Little Labors

A baby is an ideal vector for a revenge plot

In some sense, The Tale of Genji has no plot. Genji is born, then this happens and that happens and then he gets old and he dies and other people continue on, living their lives, in which further thises and thats happen.

But in another sense Genji has a perfectly rounded plot: it describes a simple triptych with the unavoidable ambiguity of paternity as its hinges. Genji is born to the most beloved of the emperor’s consorts, but she dies shortly after Genji is born; because she was of low status, her son Genji is also of problematically low status. But the emperor then marries a woman who looks like Genji’s deceased mother, and later Genji has an affair with that stepmother, and he and the stepmother then pretend that the resultant child is the emperor’s. That child eventually becomes emperor. As emperor he grants status to Genji, his real father. Genji, by this time, has gone on to marry a woman he met when she was a young girl and whom he raised as if she were his daughter. Later Genji’s third wife has a child with Genji’s evil nephew and they pretend that child is Genji’s. That child, who becomes a basically mediocre and evil man, lives on after Genji’s death with the status of a son of Genji.

So twice major characters fall in love with people who are essentially, if not biologically, their children. And twice the ambiguity of paternity enables a radical shift of power: once it elevates Genji, via his secret son, and once it diminishes Genji, via his secretly not-son. That first shift is a revenge against inheritance, the second shift is a revenge upon that revenge. It is a wise child that knows its own father, goes the saying. And a wise mother who makes use of the mystery. The novel ends in midsentence, and no one really knows if the final words are those of Lady Murasaki, or if the last chapters were written not by Murasaki herself but instead, after her death, by her daughter.