Sensation and Renunciation in The Tale of Genji

FAIN: FT-286146-22

Ashton Lazarus
University of Utah (Salt Lake City, UT 84112-9049)

Research and writing leading to a book on the Japanese literary classic The Tale of Genji (c. 1011), focusing on the tension between the allure of sensory experience and Buddhist distrust of the senses.

Combining methodologies from literary studies, phenomenology, and religious studies, this project uses close readings of The Tale of Genji to make an original contribution to the global history of the senses. The tale’s multilayered narrative combines rich sensorial descriptions of the external world, complex internal worlds of characters’ thoughts and desires, and the looming presence of the eternal world of Buddhist renunciation. We follow Genji’s circuitous path as he moves fitfully between the external, the internal, and the eternal, forever denied stasis. It is the specific tension between the allure of sensory experience and the Buddhist distrust of the senses, I propose, that animates the text’s proliferation of looping plots, displaced desire, and obsessive repetition. Sensory experience, then, emerges against the vanishing point of Buddhist disavowal and through the reflective power of the mind. The Tale of Genji activates sensation even as it attempts to overcome it.