Shōjo Murasaki, Seinen Genji: Sexual Violence and Textual Violence in Yamato Waki’s Fleeting Dreams and Egawa Tatsuya’s Tale of Genji Manga

Abstract

This paper examines how two manga versions of the Heian classic Tale of Genji, belonging to two different genres and targeting different readership, engage with and interpret the tale’s episodes depicting sexual encounters, which may be read as problematic in the original text. The shojo version, Yamato Waki’s Asaki yumemishi, published between 1980 and 1993, and targeting predominantly female audiences, how two distinct approaches in its treatment of certain potentially uncomfortable episodes: some episodes which verge too close to a reading of sexual violence, are outright erased from the manga versions. Others, whose presence is invaluable to the narrative, are remarkably faithful to the original text, while at the same time contextualizing and domesticating all threats of sexual violence that might have marred the original text. By contrast, Egawa Tatsuya’s seinen version of Genji monogatari, marketed towards a young male adult readership, takes the extreme approach of depicting all sexual encounters in the tale as consensual, pleasurable and highly explicit. The ambiguity of the original text is simply done away with by juxtaposing said text and its fairly accurate rendition into modern Japanese with quasi-pornographic, shunga-evoking scenes of sex.