The film without the cuts. And the book itself.
Every beautiful surface carries pressure.
Genji
A beautiful imperial son moves through curtains, carriages, and moonlit rooms carrying a grief he keeps trying to remake.
Imperial Palace
Behind the curtains and music of a polished court, loving someone becomes a public danger.
Favored by the Emperor, she pays for love with daily humiliation and rising enemies.
Read →A New and Embittered Enemy
Her lodging was in the wing called Kiritsubo. It was but natural that the many ladies whose doors she had to pass on her repeated journeys to the Emperor’s room should have grown exasperated; and sometimes, when these comings and goings became frequent beyond measure, it would happen that on bridges and in corridors, here or there along the way that she must go, strange tricks were played to frighten her or unpleasant things were left lying about which spoiled the dresses of the ladies who accompanied her.[5] Once indeed some one locked the door of a portico, so that the poor thing wandered this way and that for a great while in sore distress. So many were the miseries into which this state of affairs now daily brought her that the Emperor could no longer endure to witness her vexations and moved her to the Kōrōden. In order to make room for her he was obliged to shift the Chief Lady of the Wardrobe to lodgings outside. So far from improving matters he had merely procured her a new and most embittered enemy!
The cruelty here is petty, physical, and constant rather than dramatic. Kiritsubo is the Emperor's low-ranking favorite, and because her room lies far from his, she has to walk past the doors of higher women again and again, which turns the whole palace into a gauntlet: filth left out to ruin her attendants' clothes, a locked door that leaves her lost and helpless. When the Emperor finally moves her closer, he only evicts another woman to do it, so his one act of protection buys her fresh hatred instead of peace.
Kiritsubo dies and Genji is made a commoner
The emperor's favorite consort wastes away from court hostility, and her son - too brilliant to ignore, too dangerous to make crown prince - is quietly removed from the succession.
Letters and Poems
A folded sheet of verse can wound, invite, refuse, or mourn without a door ever opening.
The Emperor
A grieving ruler sits among paintings, poems, and palace curtains, unable to separate love from rule.
The Tale of Genji
The cast, locations, objects of note, core concepts, and selected passages in the Author’s Pen - at your own pace.
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