“The Tale of Genji Through Contemporary Manga: Challenging Gender and Sexuality in Japan” by Lynne K. Miyake has been published by Bloomsbury.
This groundbreaking study examines the unlikely merger of two Japanese cultural phenomena, an 11th-century aristocratic text and contemporary manga comics. It explores the ways in which the manga versions of “The Tale of Genji” use gender, sexuality, and desire to challenge perceptions of reading and readership, morality and ethics, and what is translatable from one culture to another.
Miyake shows that, through their girls, ladies, Boy Love, boys and young men, and informational comics remediations of the tale, the manga Genjis visually, narratively, and affectively rework male and female gazes. Miyake reveals how they gently inject humor, eroticize, gender flip, queer, and simultaneously re-inscribe and challenge heteronormative gender norms.
The first full-length study of Genji manga, this book analyses these adaptations within manga studies and the historical and cultural moments that fashioned and sustained them. It also interrogates the circumscribed, in-group aristocratic society and the consumer and production practices of the Heian society that come full circle in the manga versions.
“The Tale of Genji Through Contemporary Manga” utilizes Western queer, feminist, sexuality and gender theory and Japanese cultural practices to illuminate the ways in which the Genji tale redeploys itself. Yet it also provides much-needed context and explanation regarding the charges of appropriation of prepubescent (fe)male and gay bodies and the utilization of (sexual) violence mounted against Genji manga — and manga and anime in general once they went global.
Miyake is emerita professor of Japanese at Pomona College. Her background is in classical Japanese literature, and she works extensively in the narrative prose and diary literature traditions of the 10ththrough 12thcenturies. In particular, she examines the different narrative strategies employed by authors, narrators and readers in the creation of the textual experience.
She also looks at how gender is configured through the various players, for example, in a narrator who is a continuum composite of male and female rather than simply one or the other.
Recently, her studies have included the intersection between contemporary authors, scholars and filmmakers and classical Japanese literature — how the likes of a classical Japanese scholar and former attendant to the Japanese royal family (Iwasa Miyoko in “Through the Eyes of a Courtlady”) and a British filmmaker (Peter Greenaway in “Pillow Book”) re-make and re-enact textual moments from classical Japanese literature.
Her honors and awards include: National Endowment for the Humanities, Associate Kyoto Program Faculty Fellowship, 1997; Japan Foundation Fellowship, 2001; National Endowment for the Humanities, Supplemental Sabbatical Fellowships Affiliated Scholar at UCLA Center for the Study of Women, 2001; Japanese Ministry of Education Scholarship, 1992, 1997 and 2001.