Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, written at the Heian court around 1008, opens with an emperor in love with the wrong woman. The Kiritsubo Emperor's devotion to a low-ranking consort, the Lady of the Kiritsubo, scandalises his court and outrages his senior consort, Kokiden. The lady dies young, leaving an infant son so beautiful he is called the Shining Prince. To shield him from the succession struggle, his father demotes him to commoner rank as Genji of the Minamoto — and that single act of protective disinheritance sets the whole tree in motion.
The emperor consoles himself with Fujitsubo, an imperial princess who uncannily resembles the dead Kiritsubo lady. Genji falls in love with his stepmother, and their brief liaison produces a boy raised as the emperor's own: the future Reizei Emperor, whose hidden paternity is the novel's buried fault line. Fujitsubo takes holy orders to escape her guilt. Genji, meanwhile, marries Aoi, daughter of the Minister of the Left and sister of his closest friend and rival Tō no Chūjō; she bears Yūgiri and dies. He then finds Murasaki, Fujitsubo's young niece by Prince Hyōbu, and raises her into the ideal companion he can never formally make his wife.
The second half repeats the crime with the roles reversed. The Suzaku Emperor — Genji's half-brother by Kokiden, and the ruler whose reign drove Genji into exile — entrusts his daughter, the Third Princess, to Genji in his middle age. Kashiwagi, Tō no Chūjō's son, violates her and fathers Kaoru. Genji, who knows, needs only a look to shame Kashiwagi to death, and raises another man's son as his own exactly as his father once did. Murasaki, displaced as principal wife, declines and dies. Kaoru and Reizei, the two sons of secrets, carry the story into the Uji chapters.
This tree follows the standard text of the fifty-four chapters as transmitted from the eleventh century, when Murasaki Shikibu served in the entourage of Empress Shōshi at the Heian court in Kyoto. Its characters bear titles rather than personal names, as Heian decorum required, and its genealogy is deliberately circular: substitute women, unacknowledged sons, the same transgression echoing a generation later. That structural rhyme is why the world's first great novel is still read a thousand years on — the family diagram is the argument.
Open & edit this family tree →