The Rest Is History
560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Sun, 27 Apr 2025
At the height of Imperial Japan, during a golden age of court intrigue, obsessive hierarchy, and fabulous sophistication, who was the legendary lothario and emperor’s son, Genji? What can the Tale of Genji - a great masterpiece of Japanese literature - tell us about this remarkable and alien world, and the imperial family at the heart of it? Who was the woman who wrote it, at a time when in the West it would have been unthinkable? What was the influence of China, Japan’s powerful neighbour, on the world the text describes? And, does the story hold the secrets to the divine power of the Japanese emperors…? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the thrilling and romantic Tale of Genji; the historical man behind the myth, and the glorious world of Imperial Japan, with its glittering court. The Rest Is History Club: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to full series and live show tickets, ad-free listening, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to therestishistory.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestishistory. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is The Tale of Genji?
So that is the opening paragraph of the supreme, unchallenged, canonical classic of Japanese literature. It's a novel called The Tale of Genji. And to give you a sense of the sheer weight of it, in the translation by Royal Tyler, which we'll be quoting from a fair bit today, that book is more than 1,000 pages long. Now, Tom, we're not the rest is literature.
So what is a Japanese novel doing on a history podcast? Please explain.
Two answers. So as you said, this is the great classic of Japanese literature. I guess the obvious parallel might be with Don Quixote.
Yeah.
and the role that it plays in Spain. I mean, maybe even with the plays of Shakespeare in England. I will quote the novelist who, in 1968, won Japan's first Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata, in his acceptance speech. He described it as the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature.
As a Nobel Prize winner, he would Absolutely no. He's not wrong. It's had a massive influence, right? It's had an influence all through Japanese culture on anime and manga and all kinds of tales.
Right the way up to the present day, but going all the way back through medieval Japan, because this novel is, by the standards of the Western novel, I mean, unbelievably ancient. So it's written in the... early years of the 11th century. And it has profoundly, profoundly shaped the Japanese sense of what it is to be Japanese. So it's kind of a historical artifact in its own right.
But I think also it opens an absolutely brilliant window onto what is often described as the classical age of Japan, the first great golden age, 10th and 11th centuries in Japan. And this is A Japan that is emerging for the first time, really, as a distinctive civilization. So it's long existed in the shadow of China, but this kind of cultural cringe that it had long had, it's got rid of.
It is expressing ideals of beauty and grace that will, again, run throughout Japanese history. And to be honest, if you're a historian of, say, ancient or medieval history,
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Chapter 2: Why is The Tale of Genji considered a classic of Japanese literature?
So obviously part of this must depend upon her own personal qualities. So you've mentioned them in your notes, the fact that she's very learned. I mean, she's been listening to all the lessons. She's a very good observer. She's bright. She's determined. Yeah. You know, all of those things. Plus, she's in the imperial court. So she's able to observe all this. Yeah.
But what does it tell us about Japanese society? Because presumably there must be a deeper explanation for why a woman is able to produce this at this point in time, at this place.
Yeah. So I think there are kind of deep structural reasons for it. And they're well worth exploring, not just for their own sake, but because they tell us a lot about how Japan kind of emerges as a distinctive civilization. So just sticking to Murasaki for a moment.
One of the nicknames that she's given at court, and it really upsets her because it's meant kind of mockingly, almost cruelly, is Lady Chronicle. And the Chronicles in Japan are the two oldest surviving texts ever. that we have. They were written in the early 8th century AD. The first of these was written in Japanese, and the second was written in Chinese.
Between them, they give a history of Japan that actually begins with the creation of the universe. A lot of it is about the doings of the gods in the early years of the creation. It goes all the way up to the end of the 7th century. They are very clearly written to explain the origins of the imperial line, the line of the emperors, and to justify its rule as something that is divinely sanctioned.
So what you get from the Chronicles is the fact that every emperor is descended from Amaterasu, who is the goddess of the sun. And this is something that is still part of Japanese imperial culture to this day. I mean, so Charles III doesn't boast about being descended from Woden. But the current emperor, absolutely. I mean, he's descended from the sun. This is part of imperial ideology.
What we're told in the Chronicles is that the first emperor, a guy called Jimmu, which I think is a great name, is the great grandson of the sun. He is sent down from heaven and he conquers all the various peoples of Japan, including men whose arms and legs are so long that people call them the earth spiders. He reigns over Japan and he then dies at the age of 170.
And he is followed by a succession of 15 emperors, all of whom are very anonymous. They don't really seem to do anything except to have kind of madly, improbably long lives, kind of like the patriarchs in the Bible. They're living for kind of 400, 300 years, all that kind of thing. People do live for a long time in Japan though, don't they? Yeah, but not that long. Okay. Not that long.
And when you add all these very long-lived emperors to the list of more recent emperors in the Chronicle, so those who did exist, who are historical, Japanese history is made to stretch back thousands of years. And the reason that this matters is precisely because it doesn't stretch back thousands of years. Ah, interesting. It's actually very, very parvenu.
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