The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
The Tale of Genji is considered the first great novel in the history of world literature. Murasaki Shikibu’s actual name is unknown, however it was common to name women after the office held by a male relative. Her father admired her academic brilliance but wished she were born a man instead because in the Heian society, Chinese learning was only valued for men. Men and women were strictly segregated in Heian Japan. Typically, women were married around ten or eleven, and their role was to bear children. The purpose of marriage was to continue the family line and create alliances with other families. Heian women’s literature thrived in this world of gender asymmetries. As female authors, women voiced how they suffered from their dependence on their husbands.
Murasaki probably began writing her tale shortly after the death of her husband. She wrote it over a span of a dozen years, therefore, the tale developed in thematic sequences. This showed how Murasaki’s protagonists, interests, and narrative techniques evolved over time. Relationships bet...
Power and Money do not Substitute Love and as it denotes, it is a deep feeling expressed by Feng Menglong who was in love with a public figure prostitute at his tender ages. Sadly, Feng Menglong was incapable to bear the expense of repossessing his lover. Eventually, a great merchant repossessed his lover, and that marked the end of their relationship. Feng Menglong was extremely affected through distress and desperation because of the separation and he ultimately, decided to express his desolation through poems. This incidence changed his perception and the way he represents women roles in his stories. In deed, Feng Menglong, is among a small number of writers who portrayed female as being strong and intelligent. We see a different picture build around women by many authors who profoundly tried to ignore the important role played by them in the society. Feng Menglong regards woman as being bright and brave and their value should never be weighed against
Ban Zhao wrote Lessons for a Woman around the end of the first century C.E. as social guide for (her daughters and other) women of Han society (Bulliet 167). Because Zhao aimed to educate women on their responsibilities and required attributes, one is left questioning what the existing attitudes and roles of women were to start with. Surprisingly, their positions were not automatically fixed at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Ban Zhao’s own status as an educated woman of high social rank exemplifies the “reality [that] a woman’s status depended on her “location” within various social institutions’ (167). This meant that women had different privileges and opportunities depending on their economic, social, or political background. Wealthier noble women would likely have access to an education and may have even been able to wield certain political power (167). Nevertheless, women relinquished this power within the family hierarchy to their fathers, husbands, and sons. Despite her own elevated social status, Ban Zhao still considered herself an “unworthy writer”, “unsophisticated”, “unenlightened’, “unintelligent”, and a frequent disgrace to her and her husband’s family (Zhao). Social custom was not, however, the only driving force behind Zhao’s desire to guide women towards proper behavior.
Like walking through a barren street in a crumbling ghost town, isolation can feel melancholy and hopeless. Yet, all it takes is something like one flower bud to show life really can exist anywhere. This is similar to Stephen’s journey in The Samurai’s Garden. This novel is about an ailing Chinese boy named Stephen who goes moves to a Japanese village during a time of war between Japan and China to recover from his disease. By forming bonds with several locals and listening to their stories, he quickly matures into a young adult. Throughout the novel, Gail Tsukiyama shows how disease forces Stephen into isolation; however, his relationship with Sachi and his time spent in Matsu’s garden lead him out of solitude.
Ironically, Murasaki was able to write The Tale of the Genji in a patriarchal environment, which was typically dominated by male poets and historical writers. The background of this 11th century Japanese “novel” defines the unusual circumstances of a male-dominant literary culture, which allowed Murasaki to tell this story as a female author. In her own diary, Murasaki Shikibu writes about the power of patriarchal authority in the royal court, when she learns that the emperor was reading Tale of Genji. This aspect of 11th century Japanese society defines the assumption of ignorance and submissiveness that Murasaki had to endure as a female
Much about Kogawa's novel makes it difficult not only to read but also to classify or categorize. First, Obasan blurs the line between nonfiction and fiction. Kogawa draws from actual letters and newspaper accounts, autobiographical details, and historical facts throughout the novel, but she artistically incorporates this material into a clearly fictional work. In addition, Kogawa's narrative operates on multiple levels, from the individual and familial to the communal, national, political, and spiritual. Stylistically, the novel moves easily between the language of documentary reportage and a richly metaphorical language, and between straightforward narrative and stream-ofconsciousness exposition. This astonishing variety in Kogawa's novel can, at times, become bewildering and unsettling to the reader. But as many readers and critics have noted, Kogawa's style and method in Obasan also constitute the novel's unique strength. Kogawa writes in such a way that ambiguity, uncertainty, irony, and paradox do not weaken her story but instead paradoxically become the keys to understanding it.
Such a disparaging remark about the misleading nature of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior has been readily refuted, notably by Leilani Nishime, who proposes in her essay "Engendering Genre..." that it is a text that transcends genre confines; it challenges traditional definitions of genre and demands redefinitions. Whatever the case, "No Name Woman" (NNW) is remarkable in the way the reader is given a candid social commentary in the guise of an intriguing tale of scandal and oppression. In a vivid representation of traditional Chinese society, Kingston artfully manipulates perspective, or more aptly character filter (Chatman, Reading Narrative Fiction 130), to reflect the culture of an entire society in the vicissitudes of one family's life.
There is no doubt that the literary written by men and women is different. One source of difference is the sex. A woman is born a woman in the same sense as a man is born a man. Certainly one source of difference is biological, by virtue of which we are male and female. “A woman´s writing is always femenine” says Virginia Woolf
In the story “Two Kinds”, the author, Amy Tan, intends to make reader think of the meaning behind the story. She doesn’t speak out as an analyzer to illustrate what is the real problem between her and her mother. Instead, she uses her own point of view as a narrator to state what she has experienced and what she feels in her mind all along the story. She has not judged what is right or wrong based on her opinion. Instead of giving instruction of how to solve a family issue, the author chooses to write a narrative diary containing her true feeling toward events during her childhood, which offers reader not only a clear account, but insight on how the narrator feels frustrated due to failing her mother’s expectations which leads to a large conflict between the narrator and her mother.
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu illustrates the ideal man in the form of Captain Genji. According to narrator, Genji was a son of the emperor from Kuritsubo. Due to the politics of Court life, Kokiden consort and her son become the favored for heirs to the throne instead of Genji. Nevertheless, Genji remains the ideal Heian man as his mother was the emperor’s favorite concubine. Yet the fact that Genji remained a favorite of the emperor spoke to his physical brilliance. Still, Genji only remains half of which the ideal standards of the Heian court stand for. The ideal man needed an ideal female to accompany him. The ideal man and the ideal woman of the Heian Period Court revolved around symbolism of Genji’s Heian era physical perfection and the codes of court elegance. The court, which Genji lives in, is based mainly on idle time, poetry and leisure court activities. Courts therefore do not reflect rural class or working class visions of the Heian period. According to Tyler, “Composing poetry was first of all a matter of social necessity” (Tyler xix). Therefore, courts of the Heian Period revolved around poetry as an artist form of communication and the practice of elegance or miyabi. Hierarchy, in reality, would have been a crucial factor in determining the court opinions of individuals. However, Murasaki Shikibu uses The Tale of Genji to explore the possibilities of ideal individuals beyond hierarchy and position in society, but through factors regarding looks and judgment.
At one time men were expected to be loyal to their lord and women were supposed to be loyal to their husband and family. During this women were allowed to own property and even inherit family property. They were expected to control the household budget and household decisions to allow men to serve their lord. When World War II hit it marked a shift in thinking about gender roles. The Japanese society went into the past of loyalty and courage to promote war effort during this crucial time. This is when women’s duty became to only have children. Women were looked at as keepers of the nation’s household even though many women worked in factories. During this war many “unused” women were drafted to sexually service military men. Soldiers referred to these women as “hygienic public bathrooms” or even as “semen toilets.” Japan was influenced by China to take on the confucian ideals in society. Confucian society focuses on the family and the roles of the genders in the household. Men are the heads of the household; women are dependent on the men. Women were expected to marry the men their family set for them, produce kids, and oversee the house. Women became not able to own property and became “slaves” to men in every way possible. It is believed that women’s happiness in life is only to be found in marriage. In this society women were to be married between 22 through 27 and if this was not met you were considered
The late 19th century was a very different time for many living in Japan. The Tokugawa regime was leveling off, and the people of Japan who weren’t as wealthy had to find a balance between religious serenity and making money. The three most predominant religions of this era were Shinto, Confucianism and Buddhism, and an abundance of citizens living in Japan were often rooted very heavily in their religious backgrounds solely because these religious were seen more as ways of life than a religious practice. However, even the most devout of worshipers don’t always start off that way. In Katsu Kokichi’s book Musui’s Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai, Kokichi begins his life as a down and out Samurai, adopted by the Katsu family at
Women were often subjects of intense focus in ancient literary works. In Sarah Pomeroy’s introduction of her text Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, she writes, “Women pervade nearly every genre of classical literature, yet often the bias of the author distorts the information” (x). It is evident in literature that the social roles of women were more restricted than the roles of men. And since the majority of early literature was written by men, misogyny tends to taint much of it. The female characters are usually given negative traits of deception, temptation, selfishness, and seduction. Women were controlled, contained, and exploited. In early literature, women are seen as objects of possession, forces deadly to men, cunning, passive, shameful, and often less honorable than men. Literature reflects the societal beliefs and attitudes of an era and the consistency of these beliefs and attitudes toward women and the roles women play has endured through the centuries in literature. Women begin at a disadvantage according to these societal definitions. In a world run by competing men, women were viewed as property—prizes of contests, booty of battle and the more power men had over these possessions the more prestigious the man. When reading ancient literature one finds that women are often not only prizes, but they were responsible for luring or seducing men into damnation by using their feminine traits.
Moving through the stories of each character, the author uses a bland tone that results in an emotionally detached feeling for the reader. Coupled with a lack of specific names for the characters, the disengaged tone resulted in the reader lacking any emotional connection toward each character’s story. Quite similarly, the characters were aloof in their realization of how drastica...
The short story cycle is the idea that stories can be independent yet interdependent through common standards and themes. This remains the case in both the novels Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat and Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri as they connect stories such as “A Wall of Fire Rising”, “Children of the Sea”, “Mrs. Sen’s”, and “Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” through accentuation of setting and denial of loss. This idea of connectivity is present through all the stories as the individual characters face their unique challenges. For instance, in Krik? Krak! characters such as the girl and Céalinne in a “Children of the Sea” have to witness horrors imposed on their compatriots when they can do nothing to stop it and grasp onto the only constant
One of the most prominent aspects of identities that we observed from Hayao Miyazaki’s films is how he constantly attempted to revert the conventional notions of feminine qualities by creating female protagonists who are empowered with an unusual strength and determination denied in reality. Mothers, not only in Japanese society, but in most of the cultures, are expected to show caring and loving nature towards their children. Those who sacrifice their lives for the sake of their husbands and children are often glorified through media as a role-model for all mothers to look up to. In the mid 1890s, along with a formation of a nuclear family, the society started to regard the nuclear family as the basic unit that comprises the foundation of