In broadly tracing a millennium of geographic and diachronic movements in relation to Genji, we will encounter a lacuna of nearly two centuries during which complete novelistic versions of the tale had fallen out of print. In particular, our discussion focuses on interregional flows of scripts and translations between Japan, China, and the West.
This paper examines the spread of Murasaki’s reputation to noughties Hollywood from ancient Japan, and we will draw upon the image of the cannibal-of Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagia-to emphasize how Murasaki’s writing was first composed, and then later enriched, with a great many of foreign ingredients.
#Murasaki meaning in japanese series#
Bibliophiles watching or reading the series are left to puzzle over the reference: what is Japan’s national literary hero, who lived a millennium ago, doing in Hollywood cavorting with a cannibal? The movie’s anthropophagic plotline-fleshed out in prequels, a sequel, novels, and a television series-centers on a man-eating psychiatrist, who happens to have been the protégé of a Japanese martial arts master named Murasaki Shikibu. That same year, at box offices, a parallel interest in cannibalism followed the release of the Oscar-winning film Silence of the Lambs. In this way, Andrade’s manifesto charged Brazilian writers to strengthen national literary traditions without indiscriminately rejecting Anglo-European culture.Īfter a delay of nearly seventy years, the otherness of Andrade’s manifesto was translated into English in 1991. On such a dietary regimen, figurative cannibals were tasked to hunt for “the best ingredients from the cultural corpus of the Old and New Worlds in order to create something unique” (Williams 77). Using this metaphor of anthropophagia, Andrade advocated for his fellow Brazilian writers to nourish their national literature by symbolically devouring-and incorporating-admirable qualities of foreign texts. Published originally in a script brought to Brazil by Portuguese Jesuits, the manifesto celebrates the creative potential of cultural cannibalism, which Andrade described as an “bsorption of the sacred enemy … to transform him into totem” (43). With its shocking title, the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 “Manifesto Antropófago” has gained attention in recent years among Anglophone literary scholars. Introduction: From Brazil to Hollywood to Kyoto In theorizing about such matters, the Japanese concept of reverse-importation will be introduced and intercultural transferences are contextualized within Oswald de Andrade’s notion of cultural cannibalism. It will be argued that English translations of Genji helped to provide a stylistic and typographic model for reintroducing the text to modern Japanese readers as a mass-market novel. This paper examines how interregional exchanges of translations and scripts have amplified the critical and popular success of Genji. While Genji is celebrated today as Japan’s enduring national classic, it fell out of print for much of two centuries preceding its first translation into Victorian era English. Retrofit to support Japanese phonetics and syntax, a hybrid script and literature evolved from this negotiation of texts emerged Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji in eleventh century Kyoto. The fifth-century transmission of China’s sophisticated writing system to Japan prompted a cascade of textual and literary developments on the archipelago.
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