Richard H. Okada – författare

The monumental Japanese fictional narrative known as The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) appeared during the first decade or so of the eleventh century, CE. This vast narrative—which spans three-quarters of a century, and is made up of fifty-four chapters and 795 poems—has been attributed to a woman known only as Murasaki Shikibu. It has often been celebrated as ‘the world’s oldest novel’.The Tale of Genji has generated a huge scholarly literature, and this new collection, co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to help researchers and students navigate and make sense of it. The collection is made up of three volumes which bring together the best and most influential canonical and cutting-edge research.The first volume (‘Cultures of Reading The Tale of Genji’) assembles the key work in narratology, aesthetics, and poetics. A narrative that can—and has—been read primarily as a ‘romance’ has much to say about the history, culture, and society of its time, and Volume II (‘Sexual Politics in The Tale of Genji’) is organized around often contested themes such as gender, genre, and politics. The scholarship in the final volume (‘The Tale of Genji and its Others’), meanwhile, gathers the best work on topics including Noh, visual art, ‘China’, and later literature.With a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the material in its historical and intellectual context, The Tale of Genji is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research resource.

In this revisionist study of texts from the mid-Heian period in Japan, H. Richard Okada offers new readings of three well-known tales: The Tale of the Bamboo-cutter, The Tale of Ise, and The Tale of Genji. Okada contends that the cultural and gendered significance of these works has been distorted by previous commentaries and translations belonging to the larger patriarchal and colonialist discourse of Western civilization. He goes on to suggest that this universalist discourse, which silences the feminine aspects of these texts and subsumes their writing in misapplied Western canonical literary terms, is sanctioned and maintained by the discipline of Japanese literature. Okada develops a highly original and sophisticated reading strategy that demonstrates how readers might understand texts belonging to a different time and place without being complicit in their assimilation to categories derived from Western literary traditions. The author’s reading stratgey is based on the texts’ own resistance to modes of analysis that employ such Western canonical terms as novel, lyric, and third-person narrative. Emphasis is also given to the distinctive cultural circles, as well as socio-political and genealogical circumstances that surrounded the emergence of the texts. Indispensable readings for specialists in literature, cultural studies, and Japanese literature and history, Figures of Resistance will also appeal to general readers interested in the problems and complexities of studying another culture.