THE TALE AS FICTION AND HISTORY

The Tale of Genji has often been taken, understandably, for a sort of documentary on court life in the author's time, but its hero is a plainly fictional character. Scattered touches also suggest that the tale was actually conceived as a historical novel and that Genji lived in the early tenth century, nearly a hundred years before the author's time. For example, he is a master of the kin, a Chinese musical instrument prominent in the tale. Historical sources, however, show that the kin dropped sharply in popularity after the mid-tenth century and that by the author's time it was no longer played. Sure enough, when the aging Genji finds himself obliged to teach someone the kin ("Spring Shoots II"), he complains that few people play it anymore.

What really betrays the tale as fiction, however, is simply that it is more beautiful than life. Not every moment or action in it is pleasing, and many are of course painful in one way or another. Rather, the narration gives grace and harmony to things that might otherwise be too tedious or distressing to sustain the reader's interest. It is as though the author had painted an immensely long and accomplished picture scroll. The scroll accurately conveys countless details of daily life, depicts troubling scenes, and generally hints at humanity's more or less deplorable failings. However, it selects and composes these things into engaging sequences. At the close of some upsetting passages the narrator actually observes that one would have wished to paint the scene.

The narrative displays many visually brilliant scenes, and its careful attention to matters of costume is famous. However, this interest in beautiful tableaux and in dress does not prove, as some have assumed, that these nobles really spent all their time organizing visually perfect moments, any more than the incense blending in chapter 32 ("The Plum Tree Branch") shows that they had little else to do but to enjoy incense. If they had, and if they had always succeeded as well when they tried as they do in the tale, such scenes would have been superfluous. The Tale of Genji evokes a world in which many things, much of the time, are really and truly done right for a change. Still, life's cruelties show clearly enough through the grace of color and form—the form of manners, words, and feelings as well as of things. The author saw life very clearly.

All this helps to make the tale more real than history. Its most celebrated characters live more vividly in the imagination than anyone known from historical documents, and their lives—their sufferings, their disappointments, their failings, and their grace—have remained a major legacy to the centuries that have passed since they were first conceived. Although invented, they are also immortal. Even Genji's Rokujo estate, lovingly reconstructed in drawings and models, is by far the most widely known example of the domestic architecture of its time. That it never existed makes no difference at all.