On Royall Tyler’s essays about The Tale of Genji

Did you expect my previous blog post to be my last post on The Tale of Genji? 
I’ve just got Royall Tyler’s book of essays on the novel, called The Disaster of the Third Princess. It is interesting, and sheds some light on the book. 
1/ The essay “Genji and Murasaki: Between Love and Pride” is about Genji-Murasaki relationship and the 3 crises—Akashi, Asagao, and the Third Princess (Onna San no Miya). 
I didn’t realise that Genji’s pursuit of Asagao may have been politically motivated. Murasaki is the love of his life but as he rises higher and higher at court, she no longer seems enough for him in terms of rank. Asagao is a princess (daughter of His Highness of Ceremonial—a prince) and would be a threat. Fortunately for Murasaki, she first becomes a Kamo Priestess and afterwards keeps refusing Genji, but the threat is always there, and many years later he ends up marrying someone of even higher rank—the Third Princess, daughter of a retired Emperor (Suzaku). That is when everything is turned upside down and their relationship can never be the same. 
Genji brings Murasaki up and moulds her into his ideal woman, but their marriage isn’t perfect. At the core, it’s because she lacks backing (her mother’s dead, her father barely recognises her and his wife is a terrible woman) and her position is forever insecure. Her position depends on Genji’s affection, and even then, there are political factors and pressure from other people, as we can see in the case of the Third Princess. 
Another thing is that, as I’ve written before, Genji can sometimes be tactless or condescending, and scold Murasaki for being jealous or angry, which is not becoming for a lady even though the feelings are normal and understandable. 
But that’s the greatness of The Tale of Genji. I don’t know where some people get the idea that Genji or Murasaki is idealised—both are flawed and human. 

2/ “Genji and Suzaku (1): The Disaster of the Third Princess” is about the relationship between Genji and Suzaku.
Between these half-brothers, Suzaku has a strong backing (the Fujiwara clan) and has power, but Genji is the more handsome and gifted one. Suzaku is, in some ways, a pathetic figure, because he doesn’t have a strong personality and is controlled by his mother (the Kokiden Consort).  
The interesting part is that Suzaku doesn’t seem to mind Akikonomu’s affair with Genji (even if he doesn’t appoint her a Consort because of it) and their relationship seems fine, until the incident with the Third Princess. He entrusts Genji with his favourite daughter, and in the end feels betrayed. His decision to let her become a nun is a way of letting her get away from Genji, and showing him his reproaches. 
In this essay, Royall Tyler argues that the Kiritsburo Emperor knows about Genji’s transgression with Fujitsubo, but condones it. I suppose that is possible, the Emperor after all does notice the resemblance—perhaps that is his way of helping his favourite son get a son that would become an Emperor, as Genji himself cannot become Emperor. 

3/ At the end of that essay, and in “Genji and Suzaku (2): The Possibility of Ukifune”, Royall Tyler argues that the spirit that kills Oigimi and attacks Ukifune in the last part of the novel is Suzaku. The idea is that, by attacking the 2 women that Kaoru courts, the spirit of Suzaku punishes Kaoru, who is in the public eye Genji’s son.  
The main arguments are: a) when alive, Suzaku compromises his practice and his vows when leaving the mountains to come back for his daughter, no wonder that he would be an angry spirit; b) the spirit says it’s used to be an ordained monk; and c) the Uji villa, where Ukifune is found, used to belong to Suzaku. 
Is it convincing? I’m not sure. 
Royall Tyler also argues that after the exorcism, Ukifune is not completely free but still possessed by the spirit, because of her amnesia and strange reactions, especially her lack of gratitude to the nuns and condescending, snobbish view on them. Perhaps, again I’m not sure. 
But I agree with Tyler that Ukifune’s life beyond the tale (i.e. after the open ending) wouldn’t be great—in the ending we see her refusing to acknowledge Kaoru and her own half-brother, but as we have seen throughout the novel, a woman cannot resist forever. A woman, if she doesn’t yield to an aggressive and/or persistent man, would still yield because of intense pressure or interference from her gentlewomen. The only woman in the tale who successfully resists to the end is Oigimi, who kills herself. Ukifune has no protection, even the monk is afraid of Kaoru’s power, so her only option is to run away again. 

4/ In the essay “Pity Poor Kaoru”, Royall Tyler apparently argues that Kaoru’s personality lacks some kind of coherence or integration. I don’t think so. He has self-contradictions, but the contradictions don’t mean that his personality is unrealistic or lacks coherence. 
Kaoru is idealised by everyone, the way Genji has been, and he likes to think that he is kind, pious, and detached from material life, which is why he can control himself and not rape Oigimi. Religious people are the same, who like to believe themselves pious, and because of faith and fear of sin, resist the temptation to do things they know to be wrong. But at the same time, he’s not the kind of holy man he believes himself to be (as he says to the monk at the end of the novel), he still has weaknesses—his pride, his desires and longings, and his bitter side. 
He also doesn’t treat the women very nicely, especially Ukifune. It is hard to like Kaoru. 
But these weaknesses, to me, make Kaoru more real and more human. Niou himself wants to cut Kaoru down to size, because Kaoru always keeps up the façade of a pious, holy man but still visits his wife and has a secret woman elsewhere. Kaoru’s struggle is the struggle between his pious sentiments and erotic longings, which we can see particularly in the passages where he thinks he has always had higher aspirations but ends up living as all men do (ch.52). 

Overall, these essays are interesting and may shed light on things I didn’t quite understand or notice before, even though I don’t always agree with Royall Tyler.