THE TALE OF GENJI — and me. If you want to feel what na koso oshikere means, start here.
🔗https://godspeed2u.vivaldi.net/2025/02/20/the-tale-of-genji-and-me/
Plain-language companion post: why Kamakura needed Genji’s logic.
People often introduce The Tale of Genji as “the world’s first novel” or “a thousand-year-old love story from the Japanese court.” Those labels are not exactly wrong—but they stop too early.
My new paper is now live on SSRN: “Name Is All That Matters”: The Tale of Genji and the Birth of the Samurai Order.
THE TALE OF GENJI — and me.
If you want to feel what na koso oshikere means, start here.
🔗 [BLOG: “The Tale of Genji” and Me] https://godspeed2u.vivaldi.net/2025/02/20/the-tale-of-genji-and-me/
📄 [SSRN] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6004954
THE TALE OF GENJI is not only a romance. It is also a handbook of name, honour, and shame—a logic later woven into the ethic called #Bushidō. New post: why the Kamakura Shogunate needed Genji’s na koso oshikere (“Name is all that matters”).
🔗 [BLOG] https://godspeed2u.vivaldi.net/2026/01/03/name-is-all-that-matters-why-the-tale-of-genji-still-shapes-japan-after-1000-years/
📄 [SSRN]https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6004954
People often introduce The Tale of Genji as “the world’s first novel” or “a thousand-year-old love story from the Japanese court.” Those labels are not exactly wrong—but they stop too early.
New SSRN paper:
“Name Is All That Matters”: The Tale of Genji and the Birth of the Samurai Order
Why has The Tale of Genji lasted 1,000 years? Not as a love story, but as material for shaping an early prototype of Bushidō.
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6004954
Rozan-ji's 'Genji-no-tei' (源氏庭) was designed in 1965, inspired by Heian period gardens. Kikyō offer the only real colour.
White gravel is shaped into a pattern known as 'Genji Kumogata' (源氏雲形), imitating the gold clouds seen on 'The Tale of Genji' scrolls.
“It was true then: he had after all the shifting hue of the dewflower. She had heard about that. She had heard, albeit in general terms, that men were good at lying, that many a sweet word went into the pretense of love.”
-Murasaki Shikibu (紫式部), The Tale of Genji (源氏物語).
Popular Science: College students digitized 795 poems from the world’s oldest novel. “Scholars and students have spent nearly a decade documenting and digitizing a vast, first-of-its-kind repository for hundreds of medieval Japanese poems. But the compendium doesn’t draw from an array of authors. Instead, a single woman penned all the 11th century poems as part of a larger book, widely […]
The Japan Times
Toshisada Utsunomiya
Camellia Tea Ceremony
ResearchBuzz: Firehose