The Bridge of Dreams is a brilliant reading of The Tale of Genji
that succeeds both as a sophisticated work of literary criticism and as
an introduction this world masterpiece. Taking account of current
literary theory and a long tradition of Japanese commentary, the author
guides both the general reader and the specialist to a new appreciation
of the structure and poetics of this complex and often seemingly
baffling work.
The Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century by a court
lady, Murasaki Shikibu, is Japan's most outstanding work of prose
fiction. Though bearing a striking resemblance to the modern
psychological novel, the Genji was not conceived and written as a
single work and then published and distributed to a mass audience as
novels are today. Instead, it was issued in limited installments,
sequence by sequence, to an extremely circumscribed, aristocratic
audience. This study discusses the growth and evolution of the Genji
and the manner in which recurrent concerns--political, social, and
religious--are developed, subverted, and otherwise transformed as the
work evolves from one stage to another.
Throughout, the author analyzes the Genji in the context of those
literary works and conventions that Murasaki explicitly or implicitly
presupposed her contemporary audience to know, and reveals how the
Genji works both within and against the larger literary and
sociopolitical tradition.
The book contains a color frontispiece by a seventeenth-century artist
and eight pages of black-and-white illustrations from a twelfth-century
scroll. Two appendixes present an analysis of biographical and textual
problems and a detailed index of principal characters.
