Murasaki Shikibu and the Tale of Genji

Murasaki Shikibu, sometimes known in English as Lady Murasaki, lived during Japan’s Heian period. She was a lady-in-waiting to Empress Shoshi, and is credited with writing the Japanese classic literature work, "Tale of Genji."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and in our
recent Unearthed, we talked about the discovery of a previously
unknown chapter of the blue cover version of Mirasaki Shikibu's

(00:25):
Genji Monogatari or The Tale of Genji. Miasaki Shikibu has
been on my list basically since Holly and I joined
the show in but she also has a lot in
common with Say Shawagon, who we covered in our first
year on the show and whose episode we republished as
a Saturday Classic. In we cover people who have similar

(00:47):
backgrounds and stories all the time, but in terms of
Say Shawnagon and Mirasaki Shikibu, there's just a lot of overlap.
Both women were ladies in waiting in the court of
Japanese Emperor Ichi Jo at the same time, but they
served in different households. Say shann Agon served Empress Tashi
and Miasaki Shikibu served Empress Shows. These two empresses were rivals,

(01:10):
although a lot of that rivalry was sort of by
extension through their fathers. Both of these women also wrote,
with their work being viewed as both literature and as
a historical document about life in the court of hey On,
Japan at the same time, though these two women's written
work isn't really all that similar, and at this point
it seems like there is plenty of time that has

(01:33):
passed between that, say, showing a Goo An episode and
its Saturday classic uh and now there's also a lot
of context about hey On Japan that we didn't get
into as much in that earlier episode. So that discovery
that I came across for unearthed episodes finally moved Miasaki
up to the top of the list, and we are
finally getting to her today. Muasaki Shikibu, sometimes known in

(01:56):
English as Lady Mutasaki, lived during Japan's hay On Period,
which spanned from seven ninety four to eleven eighty five.
In this period is named for the Japanese capital of
hay On Kio, which was the predecessor to today's Kyoto.
The capital moved from Nara to hay On Kiyo in
seven ninety four. Japan's government and culture during this period

(02:16):
were heavily influenced by and patterned after Tang Dynasty China,
with influences from Buddhism as well. Japan started distancing itself
from China in the late nineteenth century as the Tang
dynasty declined, although those earlier influences continued to be a
big part of the culture that kind of started growing
into their own thing. Hey On, Japan was particularly known

(02:38):
for its imperial court culture, which had a focus on elegance, beauty,
and refinement, and spawned a whole renaissance in literature and
art during this period. The Fujiuata family really dominated the
Japanese imperial government and society in general. Although the emperor
was considered to be both above and outside of Japan's
social and political hierarch key, the Fujiuata family had extensive

(03:02):
connections to the imperial family and was consequently able to
exert a huge amount of influence. Polygamy was common in
hand Japan, and for much of Japanese history. Emperors typically
had multiple wives who were arranged into a hierarchy that
included the empress, followed by consorts, followed by intimates. Powerful

(03:22):
families arranged marriages between their daughters and the emperor or
his heir apparent, and then those daughter's placed in this
whole hierarchy depended on their family's position in the greater
social hierarchy. Although there were surely emperors who really appreciated
this system gave them access to so many women, this
was also really about giving Japan's most prominent and powerful

(03:44):
families access to the emperor. The Fujiuata family was Japan's
most powerful and high ranking family during most of the
Hayan period, So when the family's highest ranking members arranged
marriages between their daughters and the emperor or his heir,
those daughters usually became empresses or high ranking consorts. The
daughter's sons were in line to become emperors, and if

(04:07):
they came to the throne when they were too young
to rule, their Fujiwara grandfather became regent. That rivalry between
empresses Tashi and Shoshi that we mentioned earlier, their fathers
were brothers, and each of them was trying to get
his daughter and her children into that highest ranking position possible.
In case, it's not really clear from the sheer number

(04:28):
of times we have just said hierarchy and rank, The
hay On court was incredibly focused on rank and where
you were in the rank and precedence and order really
extremely Murasaki Shikibu was also part of the Fujiwara family,
but from a much less prominent and influential branch of it.

(04:49):
Her father was Fujiwara no Tama Toki. He was educated
and well regarded as a poet and a scholar, but
he was not nearly high enough in the family hierarch
key for his daughters to get married into the imperial family.
During his career, he was the governor of three provinces,
and at one point he was tutor to the crown Prince.
Tomatoki's famous daughter was born sometime between nine seventy three

(05:13):
and nine seventy eight. You'll see both of those years
pretty often, as well as years in between, depending on
what source you're looking at. In addition to not knowing
her birth year for sure, we also don't know what
name she was given. Girls names were not generally recorded
in hay On, Japan, so for the most part, we
only know their names if they eventually became an empress
or mother to an emperor. When it comes to the

(05:35):
moniker Murasaki Shikibu, Murasaki was the name of one of
the characters in the Tale of Genji. She was one
of Genji's wives, the one who's often described as being
the love of his life. Murasaki also means purple or lavender,
and the name Fujiwara means wistaria arbor, so there's some
speculation that this nickname was also kind of a nod

(05:55):
to her family name as well. Shikibu is a reference
to Fujiwara No Tommy Tok's offices. One of the offices
that he held it was the Bureau of Ceremonial. In
addition to not knowing her name, we don't know a
whole lot about Motasaki's life. She does seem to have
been regarded as gifted from a very early age. There
are stories that she was such a talented poet that

(06:18):
her father said that he wished she had been born
a boy. He also seems to have taught her to
speak Chinese and write Chinese calligraphy. Chinese was the official
language of the Imperial court, with everything from official documents
to literature being written in Chinese, but Chinese was also
considered to be a language for men. Women were not

(06:38):
generally taught to read or speak it. Maasaki herself said
that she learned Chinese by listening at the door where
while her father taught her brother, but that would not
have explained her ability to write in calligraphy. She also
taught Chinese to the Empress, probably in secret or at
least as discreetly as possible, because there was really no

(06:58):
privacy at court. Fuji Aa no Tamatoki was given the
governorship of the province of echizen In, and Murasaki traveled
with him to help him establish and run his household,
but she was not particularly happy there and only stayed
for about a year before returning to Kyoto. In nine
she married Fujiwara no Nobutaka. Although we don't know Marisaki's

(07:23):
age for sure, this does seem to have been a
relatively late marriage, and Nobutaka was a distant cousin roughly
twice her age, who already had other wives and children.
Murasaki and Nobutaka had a daughter in whose name was
Katako or Kenchi. The characters used to write it can
be read either way, and this daughter was later known
as Daini no Samni, and she became a highly regarded

(07:46):
poet in her own right. Fujiwara no Nobutaka died in
the year one thousand one, and it was probably at
some point afterward that Miurasaki started writing the Tale of Genji.
It might have been this work that led her to
be called to serve in the Empress's court. That invitation
came in the year one thousand and six, and the
Tale of Genji as we know it today seems to

(08:08):
existed by about ten oh seven or ten oh eight.
In addition to writing the Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu
wrote a diary during some of her time at court.
Sometimes this diary is compared to say Shonagon's pillow Book,
but the pillow book includes lots of lists and snippets
and other materials that you wouldn't necessarily describe as a diary.

(08:28):
Uh Morisaki's diary is more like a series of memoirs
or sketches of court life. It mostly covers the years
of ten o eight to ten ten, including the birth
of the Empress's children. In addition to the documentation of
notable events at court, Mirisaki's diary includes analysis of court life,
personal reflections, and references to Buddhist rituals. Just as the

(08:51):
emperor's wives were arranged into a hierarchy, so we're all
those wives, ladies in waiting throughout the whole culture. As
we said earlier, there was just so much focus on rank.
Marisaki wrote about all this in her diary, including documenting
disputes among the other ladies and her feeling that she
was treated poorly by some of the other court women

(09:11):
because of their jealousy over her literary success. The date
of Morisaki's death is not entirely clear. The last mentions
of her in writing are dated from ten thirteen or
ten fifteen. By that point, Emperor Ichijo had died and
Morisaki had moved from one residence to another with the
Empress and the rest of her court. Marisaki's brother died

(09:32):
in ten fourteen and her father died in ten twenty nine.
Sources put her death anywhere between ten fourteen and ten five.
Her daughter died in ten eighty. We will get to
the Tale of Genji after a quick sponsor break. Although

(09:54):
the Tale of Genji is a work of fiction, it's
also regarded as a look at what life was like
for the heiress Doocracy and the Imperial court in hay On, Japan,
at least, a very fictionalized, highly romanticized look. It's a
long romance with fifty four chapters that spanned about seventy
five years, featuring at least four hundred characters, and running

(10:15):
for more than a thousand pages when translated into English,
it's an early precursor to George RR. Martin. Yes, I
had that thought a couple of times. There's not as
much murdering, but it is very long and uh and convoluted.
Because it's a long work of narrative prose presenting realistic
characters in a fictional story, and it's likely the oldest

(10:37):
work that we know about that fits that description. It
is often called the world's first novel, although that designation
is not universally agreed upon. Sometimes it is also described
as the first historical novel because it seems to depict
a time between seventy five and one years before it
was written, and it treats that earlier era with some
degree of nostalgia. If you care about spoilers and a

(11:00):
housan plus year old piece of fiction, we're about to
give a brief overview of what this book is about,
along with various ways that it reflected or depicted high
on court culture, and just to be really clear, like
most of the literature and art that came out of
the Imperial court. This was focused on court culture, meaning
that it was about Japan's richest and most powerful people,

(11:21):
not the ordinary Japanese population. Like it was not about
the Japanese one percent, it was like the Japanese hundredth
of one. And as its name suggests, the book tells
the story of a man called Genji, and his mother
is one of the emperor's intimates, so she is in
a lower tear in the Emperor's hierarchy of wives. The

(11:41):
Emperor is quite fond of her, but that affection just
is not enough to change her place in the order
of things, and she also dies when Genji is very young.
Genji is just so beautiful and intelligent. In translations, he's
also called Shining Genji or the Shining Prince. As father,
the Emperor wants to make him heir to the throne,

(12:03):
but as had been the case with Genji's mother, the
Emperor's wishes alone are just not enough to do that.
Genji is not nearly high enough in rank for the
rest of the court to accept him as the heir apparent,
so the Emperor does what he can to set Genji
up for a life of wealth and privilege, but one
that is outside of the imperial family. He gives Genji

(12:24):
the surname Minamoto, making him a commoner, although he was
still a commoner of very high rank and able to
hold high level offices. Genji grows up to be handsome, adventurous,
and very sensitive, and much of the book is about
his love life. Some of the women involved are Genji's wives.
The first woman that he marries is the Minister of
the Left daughter. The Minister of the Left was one

(12:47):
of the highest ranking imperial counselors. Another wife is known
as the Third Princess, who Genji marries when he's forty.
That happens after her father he's a retired emperor, and
thus Genji's half brother decides to become a monk and
asks Genji to take care of her. In between those years,
there is the character of Murasaki, who Genji first sees

(13:07):
when she is only ten and living with her grandmother.
She reminds him of his late mother, and after her
grandmother dies, he takes custody of her, basically by kidnapping
her while her family is distracted, and then he grooms
her to be his wife. Although she is too low
in rank for Genji to name for his primary wife.
Of all the women in his life, she is the

(13:29):
one that he seems to feel the most deeply for,
and her death devastates him. Genji also has a lot
of affairs, something that wasn't necessarily frowned upon in hay On, Japan.
Polygamy was expected for men, and people also took lovers
outside of those marriages, so a man could have multiple wives,
but a woman couldn't have multiple husbands, although she could

(13:50):
take lovers if she chose, as long as the husband
acknowledged the children that his wife gave birth to. Those
children were considered to be legitimate. However, although all of
this was pretty much expected, it did not at all
translate into a lack of possessiveness or jealousy. Jealousy and
envy are very present themes in the Tale of Genji.

(14:13):
Just a couple of highlights of Genji's affairs. He fathers
a secret baby with the Emperor's wife, Fujitsubo, who is
another woman in this story who is said to resemble
Genji's late mother. That baby goes on to become emperor.
At one point, Genji goes into exile after being caught
in an affair with the daughter of a political rival,
and he pursues other affairs while he is exiled. Since

(14:35):
the Tale of Genji was a reflection of the court
culture of the time, all of these affairs can make
it seem like the hayn Court was just a total
hotbed of steamy licentiousness, but really these relationships were carried
out with just an incredible amount of discretion. In the
Imperial Court, women were housed separately for the men, including
with married couples. Wives had their own homes and their

(14:57):
husbands and lovers came to visit them, and there were
a lot of barriers, both physical and cultural, between potential partners.
Women's attire also involved layers and layers of clothing. The
number could vary, but an ideal number of layers was twelve.
A typical outfit included, at minimum trouser skirts and unlined dress,

(15:19):
lined robes, a gown, a mantle, a train, and a jacket,
so total nudity was not common, even in explicit artwork
or literature. These clothes and their materials, patterns, and colors
are a big part of the Tale of Genji. Curtains
and screens also physically separated women from their male visitors,

(15:39):
and to move these curtains or screens aside to see
a woman was essentially a promise of commitment. The idea
of just glimpsing someone through a gap in the screen
is another big theme in the Tale of Genji and
in classical Japanese literature in general, and even though Genji's
physical relationships are a huge part of the book, actual

(16:00):
physical encounters are hardly ever mentioned. In some cases, they're
barely hinted at or alluded to, and a lot of
this intimacy just happens in between the lines. Although emotional
sensitivity was a hallmark of hay On Court culture, people
also did not talk about their feelings to each other directly.
Poetry was the most acceptable way for people to communicate

(16:21):
their most personal thoughts, but they were poems, so they
tended to be veiled rather than direct, and even these
poems had to be delivered by a go between rather
than straight from the writer to the recipient. The Tale
of Genji contains nearly eight hundred poems. To add to
all this, there was virtually no privacy in the hay

(16:41):
On Court. High ranking women were always surrounded by ladies
and waiting servants and staff who all naturally knew everybody's business.
But it only really mattered if you were caught by
someone else of rank doing something that was questionable. We
should also note that all of the women that Genji
pursues in the book are full realized characters of their own,

(17:01):
with the novel exploring their feelings and motivations and internal
psychological lives. Some critics argue that the work is really
their story as much as it is Genji's, and that
if it wasn't the first novel period, it would at
least be the first psychological novel. So to get back
to the plot of the book, Genji rises through the ranks,
becoming wealthier and more prominent. Eventually he has multiple households.

(17:26):
After his secret son the Emperor, learns his true parentage,
he names Genji the Honorary Retired Emperor, which is essentially
the highest honor that Genji could ever hope to attain
as a commoner. But in his last years, after the
character of Mirisaki's death, a grief stricken Genji becomes really
lonely and wistful, and ultimately decides to take religious vows

(17:47):
and live his last year's in seclusion. But the book
does not end with Genji's death. It continues on with
a mostly new cast of characters. It's last third tells
the story of Koru, who is sent it as Genji's son,
but it's really his best friend's grandson, plus Koro's friend
n Know, who is Genji's grandson. Like Genji, they have

(18:09):
a series of relationships, affairs, and seductions, some of which
can have a similarly soapy tone to modern Western audiences.
For example, there is a whole love triangle that also
involves an apparent death, a case of amnesia and exorcism Woho,
and the decision to become a nun. The book also
ends on an ambiguous note, which doesn't resolve a lot

(18:29):
of these earlier threads. So that very brief overview seems
pretty straightforward, But the novel itself really isn't. It contains
a lot of little snippets, some of which seemed like
abandoned threads of the story, Along with shifts in the
point of view, character's interior monologues, authorial asides, and those
nearly eight hundred poems that we mentioned earlier, it can

(18:51):
be challenging to read and absorb any work that was
written in another language as a reflection of another culture,
and even for Japanese speakers. The Tale of Genji is
typically translated from hay On Japanese to modern Japanese. But
the Tale of Genji has some traits that make it
particularly challenging for modern readers and translators. Especially For one thing,

(19:13):
it contains a lot of references and allusions to historical
people and events from hay On Japan, including many, many
references to the literature of the time. So there is
a lot of nuance that a well read person in
eleventh century Japan would easily grasp. But it's just about
invisible if you are a Westerner whose only experience with
hay On literature is the Tale of Genji and maybe

(19:36):
say shonagons Pillow book. Yeah, there are the two things
that I think it read the most often among English speakers.
And on top of that, we talked about how relationships
in the court of hay On Japan were carried out
with layers and layers of discretion. The book itself is
also written that way. Hay On Japanese as a language

(19:57):
didn't always clearly connect things like subject and objects. Often
these kinds of linguistic relationships were denoted through very subtle
shifts in verb conjugation. To add to that, most of
the characters in the book are not directly named. They
are mentioned by title or rank. In some cases, there
are duplicates among these titles or characters. Titles change over time.

(20:20):
People who were part of the hay On court, who
were immersed in a culture that was threaded through with
all of these hierarchies and ranks probably would have been
able to tell who was who without a lot of difficulty,
But translations of the work often end up deriving various
nicknames for the characters to make things more intelligible to
readers who don't have that background. All of this adds
up to a work that a lot of critics think

(20:41):
was meant to be read and re read over and over,
because it's only after rereading it that a reader could
possibly pick up on all of those illusions and subtexts
and connections involved. We'll talk about the ongoing influence of
this book after we first pause for a sponsor break.

(21:05):
As we said earlier, it's not entirely clear when Miasaki
Shikibu wrote Genji Monogatari. It's not even clear what order
she wrote the chapters in, or whether those chapters were
originally read in the same order that they are today.
One chronicle written in the fourteenth century suggests that Miurasaki
went on a pilgrimage to a temple not far from

(21:25):
Kyoto after a princess asked the empress for a new story.
The empress commissioned one from Miurasaki, and then while she
was at this temple, Miasaki had a vision of an
older Genji in exile, and that prompted her to write
chapters eleven and twelve first. It's not really clear, though,
how much truth there is to this story. There has
also been some debate about whether Motasaki was the sole

(21:47):
author of the entire work, with some people speculating that
some chapters, in particular those last ones after Genji's death,
may have been written by her daughter, and there's really
no clear evidence of this one way or the other,
but there is some suggestion that Murasaki may have had
an editor who helped shape a sprawling, very complex work

(22:07):
into its final form. The whole authorship debate is like
mostly people reading it incredibly closely trying to pick up
clues as to whether her daughter may have picked up
part of it. Within decades of Miurasaki Shikibu writing the
Tale of Genji, though people in Japan were recognizing it
as a classic. Fujiwara No Shunzi, who was an influential

(22:28):
poet and critic in the late twelfth century, called Genji
monogatari indispensable, especially for people who wanted to study poetry.
The earliest surviving version we have of the Tale of
Genji is an incomplete set of illustrations from about the
same time. At court, empresses didn't typically read work to themselves,
it was read allowed to them, with the empress following

(22:50):
along with illustrations on a scroll. The remaining fragments of
this twelfth century scroll are considered a Japanese national treasure
and are housed in two different museums in Japan. Although
movable type was being developed in China around the time
that Murasaki Shikibu lived, it didn't become widely used or
spread to Japan until later, so the Tale of Genji

(23:11):
was mainly copied by hand for the first centuries of
its existence. That meant that by the thirteenth century, or
so there were lots of copies floating around, with all
kinds of variations starting to crop up, people started making
an effort to identify and preserve the original text. One
of these was Minamoto no Mitsuyuki, who were to his
son Chikayuki, with Chikayuki probably finishing their work after his

(23:34):
father's death. Mitsuyuki was the governor of Kawachi, so their
version is known as the Kawachi Text. Poet and calligrapher
Fujiwara no Taika was doing similar work at about the
same time. He compiled the aob Yoshi Bone, or the
blue cover text version of the book. Until twenty nineteen,
they were believed to be four surviving chapters of this

(23:56):
version that he wrote in his own hand, and we
talked about the newly discover fifth chapter in our year
in Unearthed in twenty nineteen. There's also one other set
of early copies of the Tale of Genji that's grouped
together basically as other texts, but Fujiwara no Taika's compilation
was regarded as standard by the fourteenth century, and today

(24:17):
most translations from hay On Japanese use his version as
a starting point. The Tale of Genji continued to be
read in Japan and the centuries after it was written,
growing more popular during the Muromachi period from about thirteen
thirty eight to fifteen seventy three and then during the
Edo period from about sixteen o three to eighteen sixty eight.

(24:37):
In addition to adaptations of the work into other media,
Murasaki Shikibu became a character and various works of fiction
during these periods. Several satirical versions of the Tale of
Genji were written during the Edo period as well. We
talked about the Edo period and its culture more in
our previous episode on Katsushika Hokusai, which were also going
to put out as a Saturday classics soon. By the

(24:59):
ear twentieth century, the Tale of Genji was still regarded
as a classic work of Japanese literature, but it wasn't
necessarily beloved by Japanese readers. The one thousand year old
Japanese it was written in was just too inscrutable for
most people to read and enjoy. Then poet Yosano Akiko
published a four volume translation into modern Japanese in nineteen

(25:22):
twelve and nineteen thirteen. Her translation made the work far
more accessible to Japanese readers. It was well reviewed, and
it sold well in spite of what was regarded as
a pretty expensive price tag. Many other translations into modern
Japanese have followed. The first translations of The Tale of
Genji into English were created at the end of the
nineteenth century. The first translation of the entire work was

(25:45):
by Arthur Whaley, who published a six volume work volume
by volume in the nineteen twenties and thirties. Wale's work
was generally regarded as a huge achievement in the English
speaking literary world, although it did have some shortcomings. There
is some degree of subjectivity in translating any work, but
Wiley in particular seemed more focused on trying to preserve

(26:08):
what he saw as the beauty of Miasaki's language rather
than the accuracy of the story as she wrote it.
He basically left out parts that he thought were uninteresting
or obscure, and sometimes he wrote passages that he thought
sounded as beautiful as the original, whether or not they
conveyed sort of the same meaning as the original. He

(26:28):
also simultaneously tried to make all the dialogue sound like
things that English speakers would actually say in conversation. Rather
than reflecting the flavor of Mirasaki's prose dialogue or the
many layers of discretion that were part of hay On
Court culture. Even so, his translation made the book accessible
to the world of Western literature before he had even

(26:49):
finished it. When he still had two volumes left to go,
the Tale of Genji was being called one of the
masterpieces of world literature, with people comparing it to everything
from the Iliad and The Odd to See to the
works of Shakespeare, Flowbear, and Tolstoy. Wales's translation, rather than
the original hand Japanese, also became the starting point for
other translations into other languages, meaning that Wales's editorial decisions

(27:13):
influenced how The Tale of Genji was translated into other
languages as well. Other English language translations since then have
tried to, in one way or another, improve on or
correct Wali's work. Later English translations are by Edward Side
and Sticker in nineteen seventy six, Royal Tyler in two
thousand one, and Dennis Washburn in Helen McCullough also translated

(27:36):
a selection of earlier chapters in nineteen nine four, and
these translations are all very different from one another. Yeah
You can read whole papers that are devoted to looking
at the same passage from hay On Japanese and how
each of these people translated it, and with the subtled
differences or dramatic differences, and all of those translations are
Some of these differences just come with the territory of

(27:58):
translating any work into another language, especially when that work
is so different in terms of both time and place,
But translating the Tale of Genji can be particularly challenging.
It's a book that involves a lot of romantic entanglements
and seductions and other deeply personal human encounters, written during
and about a time and place that had a very

(28:18):
different set of more as and expectations for behavior than
most people are living under today. And on top of that,
as we touched on earlier, it was written in a
language and style that obfuscated a lot of the details
about all these things. So apart from how they've handled
things like the sound of the language, different translators have
come away with very different interpretations of characters, actions and

(28:41):
reactions and feelings. On top of that, when it comes
to translations into English, the major translations we have today
have all been by people who were from the United
States or the United Kingdom. So in addition to all
those other challenges, these translators have also had to contend
with the cultural baggage that comes from center reas of
Western fascination for and objectification of Asian nations and cultures.

(29:05):
In addition to its reputation as a masterpiece and world literature,
the Tale of Genji was part of the earliest evolution
of Japanese literature in Japanese, and that evolution was largely
the work of women. As we said earlier on the show,
when Miurasaki Shikibu was living, Chinese was the official language
of the Japanese Imperial Court, and so called serious literature

(29:28):
was being written and read in Chinese. Women, on the
other hand, were writing in Japanese using a style of
cursive writing called hiragana, which was so associated with women
that it was nicknamed the women's hand. So in a
lot of ways, Hayon Court women lay the groundwork for
later Japanese literature, and that brings up another point about

(29:48):
the Tale of Genji's translations. Miasaki Shikibu was a woman
writing a work that was being read or read aloud,
mostly for an audience of women. The translator that finished
the first translation into modern Japanese was also a woman,
But as far as English translations, when it comes to
translations of the entire work, all the English language versions

(30:09):
are by men. If you remember that one woman that
we mentioned, she only translated a portion of it. And
that's not to say that men are not capable of
translating work by women. But for a work that has
so much focus on women's inner lives and feelings, it
would be really interesting to have a woman's take on
the whole thing in English. Yeah, I personally like my
fantasy wish list. If I could just snap my fingers

(30:30):
and have some kind of piece of literature at my
immediate disposal, it would be a translation of the Tale
of Genji into modern English by a Japanese woman. I
think that would be amazing. I'm sure it will happen
at some point, at some point suhere. Yeah. So Apart
from all of these translations, there have also been so
many adaptations of the Tale of genjians you every conceivable medium,

(30:52):
including movies, radio plays, TV cereals, manga, would black prints,
and kabuki plays. In two thousand eight, even appeared as
a Google Doodle in Japan for the one thousandth anniversary
of the text, and that is the now at this point,
six year delayed episode. Uh, do you have listener mail

(31:13):
that is not six years delayed? H, It's not delayed
at all. Um. We're recording this on December twenty three,
and this came December twenty seems very timely to me.
It is from Erica. Uh. And Erica wrote about the
Italian Hall disaster and says, Hello, I was shocked and
excited to see that you were doing an Italian Hall episode.

(31:35):
I'm from Dollar Bay, Michigan, a couple of miles south
of Calumet. I've been a history nerd my whole life,
and local history is a huge part of that. When
I took part in the Local History SmackDown, we named
our team the Big Annies. There are some points that
are well known around the area. The one Man Drill
is referred to as the widow Maker because of the
fear of being alone in that environment. The kew I

(31:56):
Brewing Company has a dark beer called the widow Maker
Black Ale. It's delicious, though if you don't like dark beers,
it's probably not for you. You briefly mentioned the Quincy
Mine that side of a National Historic Landmark district and
the Quincy Mine Hoist Association runs tours from April to
late Fall, usually with themed Halloween tours. Check out their

(32:17):
instagram for fun pictures. I worked here in high school
and college. I love it so much I convinced my
now husband that we should get married there. The Quincy
Number two shaft houses an iconic piece of the landscape.
Nordberg Steam Hoist is the largest steam powered hoist engine.
Attached some of our wedding photos for context. Thanks for
all you do and bringing stories like this to a

(32:37):
wider audience. Erica, Thank you so much, Erica for this
awesome uh, this awesome email, and for sending the pictures. Um.
I had found the Widowmaker nickname in the research and
it just did not make it into the episode for
whatever reason. But if I'm ever in the area, I
will super try that uh that dark beer, because I
do love a very dark beer. If you would like

(32:58):
to write to us about this or any of our
podcast or history podcast at I heart radio dot com.
We're also all over social media. Missed in History. That's
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And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast
the I heart Radio app, and anywhere else you get podcasts.

(33:21):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
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