Hagiwara Hiromichi - Works - Interpreting The Tale of Genji

Interpreting The Tale of Genji

Hiromichi’s ingenuity and sensitivity to literary style found their ultimate expression in his efforts to make the most revered work of the classical canon, The Tale of Genji, accessible to a wider readership. Having successfully lectured on Genji to a popular audience, he began to raise funds to publish a new edition that incorporated interpretation and revised commentary on the original text in 1851. Undaunted by the well-established views of generations of scholars, Hiromichi chose deliberately simple language to turn the world of Genji commentary and criticism on its head. The introduction to his Genji monogatari hyōshaku he explains to readers why this classical text has achieved such renown in the following manner :

The more one reads Genji the more difficult it becomes to express how exceptional it is… The text is remarkably detailed and complete. Put simply, it is written in a way that allows one to scratch in all the places that itch.

Hiromichi focused on textual evidence to substantiate this claim throughout his edition of the text. He argued that the internal consistency of detail and the tale’s unvarnished depiction of human feeling and behavior give the reader a sense that he or she is engaged with a fictional world as real and compelling as a great theatrical production or life itself. To guide inexperienced readers, allowing them to appreciate Genji with the same sense of satisfaction he had discovered after devoting his life to its study, he devised a new interpretive system. He believed that Genji, or any great work of prose fiction, should be valued for its capacity to engage the imagination of readers from all walks of life.

It may seem obvious to contemporary readers that a work of literature should be valued for the ability of its prose to engage the reader’s imagination, but to critics of the Edo period the claims made by Hiromichi were akin to heresy. His immediate predecessors were deeply invested in establishing Genji’s importance in relation to Buddhism, Confucianism, and, ultimately, the superiority of Japan’s indigenous culture (see Kokugaku and Shinto). These interpretive schemes tied the evaluation of Genji as literature to particular moral, ideological, or cultural values. Following in the footsteps of the greatest scholar of nativist studies of the Edo period, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), Hiromichi, did much to promote scholarship on Genji. Unlike Norinaga and his influential thesis regarding the affective, or mono no aware oriented approach to reading Genji, however, Hiromichi's interpretation ultimately rested on the internal consistency and literary style of the text, not ideological argument. The first two installments of Hiromichi's commentary were well received and widely reprinted, but only for a brief period. After seeing the publication of the first two volumes of his magnum opus on Genji to print, including the carving of woodblock prints himself, Hiromichi succumbed to protracted illness and died in 1863, leaving his greatest work incomplete. Only five years after Hiromichi’s death, the Tokugawa Shogunate collapsed and the Meiji restoration began. Politicians and academics devoted to modernizing Japan in the Meiji period (1868-1912) sought to revive the nativist rhetoric associated with Genji in the Edo period. Almost immediately, the ideas Hiromichi had used to liberate Genji from the limitations of premodern ideology became a liability while those promoted by Norinaga were easily tailored to serve the needs of scholars and politicians eager to advance both nativism and nationalism. To this day Hiromichi's work remains in the shadow of interpretations that point to Genji as an icon of national culture.

Evidence of Hiromichi's innovative scholarship can be found in Tsubouchi Shōyō's seminal treatise The Essence of the novel (Shōsetsu shinzui, 1885). While Shōyō makes no explicit reference to Hiromichi, his treatise, shows the influence of Hiromichi's theories on Genji, mono no aware, and the elaboration of Bakin's views concerning Edo popular fiction (shōsetsu 小説 ) that appear in texts written by Hiromichi.