the artist actually guides you to look at a particular point in the painting. We see a standing curtain known as the kichō, and that's been strategically erected in the middle of the composition.

3:49The curtains' function is to shield the activities of the women in the room, and then you have the fusuma, or the sliding doors, and these rolled-up curtains, and together with the directional lines of the standing curtain, they lead you towards the left of the composition where the main activity is taking place. Dr. Steven Zucker: And there we see four women, three principal figures and an attendant.

4:16Dr. Eve Loh-Kazuhara: We have Nakanokimi, who's seated on the left, and her attendant is combing her hair. It seems like she's just stepped out of her shower because she's not wearing her full 12-layered robe. Next to Nakanokimi, we have Ukon, who's reading, and then we have Uki fune, who is looking at illustrations accompanying this text being read. Dr. Steven Zucker: Nakanokimi is given a degree of importance in this composition. Lines seem to move towards her. There is this grid that exists where horizontals are parallel to the picture plane, but then there is one dominant set of diagonals that are also parallel to each other, with one exception, the standing silk screen, which has its own diagonal, but helps to create an arrow that

5:06points directly to this figure. And she's partially hidden by the silk curtain, which I find fascinating, because on it, is a painted landscape that is separated by these beautiful ribbons that fall from the top, creating both a sense of deep space and simultaneously, a flattened space, in contrast to the other representation of a landscape, which is just above it on the sliding screens, both of which tease us about the actual natural world, which is beyond that open door, which we are not allowed to see.

5:41Dr. Eve Loh-Kazuhara: So there is a lot of referencing of these nature motifs. We can see this repeated several times in this composition. We see it on the kimonos that they're wearing. We see it on the fusuma, or the sliding doors. We see it on the standing screen, and right down to these rather abstract motifs on the rolled curtains, reinforcing the idea of the interiorization of nature, bringing nature inside.

6:08Dr. Steven Zucker: It's interesting that the one figure whose face we are given access to is the figure that is furthest from us. Dr. Eve Loh-Kazuhara: Ukifune has come to live with Nakanokimi, and she often consults Nakanokimi on matters of the heart. Ukifune represents a bit of a tragic figure. Because of her lower status, she's been rather unsuccessful in affairs of the heart, and we understand that, later on, Ukifune attempts suicide, but she turns away from this material world and goes off to join a monastery. Dr. Steven Zucker: And so I always believed that the increasingly literary culture of the Japanese court was a direct result of the introduction of Buddhism centuries earlier.

6:54Dr. Eve Loh-Kazuhara: Illustrated scrolls, or emaki, were introduced to Japan from China, particularly during the spread of Buddhism. Dr. Steven Zucker: This is such a lavish and beautiful image, and one can only imagine what it would have been like to look at these paintings embedded within panels of script that were every bit as alive as these images, where the script is a layer atop, a highly decorative background, so that there is almost a kind of seamlessness between text and image as the stories unfold.