1. Introduction
[1.1] In a memoir written in the mid-eleventh century, a woman known to history only as the daughter of Sugawara Takasue recounts a scene from her childhood in which she, aged twelve, is first introduced to what would become a lifelong literary obsession, The Tale of Genji. She writes: "One tale or another was told me by my elder sister or stepmother, and I heard several chapters about the shining Prince Genji. My longing for such stories increased…I washed my hands and went secretly before the altar and prayed…'Please let me go to the Royal City. There I can find many tales. Let me read all of them'" (Shepley and Doi 1920, 3–4).
[1.2] Sugawara Takasue's daughter is exceptional in that her memoir (The Sarashina Diary) is one of the most complete and vibrant records of a woman's life from the Heian period (794–1185), evoking a vivid picture of the remarkable and uniquely structured literary culture of mid-Heian Japan. Even though she has been dead for nearly 1,000 years, she is in many ways familiar to us as fan scholars. In a memoir spanning some forty years, we glimpse a women whose central passion and means of identification was her love for monogatari (tales), particularly The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, ca. 1002–10), a novel written in the early years of the eleventh century by lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu, which spans some fifty-four scrolls and is today widely regarded as the most central text of the Japanese literary canon (note 1).
[1.3] In this paper I examine these two texts through the lens of fan studies, reading them as key examples of modes of fan engagement in eleventh-century Japan. Though it is ostensibly a piece of original fiction, I argue that The Tale of Genji is representative of a prevailing attitude toward contemporary literary interactions with the canon, while at the same time it ushered in new modes of fannish, female readings of and engagements with canon. The impact that this gynocentric text had on its readers (both in terms of affective response and reading strategies) is demonstrated by The Sarashina Diary (Sarashina nikki, ca. 1059), a memoir written by a woman whose love for the Genji began at the age of twelve and lasted her whole lifetime.
[1.4] The eleventh century saw Japanese courtly culture reach new heights, with a blossoming of Japanese prose literature written by women. Heian literary culture (particularly that of women writing in Japanese script) has a great deal in common both with a number of premodern literary cultures that have been reexamined and reinvigorated by fan scholars and with modern fandom communities themselves. As I will demonstrate, the textual and oral literary traditions in place during the Heian period were essentially transformative, taking place within a fixed context of shared literary referents and reworking existing canonical material in new, interrogative ways. The combination of the rising rate of female literacy, the emergence of female literary networks, and the birth of prose fiction contributed to the establishment of a literary culture with much in common with contemporary fan cultures.
[1.5] While the majority of scholarship demonstrating that "transformative writing practices…[are] not a new phenomenon" is Anglophone and Eurocentric, an examination of Japanese literary history shows that "Japan is no different" (Dahlberg-Dodd 2019, ¶ 4.1). As with all other fan studies treatments of premodern societies, the label of fandom or transformative fan works can only ever be partially valid. Yet at the same time, exploring Heian literature through this lens might be considered not as anachronistic but as a revolutionary rereading of dominant narratives, "reveal[ing] an unbroken tradition of a specific type of engagement with literature, to which we have only recently given a name" (Simonova 2012, ¶ 7.5). My argument is that the literary terrain of women writers in eleventh-century Japan was a necessarily transformative, continuous cycle of literary production, exchange, transformation, and reception. By examining it in the context of fan studies, I hope to demonstrate not only the interplays and relationships of this complex literary system but also how individual girls and young women of a millennium ago loved certain texts and stories so devotedly that they became the defining force in their lives.
2. The transformative terrain of Heian court literature
[2.1] The Heian period was considered a highpoint of Japanese culture, with the capital city Heian-kyō functioning as the cultural stronghold of the time. It was a period distinguished by the proxy rulership of the Fujiwara family, who from 794–1160 dominated the government. The Fujiwara surrounded the emperor as regents and statesmen in a political system that enabled them to become the de facto rulers of the state, though over the centuries some emperors tried to reassert imperial control. Their dominance was maintained across such a prolonged period through two main strategies. The first method was the marriage of the family's daughters to sitting emperors, thereby increasing the chances that the next emperor would have Fujiwara blood and giving them a means by which to dictate imperial succession. This political dominance was supported by cultural prominence; through an extensive tradition of patronage, the family achieved a soft monopoly on the production of the arts, which were integral to the highly aestheticized Heian culture (Kristeva 1997).
[2.2] Heian culture is considered to have reached its peak in the eleventh century under the guardianship of Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027), who consolidated his power in 999 when he married his daughter Shōshi (988–1074) to the reigning Emperor Ichijō. In order to bolster her status (and by extension his own), he provided her with a salon of talented ladies-in-waiting who excelled in arts and literature. Among these women was the author of The Tale of Genji, a governor's daughter known as Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 973 to ca. sometime after 1014) (note 2).
[2.3] The dominating force in Heian culture was China, which functioned as a reference culture for Japan: almost all aspects of aristocratic life, and particularly art and literature, were modeled on the Chinese example (Denecke 2014). The Chinese influence was particularly evident in the literary culture of the time; the Japanese nobility adopted an extensive backlist of Chinese poetry, court histories, and religious texts, as well as a hierarchy by which "history was best, poetry was good, and fiction did not even belong on the list, so degraded was it" (Chance 2011, 42). At the same time, however, the Heian period saw the emergence of distinct Japanese artistic and cultural identity. A new Japanese canon was in formation alongside the inviolable Chinese texts imported from the continent, and the emergence of distinctly Japanese forms and styles of poetry was changing the dynamics of the relationship between the Heian aristocracy and the literature with which they engaged.
[2.4] Poetry (specifically, the brief, thirty-one-syllable waka form) became central to all levels of Japanese court society, present in most social interactions and acting as a marker of (and means of gaining) social status. By the eleventh century, members of the aristocracy (male and female alike) were expected to be familiar with and able to refer to a vast canon of Chinese and early Japanese poetry, histories, and religious texts. They were also expected to reference, recite, and even compose poems off-the-cuff in conversations, a talent which consequently became central to love affairs, political maneuvering, and all social interactions. Classical literature and poetry were not "monopolized by a small number of scholars, but an integral part of intellectual life and a widely-accessible body of raw material for literary creativity" (Guest 2013, 2). Poetry was not viewed as a thing apart but rather, like most art in Heian culture, an integral part of life, "utilized in such everyday matters as courtship and social interactions of every kind to more formal court rituals and aesthetic entertainment" (Miyake 2001, 24). The result was a shared, fluid literary terrain that would be constantly accessible to almost every member of the Heian elite.
[2.5] This terrain did not exist as a "static foreign 'scripture' monopolized by a small number of scholars"; instead, it was constantly being supplemented and even altered by Japanese courtiers (Guest 2013, 2). Literary merit came not just from rote memorization nor completely improvised poetry but from one's ability to transfer "a remembered text from its original written context to a new setting" (Kamens 2007, 145), altering it as needed to meet the aesthetic and social demands of the situation. Reference to canonical works could be (and were) used to imbue one's own work with authority, but this was also indicative of a broader transformative tradition; almost all literature was directly in conversation with its precursors within the canon, as well as previous responses to such texts and tales. Like modern fan cultures, Heian literary culture used "sophisticated allusion and intertextuality to create new meanings" and assumed "a knowledgeable audience with a shared understanding of their source" (Wilson 2016, 1.1).
[2.6] Arkady Martine (2019) examines a similar transformative phenomenon in classical Byzantium, describing it as a culture in which literature was produced and maintained "by 'fans' of classical literature and for 'fans' of classical literature." The resulting society is one that fosters a "form of creativity…[that] is not about the construction of originality, but instead about the use and employment of the familiar" (Martine 2019). Such literary traditions resist modern critical taxonomies; scholars must seek new ways of examining "how the literary terrain of mid-Heian Japan was encountered, accessed, and in some cases altered by at least some of the men and women who traversed it" (Kamens 2007, 130).
[2.7] At the very least, we must reexamine our understanding of the notion of canon. Heian Japan was the period in which many of the works still considered canonical in modern Japan were authored. At the time, however, the Japanese were navigating a literary tradition inherited from a reference culture, attempting to match it to their own traditions, and contending with the unusually fluid nature of their compositions. Heian Japan was a period of canon formation, but even that designation is problematic. Critics have noted the opposition between different approaches to studying canon: a dichotomy of either emphasizing the sociological dimensions of canon and institutional canon formation or its purely aesthetic aspects (Kolbas 2018). In Heian culture, this duality is made null and void. Aesthetics was the core around which sociological processes and institutions were built, and there existed "[no] opposition between art and non-art…Everything was subjected to the overall aesthetization—the rituals, the festivals, the ceremonies, the attitude towards nature, and even everyday life and communication." (Kristeva 1997, 207). To speak of a demarcated canon consisting purely of written literature would be inaccurate. Instead, written literature formed one part of an all-encompassing cultural canon composed of poetry, history, music, religion, literature, and art. The lack of demarcation between a textual canon and everyday life encouraged a culture of "lively reception, rewriting, commentarial adaptation and rearrangement" (Guest 2013, 1–2). This was amplified by the enclosed, inward-facing nature of the Japanese court at Heian-kyō, which consisted of less than 1 percent of the entire Japanese population of the time; for its inhabitants, "the entire range of experience was so familiar that the briefest hint would suffice to convey one's meaning" (Morris 1979, 290). All of these factors combined to give the result that "the perception of the world of the Heian aristocrats, such as has been conveyed to us in their literary production, entailed a poetic encoding of the world, the creation of a distinct chronotope that loaded both their space and time with layers of cultural meaning" (Raud 2002, 102).
[2.8] To this end, I follow Genji scholar Haruo Shirane in using the term canon in "the broader, more political sense," as meaning "those texts that are recognized and used by dominant institutions" (2002, 22). The Heian canon encoded a worldview, entailing processes of living and interacting, and providing a clear model for social, aesthetic, amatory, and political worlds of the Heian court. The value of canonical works of literature was not only in their significance as texts but in their functions in narrativizing Japanese history and identity and upholding aesthetic standards.
[2.9] The Japanese literary terrain underwent change in the tenth and eleventh centuries with the promulgation of kana, a syllabic Japanese script. Providing an accessible alternative to the masculine kanbun ("Chinese writing"), which used Chinese characters and Japanese grammar rules) that had previously dominated the written form, kana was soon popularized among women, and by the early eleventh century, writing (in kana) was regarded as an integral part of (aristocratic) women's education. While serious texts continued to be written in Chinese characters, this period saw a rise in wabun (Japanese writing with kana) by women. So strong was the link between kana and women that wabun came to be "strongly associated with female subjectivity, private sentiment, and romantic emotions" (Denecke 2014, 48).
[2.10] The rise in wabun saw the emergence of a new type of vernacular fiction known as monogatari (tales): a "genre of fictional tales in Japanese prose that was regarded in the early eleventh century as a notoriously, even reprehensibly, feminine type of literature" (Sarra 1999, 82). Common types of monogatari included the aristocratic court romance and tales with supernatural elements, comparable to Western fairy tale traditions in both content and vernacular origins. The literary hierarchy of poetry and nonfiction over prose fiction, and the linguistic hierarchy of kanbun over wabun, both firmly placed monogatari as subordinate. Even the name recalls its status as a feminine, vernacular literature: "The world of the tale (monogatari) is one of women gathering in groups; we hear the things (mono) they tell one another (katari)" (Chance 2011, 40). These monogatari were seen as worthless and corrupting, and vilified as worldly by religious figures. In 984, influential scholar Minamoto no Tamenori denounced monogatari as "the very roots of sin" (Harper and Shirane, 2015, 17), while the author of The Sarashina Diary describes being frequently chastised for her devotion to tales over her religious observances.
[2.11] But as much as official channels sought to censure them, monogatari grew to develop a passionate, overwhelmingly female readership, providing a means by which women could "record, lament, or creatively reimagine the romantic on-goings and the fierce marriage politics between members of the Heian elite" (Denecke 2014, 186). Monogatari soon became a consuming passion for both isolated daughters and wives of officials and the flourishing salons of women installed at court (note 3).
[2.12] The crowning jewel of the monogatari tradition was Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji), which was written in the first decade of the eleventh century and is now recognized as one of the most important novels in the Japanese literary canon. Part of the reason it is such an exceptional text is that it bridges the dual literary traditions of mid-Heian Japan, adapting many features of official kanbun texts to fit the form and audience of monogatari. Using subordinate wabun prose, Murasaki Shikibu reinterprets canonical Japanese narratives and literary forms to center women and explore possible alternatives to the national narrative of the Heian era.
3. Canon divergence in The Tale of Genji
[3.1] The Tale of Genji recounts the life of Genji, an emperor's son, and the various love affairs he conducts over the course of his life. Because of the low rank of his mother, Genji is removed from the Imperial succession as a child and demoted to commoner status. Ostensibly depoliticized, he spends much of his life involved in amatory pursuits, and his various lovers occupy a key role in the narrative. Among their ranks is his own stepmother, the Empress; the two have an illegitimate child who eventually becomes the Emperor Reizei.
[3.2] The early chapters are concerned primarily with a number of different affairs in Genji's youth, but in chapter 12 he is forced into exile from the court by the Fujiwara, who are the maternal family of the newly ascended Suzaku Emperor, Genji's half-brother. However, he eventually returns and reaches previously unseen peaks of power in his society. After his death (which takes place between chapters 41 and 42), the narrative jumps forward some eight years, and the final thirteen chapters (known as the Uji chapters) follow the fortunes of several members of the next generation.
[3.3] Murasaki Shikibu's focus is not on the politics (a topic considered unsuitable for female writers) but on the interior lives of her characters and relations between the sexes. Nonetheless, politics—both historical and fictional—play a key part in the narrative. With no substantial fiction canon in existence, the only officially recognized prose works she could draw on were courtly histories. Also, as I have stated, in the context of Heian Japan, canon does not merely denote words on a page; Murasaki was also influenced by wider narratives of Japanese history and legend that influenced every aspect of Heian court society.
[3.4] The Genji was so successful because it "drew directly upon the realities of the lives of the aristocracy, providing the men and women who first read her tale with the shock of the familiar" (Washburn 2016, 21). It is this "shock of the familiar" that first attracted Murasaki's audiences, and it is arguably this same "shock of the familiar" that fans seek when reading and consuming transformative fan works today. The verisimilitude of the Genji established it as a work that "did not merely situate readers outside the fictional world, peering in, but called for their 'becoming' part of the world of the text," allowing audiences to "share the textual moment in tandem with the fictive characters in the tale" (Miyake 2001, 25); ultimately, the Genji is filled "with so many signs of the public domain that the illusion is created that the fiction itself is of the same ilk" (Bowring 2003, 21). Compounding this illusion is the fact that the "sharp conceptual distinction that the modern mind tends to draw between…work of fiction and…a work of history is only partially valid" (McCullough and McCullough 1980, 8). Murasaki's model of fictionalizing and altering narratives of national history seems to have much in common with modern RPF (real person fiction), a form of fan writing that "concerns itself primarily with the official narrative, or 'canon,' and often fills in gaps or re-tells stories from a different perspective" (Hagen 2015, 45).
[3.5] The Genji's immediate and enduring success as a narrative was not merely due to its adherence to sanctioned historiographical narratives about Japan and its Imperial family: it was more than just "a compendium of facts about the customs and manners of the Heian court" (Washburn 2016, 24). Here again, the transformative potential of Murasaki's work surfaces. Paying particular attention to women (who were underrepresented in official written court histories), she created her tale in the space between reality and fiction: it "is not only fictional because it contains fictional events, but because it creates a fictional space governed by the two discursive poles of 'public' and 'private'" (Denecke 2014, 240). In many ways, the Genji is a gynocentric reinterpretation of the centermost official narrative of Japan: the continuation of the Imperial line and the country's proxy rulership by the Fujiwara family. By writing a story centering female characters in a female-coded script (wabun) and genre (monogatari), Murasaki Shikibu was carving out a place in canonical narratives for women.
[3.6] The events in the early chapters of the Genji are molded on early written court histories of Japan, which recorded matters of Imperial succession and the like; so direct was the influence that Emperor Ichijō, upon hearing a section of the Genji read aloud, proclaimed "She must have read the Chronicles of Japan…she seems very learned." (Murasaki 1996, 57). The parallels between the two are most obvious in the emperorship: Genji's grandfather, Emperor Ichi no In, corresponds to Emperor Uda (r. 887–97); Genji's father the Kiritsubo Emperor is Emperor Daigo, and so on. Even Genji himself is inspired by numerous historical figures, though he is not a direct parallel to any one individual.
[3.7] For all the historical accuracy of the earlier sections of the book, Murasaki eventually manufactures a divergence from national canon, brought about largely because of the actions of Genji himself, which leads to the story's transition into an alternate political universe. Ultimately, "as we progress through the work this historical crutch becomes less and less important, and indeed less and less tenable, as Genji eventually fathers an emperor, but in the early stages it certainly plays its part" (Bowring 2003, 21).
[3.8] The canon divergence can be traced in particular to one point: Genji's triumphant return from his exile. A few chapters earlier, Genji is exiled by the powerful Fujiwara clan for becoming too politically dangerous to their monopoly on power in the court and influence over the Imperial succession. The exile plotline directly invokes and metamorphoses actual events from history. Emperor Daigo, the historical model for Genji's father, was a rare example of an emperor who ruled with some measure of autonomy from the Fujiwara; he is generally understood to have been attempting to undermine their near-absolute political power and reassert Imperial control. To this end, Daigo instead relied on and promoted non-Fujiwara courtiers and statesmen—most notably, Sugawara no Michizane, generally agreed to be a historical model for Genji himself: a non-Fujiwara statesman favored by the reigning emperor in an attempt to undercut the political system that allowed the Fujiwara to dominate (Shirane 2015). However, in 901, Michizane was forced into exile by the Fujiwara clan (much like Genji); he died in exile two years later. His removal from the Court marked the end of resistance to the Fujiwara; they reigned unopposed for the next sixty-odd years. The same pattern (political ascension followed by exile by the Fujiwara) ended the careers of many of Genji's conjectured historical counterparts: not only Sugawara no Michizane, but also Minamoto no Takaakira (914–82) and Fujiwara no Korechika (973–1010). Examining historical precedent reveals that as a non-Fujiwara in Heian Japan, Genji's gradual political decline "is, to a large degree, a reflection of contemporary [Fujiwara-dominated] politics" (Shirane 1985, 620).
[3.9] However, the pattern of the historical narrative is overturned in chapter 14, "The Pilgrimage to Sumiyoshi," which sees Genji (unlike any of his historical counterparts) returning triumphant from exile and resuming his place in the Heian political vista. At this point, Murasaki separated from the "crutch" of history and canon (Bowring 2003, 21). Instead, she began to draw on the fictional precedent for her character, and "employed plot conventions which were already known to her audience and which they no doubt expected her to use. The youth, exile, and triumphant return of the shining hero—which form the central axis of the early part of the Genji—derive from a familiar plot paradigm which the modern folklorist Origuchi Shinobu has called the kishu-ryūri-tan, or the "exile of the young noble"' (Shirane 1985, 615–16).
[3.10] Genji's return coincides with the other major interruption of historical continuity: the enthroning of Emperor Reizei, whom the reader knows to be Genji's illegitimate son (and not, as is widely believed, the son of Genji's father). Commentators have noted that his installment on the throne marks an interruption of an imperial line that had continued for 1,500 years (Phillips 2010, 383). The "fiction of 'a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal'" has always been central to Japanese national identity (Kobayashi 2008, 296); in undermining it, Murasaki Shikibu directly questions the supremacy of official narratives. Taking her cues from national history and canonical methods of historiography, she "meticulously traces the second line of relationships on top of the accepted lineage" (296). The ascension of Reizei functions not merely as a catalyst for Genji's return to the capital but also as symbol of the rewriting of the sanctioned canon of history.
[3.11] The catalyst for Genji's return to the capital and Reizei's ascension to the throne is the supernatural appearance of Genji's late father, the Kiritsubo Emperor (whose historical counterpart Emperor Daigo tried and failed to divest the Fujiwara of power). As a result of this visitation, Genji's half-brother, the Suzaku Emperor, goes against the wishes of his Fujiwara mother and grandfather, recalls Genji to the capital, and retires in favor of the non-Fujiwara Emperor Reizei. This series of events means that the Kiritusbo Emperor is able to revise the dominant national political narrative from beyond the grave, finally attaining "what he was unable to while alive and what no mid-Heian emperor ever achieved: control of the imperial succession" (Shirane 1985, 621). The apparition of the Kiritsubo Emperor, by enabling Genji's return, sets off a series of events that eventually topples Fujiwara dominance. By the end of his life, Genji has impossibly achieved a position superior to that of his Fujiwara rivals: not only does he marry his daughter to the emperor, and thus achieve the public position of a Fujiwara regent, but he is also secretly the father of an emperor. In the character of Genji, "Murasaki Shikibu brings together two seemingly incompatible political strands, the ideal of kingship and that of [Fujiwara] rule" (Shirane 1985, 640). Her hero overcomes the political constraints that seemingly limited the splendor and development of Heian society, and gains a "glory in this life [that] honours this latter age beyond what it deserves" (Murasaki 2001, 591).
[3.12] By reimagining Japan's past, Murasaki plots out an alternate course for its future—and its present. At the time when she was writing, "the reigns of Uda and Daigo [late ninth to early tenth centuries] were already being idealized…as an age when the sovereigns governed without interference from the Fujiwara regents" (Bialock 2007, 243). Murasaki Shikibu's own diary suggests that she herself felt some discomfort with the state of the court under Fujiwara no Michinaga, revealing that "Amid a certain magnificence, she also found drunkenness, frivolity, back-biting, and a general sense of life being wasted" (Bowring 1996, xvii). While the diary itself contains no overt condemnation of the state of affairs, The Tale of Genji perhaps functions as an implicit challenge to the contemporary order, presenting a revised narrative of national history.
[3.13] In this way, the Genji functions almost as a fix-it fic: defined in Fanlore as a piece of writing that "changes something about canon that the fan writing the fic wasn't happy with" (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fix-it). At the point of canon divergence, the Genji becomes in many ways a fantasy of restoring power to the Imperial line. Thus, the Genji might not have just been responding to a textual desire for the "exiled noble story" from her female, monogatari-reading audience but also provided some measure of fix-it for those readers who were aware of the political implications of the dominant historical canon. It is implicitly a challenge to the dominant historical narrative, functioning as a piece of textual revisionism that posthumously empowers Emperor Daigo and his line (note 4).
4. Genji fans in the salons
[4.1] Modern scholarship can read Murasaki Shikibu as an early figure in a long tradition of fan writers, whose creations are defined by their consumption and transformation of canonical material. In many ways, her dual position was facilitated by the very nature of the Heian court salons, where dozens of educated ladies-in-waiting would eat, live, and sleep together. These women were often brought to court because of their literary talent, and the salons were a place where they could exchange and enjoy writing and poetry. Traditionally, "fandom does not preserve a radical separation between readers and writers" (Jenkins 2014, 39); in the Heian salons, the lack of separation between writers and readers was physical as well as figurative. Heian scholar Tzvetana Kristeva argues that texts written in this context actively invited reader participation. Examining a diary written by Sei Shōnagon, a near contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu, she describes it as a text that "allows for many different interpretations, and even more than that: it presupposes them as a major condition for its own existence" (Kristeva 1994, 28). The texts that were being authored in the salons of mid-Heian Japan were neither completed once the author penned the final word nor read as an isolated entity; rather, "readers were expected to 'complete' the meaning of the text—in short, to collaborate in the production of meaning" (Miyake 2001, 24).
[4.2] Murasaki Shikibu's diary speaks to the extent of the lack of separation between writers and the first wave of readers. It describes the presence of an active readership who waited enthusiastically for new instalments of the in-progress Genji, to the point that the wall between writer and reader was breached. A passage in her diary mentions Michinaga himself stealing an incomplete draft of a chapter from her room: "Then, while I was in attendance, His Excellency sneaked into my room and found a copy of the Tale that I had asked someone to bring from home for safekeeping. It seems that he gave the whole thing to his second daughter" (Murasaki 1996, 33).
[4.3] This passage not only reveals that there were multiple versions of at least some parts of the Tale in existence even at the time of writing (problematizing the idea that there ever existed a definitive text of the Genji) but also gives a sense as to the networks of readers in existence, "implying that fans were anxious to peruse the latest instalments" (Chance 2011, 42). Murasaki's diary even mentions her discussing her writing with her peers in letters, presumably while the work itself was still in progress: "I had managed to exchange sympathetic letters with those of like mind—some contacted via fairly tenuous connections—who would discuss my trifling tales and other matters with me" (Murasaki 1996, 34). It is almost certain that the reactions and demands of her audience of peers had some impact on the writing of the Genji. Just as importantly, they laid the foundations for Genji reception models that are still in place today: the infrastructure of the Genji fandom.
[4.4] One of the most notable examples of this can be found in the names of the characters. In Heian, personal names were not widely shared, and the Genji conforms to this custom: almost none of the characters are given personal names within the text itself and are instead referred to by their title or residence (both of which frequently change). However, due to the unprecedented depth and complexity of the Genji, its readers "soon found this situation intolerable and devised a series of names that everyone now uses as a universal shorthand, but which do not actually occur in the text" (Bowring 2003, 71). Characters were distinct and three-dimensional enough to require individuation beyond their social rank or role within the narrative (e.g., hero, romantic heroine, wicked stepmother); frequently, their appellations are often strongly evocative of some aspect of their personality or situation in life (for example, the character Murasaki is named for the purple flower to which she is compared when Genji first sights her) (Kido 1988).
[4.5] The adoption of universally shared names for the characters who are unnamed in the text itself suggests that "there was an unwritten tradition of naming from the very beginning," even though "in strict textual terms these names did not exist" (Bowring 2003, 72–73). This practice of the audience collectively adopting extratextual names for the characters resembles the construction of fanon (which Fanlore defines as "any element that is widely accepted among fans, but has little or no basis in canon" [https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanon]). Furthermore, the fact that the characters of the Genji were given extratextual names by readers is not merely a result of the Genji's length and complexity; it also suggests that among the women of court salons, discussions of the Genji and its characters took place often enough to require the coining of shorthand names for ease of reference, and that these discussions were regular enough for fanon to be established fairly rapidly.
[4.6] Like many transformative fan responses to texts, this audience naming of characters might have had an affective aspect. Ivan Morris (1979) remarks that one of the defining features of Heian literature is "the fantastic lack of specificity"; by contrast, fanon "suggests a hybrid, even transformative, practice of containment" (Kahane 2016, ¶ 6.6). The naming of characters essentially served to "contain" characters and events within individual identifiable personages and provided easy referents for fan discussion. This is particularly radical in the case of female characters: since women of the Heian court tended to be known publicly by their fathers' or husbands' positions, the application of distinct appellations to female characters is a way of giving them agency within the text and the wider Heian tradition. Lynne K. Miyake (2001) argues that one of the key reading strategies of Heian Japan was "projecting a continuity between the reader's and the character's experience" (28); giving characters (particularly female characters) individual names was a strategy that increased the potential for reader identification. In The Sarashina Diary, one of the earliest sources written on the Genji, Takasue's daughter makes particular reference to several female characters with whom she particularly identified. She daydreams about being the Lady Ukifune, who like her is the low-ranking daughter of a provincial official:
[4.7] The only thing that I could think of was the Shining Prince who would some day come to me, as noble and beautiful as in the romance. If he came only once a year I, being hidden in a mountain villa like Lady Ukifuné, would be content. I could live as heart-dwindlingly as that lady, looking at flowers, or moonlit snowy landscape, occasionally receiving long-expected lovely letters from my Lord! I cherished such fancies and imagined that they might be realized. (Shepley and Doi 1920, 20)
[4.8] All of this demonstrates that even as the Genji was in production, there was extensive fan engagement with, and even transformations of, the text, suggesting that it was not seen as Murasaki's property; within the salon, it had already attained semicanonical status among its readers, without the inviolability of imported Chinese and official Japanese kanbun texts. But all the factors I have mentioned—the lack of demarcation between text and reality, the multiple copies of the manuscript, and the thriving tradition of audience naming—make it difficult to ascertain where the original text of Murasaki Shikibu's Genji ends and Genji reception begins. In fact, while Murasaki Shikibu is generally accredited with sole authorship, various scholars have aired doubts about the validity of this claim. In particular, the last ten chapters, which take place after the death of Genji and carry on the story of other characters, are suspected by some to have been written by a second party. While there is no historical evidence that Murasaki Shikibu is not the sole author, computer analysis has turned up "statistically significant discrepancies of style between chapters 45–54 [the Uji chapters] and the rest, as well as discrepancies among the earlier chapters" (Tyler 2001).
[4.9] Ultimately, however, even the ambiguity surrounding the authorship of these parts of the Genji speaks to its fannish origins. While we may never know for certain, there is at least the possibility that part of the complete Genji as we know it today was the product of a writer or writers attempting to emulate the style of the original, to resolve the fates of secondary characters and write their own conclusion. Genji translator Royall Tyler speculates a model of communal fan writing that certainly evokes modern fandom practice:
[4.10] I imagine a group of several women getting together to write the Uji chapters, in order to extend the tale. Each wrote different bits (there would have been differences of rank between them, so that a relatively inferior draft from one would have been more acceptable than from another), but they were very talented, and they got together to discuss all the drafts and to adjust them, and perhaps one acted as an overall editor. This takes place purely in my imagination. (Tyler 1999)
[4.11] Apart from the Uji chapters, other chapters that come under consideration for different authorship include those that diverge from the main story of Genji's life to focus on the affairs of other characters—notably, the chapter "Yūgiri," which focuses on Genji's son. Of this, Tyler writes: "while translating most of 'Yūgiri' I had the strong feeling that whoever wrote what I was translating was someone new…It seemed completely out of character for the narrator's treatment of Murasaki no Ue both before and after 'Yūgiri,' and I also found it relatively poor quality" (1999). Such sentiments are not new. The Mumyōzōshi (a piece of monogatari criticism written in the late twelfth century) notes that for the bulk of the novel, Yūgiri's "sincerity towards women, although somewhat lacking from the point of view of passion, makes him superior to Minister Genji as far as prudence is concerned." but criticizes how he unexpectedly "ruin[s] his reputation as a faithful husband" in the chapter that gives him his name (Marra 1984, 144). The mid-Heian court being an open space of shared ideas and communal transformative practices, it is credible that the Genji we have today is the product of more than one author, and fan-written supplements being absorbed into the official text may account for some of the out-of-character segments of the tale.
5. Fan identity in The Sarashina Diary
[5.1] The permeability of the lines between writer and reader is evident in the writing of Murasaki Shikibu, but to conclude my examination of eleventh-century literary cultures, I turn to a woman whose writings have memorialized her to history primarily as a reader. The daughter of Sugawara Takasue (ca. 1008–after 1059; known to scholars as Lady Sarashina) wrote a memoir around the age of fifty-one about her life; while it deals with a range of topics, such as her marriage, her court service, and her religious aspirations, it centers her identity as a reader and, specifically, a reader of The Tale of Genji. Such is her devotion to the Genji and other monogatari that scholars tend to depict her "as simply an addicted reader" with little self-agency (Sarra 1999, 84); despite the depth and literary deftness of her writing, she is "sentimentalised as a girlish writer and her memoir trivialised as a more or less juvenile production" (82). These reductions reflect an age-old tradition of infantilizing female readers and fans in academic scholarship; but contrary to such descriptions, Lady Sarashina's diary proves that she has startling insight into her own identity as a reader and fan. While the book may open with the image of the author as a young girl, by the time she set her memoir to paper she was a widow in her fifties with acute religious sensibilities: nonetheless, she chooses to place her love for the Genji at the center of the text and her textual identity, introducing it in the first sentences:
[5.2] Somehow I came to know that there are such things as romances in the world and wished to read them. When there was nothing to do by day or at night, one tale or another was told me by my elder sister or stepmother, and I heard several chapters about the shining Prince Genji. My longing for such stories increased, but how could they recite them all from memory? I became very restless and got an image of Yakushi Buddha made as large as myself. When I was alone I washed my hands and went secretly before the altar and prayed to him with all my life, bowing my head down to the floor. "Please let me go to the Royal City. There I can find many tales. Let me read all of them." (Shepley and Doi 1920, 3–4)
[5.3] From this opening, two things become clear: that her love of tales is in conflict with dominant social mores; and that her tendency is to define herself in relation to tales, whether emotionally, textually, or even geographically. The memoir opens with her journey, at the age of twelve, toward "the Royal City" where she "can find many tales": a journey both metaphorical and literal. (Because of the nature of Heian social structures and the difficulty in disseminating texts, the tales she coveted were physically situated in the capital city as well as figuratively occupying the space of the court there.) It acts as a literalization of Jenkins's assertion that fans are essentially "nomads" who are "constantly advancing upon another text, appropriating new materials, making new meanings" (2014, 32).
[5.4] Just as the journey toward new texts is literalized in the memoir, so too is the idea of a literary terrain. Whenever she travels, Lady Sarashina relates the places she visits to the literary terrain she has spent her life traversing, constantly constructing new meaning through her relationship to the texts. A visit to Uji, for example, is distinguished by her relating it to an episode in the Genji:
[5.5] We could not cross the river for a long time, so I looked around the place, which I had felt a curiosity to see, ever since reading Genji-monogatari which tells that the daughter of the Princess of Uji lived here. I thought it a charming spot. At last we managed to get across the river and went to see the Uji mansion. I was at once reminded that the Lady Ukifuné [of the romance] had been living here. (Shepley and Doi 1920, 56)
[5.6] The sections of The Sarashina Diary that deal with travel are early installments in the long tradition of Japanese travel writing, a literary genre in which "the personal and immediate find their meaning through identification with the rich literary and cultural heritage of travel that had evolved through the centuries" (McKinney 2019, 152). The potential for this identification was to be found in certain places and settings which acted as conduits for a long literary tradition; "to pause at a place that recalls for you a poem or a famous moment in literature or history stirs a genuine emotion, and we can imagine that…[for those finding themselves] standing in the presence of famous and evocative places long known only from books, the thrill of emotion was real" (152). This is another case in classical Japanese literature of emotive response stemming from what Dennis Washburn calls the "shock of the familiar." Parallels can be drawn between the literary travelers (usually men) who actively traveled for the joy of visiting the "famous and evocative places long known only from books," and the early readers of the Genji (particularly women) who were drawn to the text because of the shock of the familiar that, through the format of the exciting monogatari, wedded the routine and insularity of women courtiers' daily lives to a grander and more romantic literary tradition. Lady Sarashina stands at the intersection of these seemingly dichotomized readerly identities; in her hands, the literal terrain of Japan is transformed into an extension of the Genji and her own emotional connection to the text (and particularly to the character of Ukifune).
[5.7] Sections such as those mentioned above suggest that notions of Lady Sarashina as a juvenile passive recipient of tales should be discarded in favor of readings that center Lady Sarashina as an active consumer of and participant in monogatari tradition. Instead of describing her habits in terms of addiction and loneliness, Edith Sarra suggests understanding "reading as interpretation, and beyond that, as a means of seizing and designing, of 'authoring,' rather than simply foreshadowing" (1999, 91).
[5.8] The conflict surrounding interpretations of The Sarashina Diary's reading strategies is exemplified by the ambiguity of the term yomu, which is generally translated to mean "reading" but in fact had a much broader range of connotations in Heian Japan. Sarra argues that there was not a hard line between reading and creating, and that the verb "to read" (yomu) implied a far wider range of possibilities than in modern Japanese. In Heian Japan, yomu overlapped "significantly with notions of composition and formal utterance—the oral composition and recitation of waka, the oral readings of monogatari that took place in the women's quarters of the palace and other literary salons, and the scribal copying out and reproduction by hand, with resulting textual variations (inadvertent or interpretive), in the texts so 'read'" (Sarra 1999, 84). This interpretation defies the image of passive and isolated readership in The Sarashina Diary: "it is not at all clear that these passages describing the heroine's involvement with what the narration will later deplore as 'frivolous tales and poems'…do not also imply active writing, the copying out or even composition of the texts with which the reader secludes herself" (84).
[5.9] Lynne K. Miyake (2001) questions the validity of applying the modern concept of the reader to Heian literary culture and stresses the need "for an alternative, more interactive, and less passive model for classical Japanese texts" (36). I propose that fan studies can provide one such model: the concept of fan reading. What Takasue's daughter engages in is not the passive reading of static texts but rather a fluid (and occasionally communal) process of fan reading that challenges and interrogates the boundaries of the source text. As Henry Jenkins describes it:
[5.10] [Fan reading] is a social process through which individual interpretations are shaped and reinforced through ongoing discussions with other readers. Such discussions expand the experience of the text beyond its initial consumption. The produced meanings are thus more fully integrated into the readers' lives and are of a fundamentally different character from meanings generated through a casual and fleeting encounter with an otherwise unremarkable (and unremarked upon) text. For the fan, these previously "poached" meanings provide a foundation for future encounters with the fiction, shaping how it will be perceived, defining how it will be used. (Jenkins 2014, 39)
[5.11] Redefining Lady Sarashina's reading practices as part of the multifaceted phenomenon of fan reading gives insight into the state of Heian fan culture and "the workings of literature as a socio-cultural practice" of Heian Japan (Raud 2002, 104). In many ways, it resembles modern reading communities in digital spaces, which are comprised of "both fan writing and oral interaction between women" (Opel 2015, 3.2).
[5.12] Previous readings of Lady Sarashina tend to look at her "addiction" to reading as perpetuating her isolation, but passages in her diary suggest that it was the means by which she forged new bonds, and that her relationship with other readers was what enabled her to immerse herself so fully in monogatari. Her memoir is "an important source of information about the role and modes of circulation of literary texts in the late Heian period"; a window to a community of female readers, in which reproduction, reading, and dissemination of texts is a central aspect (Raud 2002, 106). Tales are sourced through word of mouth and personal connections, in a network of female readers. Her first encounter with The Tale of Genji is through oral storytelling from her female relatives (elder sister and stepmother); she is finally gifted physical copies of the Genji and other tales by her aunt:
[5.13] One day I visited my aunt, who had recently come up from the country…she said: "What shall I give you? You will not be interested in serious things: I will give you what you like best." And she gave me more than fifty volumes of Genji-monogatari put in a case, as well as Isé-monogatari, Yojimi, Serikawa, Shirara, and Asa-udzu. How happy I was when I came home carrying these books in a bag! Until then I had only read a volume here and there, and was dissatisfied because I could not understand the story. (Shepley and Doi 1920, 19)
[5.14] While at court, she makes friends with her fellow ladies-in-waiting through their shared love of tales. She describes how, at nighttime, "My companions passed their leisure time in talking over romances with the door open which separated our rooms, and they often called back one who had gone to the Princess's apartment" (Shepley and Doi 1920, 45). Ultimately, despite the significant differences between Lady Sarashina and other famous Heian diarists such as Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shōnagon, the writing of all these women places emphasis on the vibrant communities of reader-fans at court. Although separated by generations and circumstances, all these women are connected by the texts they read, write, talk about, and love.
6. Conclusion
[6.1] As this paper has demonstrated, the literary terrain of eleventh-century Japan was inherently transformative and bears many similarities to modern fan communities. Some of the core similarities between the two are the willingness of readers to engage creatively with texts beyond the reading of them, the emergence of amateur creative writing, the lack of demarcation between readers and writers, and the immersiveness of the fan community and experience.
[6.2] In recent years, the literary cultures of Heian Japan have begun to attract some measure of fannish comparison. Lynne K. Miyake likens Heian reading strategies to the sorts of textual engagement enabled by "technologies of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries," particularly the internet (2001, 35). Scholars and casual readers alike have commented on how "modern" Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book feels (Kristeva 1997, 213); one blogger's review of The Pillow Book remarks that "it is not just contemporary, but…bloggy. Reading Sei Shōnagon is almost exactly like reading a thousand-year-old Tumblr" (Doyle 2010). Japanese scholar Hannah E. Dahlberg-Dodd highlights The Tale of Genji as a cornerstone of the "long history of composing transformative works in Japan" (2019, ¶ 4.2), while Dennis Washburn, translator of the most recent English edition of the Genji (published in 2015) frames his translation as part of a long lineage of fannish reception, asking his Anglophone readers to "consider the example of Sherlockians or fans of Harry Potter and Game of Thrones" in imagining the impact of the text on early audiences (2016, 22). The image of Takasue's daughter as an enthusiastic reader is one of the underlying constants that has characterized assessments of The Sarashina Diary over the centuries.
[6.3] Ultimately, the persistence of these comparisons demonstrates both a through-line of fan engagement with these classical Japanese texts across centuries and the power that they still have to inspire and engage modern audiences. Although mid-Heian Japanese literature and fan studies may at first appear to make strange bedfellows, each has the potential to invigorate the other: fan studies can provide a new framework for examining an exceptional literary culture, while Heian Japan presents evidence of fan communities and engagements with texts long predating the modern era.