![]() ![]() An admirer of 11th-century Japanese literature, Umi’s culinary odyssey could be a modern-day plotline of one of its heroes, and like most classic tales, his adventure worked out in the end.Ĭhef Masao “Umi” Umezaki from Japan spent his early years in the United States and became a renowned sushi chef in Nyack. ![]() Last fall, after eight years of searching for a space, he opened his new restaurant Murasaki, which he named for the ancient author."Īffordable sushi restaurant using high quality fish in their "very fresh and delicious sushi and sashimi".Western criticism of the art and text in Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji functions similarly to the consideration of Genji as a hero of the work. While the trend in literary analysis has been towards the realization of universal human truths among world literature, a paradox has emerged: In trying to universalize the human experience, we have often pushed ourselves further away from the true meaning of texts which would otherwise seem familiar. Similarly, when we look at the accompanying art, we have to be aware of our Western lens. This is true for criticism of The Tale of Genji. Contemporary criticism of the book has fought to categorize the work as essentially prosaic, and, in turn, has undermined its poetic and artistic value by focusing only on the book as the world’s first novel, as notable as this is. ![]() The text, however, should not overshadow the images of the narrative, which complement and mimic Shikibu’s techniques of repetition and substitution that we also see in the accompanying artwork, as critic Richard Bowring notes. In order to deny the traditional nativist reading of The Tale of Genji, western critics have turned to a diegetic interpretation of the text. By taking this western view of the work as simply a narrative, criticism then struggles to find a hero of the tale by western definition. The most telling scene of the character of Genji is later on in the text when he retreats to Suma. When we look at this image and use it to retrospectively analyze both the entirety of the artwork and the text, the true image of Genji emerges. As the protagonist of the world’s first novel, Genji does not do anything heroic in the western sense of the word. As Alan Priest writes in his article, “The Take of Genji,”Īrchaeological reviewers would doubtless have raised a dubious eyebrow as to the entire accuracy of the background and conversation. But it is not a contemporary English novel-it is eleventh-century Japanese-and no one can question Lady Murasaki's details much. ![]() In the West, we identify heroism with chivalry or valiance. In this way, figures like The Odyssey's Odysseus or Beowulf seem much more fitting than the depictions we see of Muraski’s protagonist. Genji, in contrast to the western hero, does not slay dragons or show courage in battle. Instead, he is a much different type of hero which would centuries later come to be known in the West as a romantic or Byronic hero. He is often pictured aloof from courtly society and in contemplative solitude, like when he is depicted thinking of Murasaki or pondering the ephemerality of life. The most notable image from the work is Genji’s retreat to Suma where the melancholic images of a despairing Genji invoke our Western sense of a Byronic hero. ![]()
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