The Tale of Genji Scrolls (Genji monogatari emaki)
The narrative scrolls illustrate Murasaki Shikibu’s novel about Prince Genji. We look down into the rooms through roofs that have been lifted away.
The faces are almost identical – a line for the eyes, a hook for the nose. The emotions are conveyed by the rooms and the colours.
Genji monogatari, The Tale of Genji, was written in the early 11th century by the court lady Murasaki Shikibu. It is often counted among the world’s first novels. It tells of an emperor’s son, Genji, and his loves and life at court in Heian-kyō, present-day Kyoto. In the 12th century illustrated scrolls were made of the story. The oldest surviving example is the Genji monogatari emaki, a National Treasure of Japan.
The scrolls consist of alternating sections of text and pictures. The text is written in elegant calligraphy on paper decorated with gold and silver. Only parts of the original scrolls survive, some twenty pictures. Most are in the Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya, and a few in the Gotoh Museum in Tokyo. For conservation reasons the scrolls have been divided and mounted separately. They have long been attributed to the court painter Fujiwara no Takayoshi, but the attribution is uncertain. Most scholars believe that several painters and calligraphers worked on them.
The pictures show court life indoors. We see the rooms from above by means of a technique in which the roof and walls are removed, fukinuki yatai, meaning roughly “blown-away roof”. The figures sit in rooms with screens and curtains, often in long, many-layered robes. In one famous scene Genji holds a newborn child who is not his own, and a sense of grief and guilt pervades the whole picture.
The faces are drawn according to a convention known as hikime kagibana: the eyes are a mere line and the nose a small hook. The faces therefore do not express emotions directly. Instead, the mood is conveyed through the placing of the figures, the clothing, the colours and the slanting lines of the architecture. The diagonals often create a sense of unease or confinement.
The pictures are painted in a technique called tsukuri-e. First the outlines were drawn in ink, then thick layers of mineral pigments were applied, and finally details and outlines were drawn in again. Over time the colours have faded and flaked, so that the pictures now look more subdued than they did originally.
The scrolls have been interpreted as an expression of Heian aesthetics, in which the concept of mono no aware, a sensitivity to the transience of things, was central. The pictures show not dramatic events but quiet moments charged with feeling. They are therefore meant to be read together with the text.
The Genji monogatari emaki is one of the most important sources of knowledge about Japanese narrative art and court life in the Heian period. The scrolls are shown only for short periods, as they are sensitive to light. Scholars have made reconstructions of the original colours, showing how strong and brilliant the pictures once were.