Figures of Resistance: Language, Poetry, and Narrating in The Tale of the Genji and Other Mid-Heian Texts

In this revisionist study of texts from the mid-Heian period in Japan, H. Richard Okada offers new readings of three well-known tales: The Tale of the Bamboo-Cutter , The Tale of Ise and The Tale of Genji . Okada contends that the cultural and gendered significance of these works has been distorted by previous commentaries and translations belonging to the larger partriarchal and colonialist discourse of Western civilization. He goes on to suggest that this universalist discourse, which silences the feminine aspects of these texts and subsumes their writing in misapplied Western canonical literary terms, is sanctioned and maintained by the discipline of Japanese literature. Okada demonstrates how readers might understand texts belonging to a different time and place without being complicit in their assimilation to categories derived from Western literary traditions. Emphasis is also given to the distinctive cultural circles, as well as socio-political and genealogical circumstances, that surrounded the emergence of the texts.