Scholars and students have spent nearly a decade documenting and digitizing a vast, first-of-its-kind repository for hundreds of medieval Japanese poems. But the compendium doesn’t draw from an array of authors. Instead, a single woman penned all the 11th century poems as part of a larger book, widely believed to be the world’s first novel.
The Tale of Genji is a significant piece of classic Japanese literature, and not just because of its age. At over 500,000 words, it’s also one of history’s longest novels. Written by Murasaki Shikibu, a court assistant or “lady-in-waiting” during the Heian period, Genji is a tale of love, adventure, and intrigue that spans the title prince’s life. But the novel also interweaves a repository of 795 poems throughout its roughly 1,300 pages—each written from the one of 118 separate characters’ perspectives, including mothers, servants, emperors, lovers, and Genji himself.
These sections weren’t just rhetorical flourishes from Murasaki. Poetry was a popular form of communication in both written and spoken form during the Heian period. In this sense, Murasaki was simply reflecting the era in which she lived. But to do so at such a scale required a remarkable level of talent.
“It’s a really extraordinary feat to be able to ventriloquize all of these highly distinct characters and come up with the kind of poems that they would write,” J. Keith Vincent, a Boston University College of Arts and Sciences associate professor of Japanese and comparative literature, explained in the project’s accompanying announcement. “Within 200 years of finishing her book, the greatest poets in Japan were saying, ‘It’s basically impossible to become a poet without having memorized The Tale of Genji.’”
While Genji’s earliest readers preferred to focus on the novel’s poetics, modern audiences are more often drawn to the plot and character dynamics. Vincent saw this firsthand whenever he assigned Genji to his own students. According to him, glossing over these integral passages was a disservice to both readers and the novel itself. But about a decade ago, Vincent realized a way to help students appreciate the work as a whole: a Genji poetry database.
“I thought of the project as a way to get students to slow down and pay more attention to the poems,” he said.
Starting in fall 2016, Vincent offered his Japanese literature students extra credit for locating and entering various translations of Genji’s poems into a single (very large) spreadsheet. Today, there are four main English translations of the entire novel, as well as another translation work focused on only the poems. Combine those with the original Japanese, and that adds up to nearly 4,000 entries.
“It’s extraordinary how different the versions can be, how different the [translators’] styles are,” he said. “… The idea is that you get a sense of the choices one has to make as a translator, and can gradually arrive at the nexus of the original [meaning] through these five different versions.”
In total, Vincent estimated the database took around 150 students “hundreds and hundreds of hours” over about six years. Further collaborations—including one with the design firm run by Vincent’s partner—over another couple years resulted in a dynamic, detailed website dedicated to Genji’s poems. Additional information on Genjipoems.org includes details like an entry’s chapter and order; author and audience; the form in which it is told (written, spoken, in response, or group composition); literary techniques, and allusions. There’s even information like the season in which a poem was delivered, and how old Genji himself was at the time of its creation.
Now, anyone can take a moment to appreciate some of the epic’s most frequently overlooked portions. Vincent said that like his students completing their original extra credit assignments, site visitors can “pay very close attention to the words and notice things about them.”
“By the time you get to the ‘write a commentary’ part [of the website], you have all the building blocks you need to write a sophisticated close read,” he continued.
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