What Women? The Tale Of Genji

What Women?

Murasaki Shikibu fills her novel, The Tale of Genji, with love story after love story, seduction after seduction. Lyric poetry flows freely between lovers, and male protagonists sweep women of every rank off their feet, seldom failing to obtain the object of their desire. Upon further examination, however, these men act not for the sake of love but for their own selfish gain. Through the characters of Murasaki, Ukifune, and the men who supposedly love them, Murasaki Shikibu portrays how men of the Heian period often loved women not for the women themselves, but pursued them in order to fulfill their own wants and desires.

Murasaki Shikibu shows competition as a driving force beneath the pretense of love through the complex relationships between Ukifune, Karou, and Niou. The two men, who view each other as both best friend and rival, each meet Ukifune on their own and without the other's knowledge. Niou's attraction to Ukifune does not seem to influence Kaoru's intentions towards her; once Niou discovers Ukifune's tie to Kaoru, however, Niou's efforts and seeming devotion to her take on the edge of competitiveness. At a poetry gathering arranged by the Emperor, Niou overhears Kaoru humming to himself about Ukifune and, with more than a little jealousy, thinks "with a first lover like [Niou], how could she possibly come to prefer me?" (1024). His habit of competing with Kaoru kicks in; he cannot escape the thought of Kaoru and Ukifune, and this tints all of his actions towards her. Even while spending time with her, he continually tries to push her into denouncing the Commander, forces comparisons between them, and suffers fits of jealousy (1027-28). Niou focuses on Ukifune not as an object of true affection but as another way to prove himself more capable than Kaoru.

By showing mindset that feelings of devotion transfer easily from one target to another, Shikibu continues demonstrating how men's actions and emotions towards women often come about strictly for the sake of the male's personal happiness. Although apparently more sincere than Niou, Kaoru's treatment of Ukifune also derives from selfish desires. Rather than pursuing Ukifune for her own personal worth, from the very beginning he finds himself attracted to her solely based on her sisterhood to Oigimi, his dead love. When seeing her for the first time, "...he knew that this girl [Ukifune], even if not the same [as Oigimi], promised real consolation" (970) simply because of the blood tie of half-sisterhood she shares with the one he loved. As he progresses in his attentions towards her, her existence comforts him although she never becomes much more than a symbol of past memories and happiness for him. As he takes the drastic step of moving her to the mountains to keep her for himself, images of Oigimi keep overlapping (1003), showing how he has taken Ukifune as merely a replacement. Even when he discovers the affair between Ukifune and Niou, Kaoru does not react in jealousy the way a person truly in love would; rather, he decides that "...he would just let her go on being whatever she was to him" (1036), fully aware that he keeps her with him as a stand-in for his true love, Oigimi, who no longer inhabits this world.

Likewise, this notion of replacing women with blood relatives shows itself through the relationship between Genji and Murasaki. Although Murasaki appears to