Two thirds of the way through the Tale of Genji, the eponymous hero, the Shining Prince, dies a death that goes unnarrated. The next chapter famously opens with the announcement: “Now that his light was gone, among the many descendants there who had basked in his glow not a one could take his place.” For the last several years, Professor Sarra has been researching late Heian court fiction and the un-Genji-like male fantasy figures who occur repeatedly in the wake of the Shining Prince. In this talk she discusses aspects of Genji’s characterization itself (the “lightness” that makes him unbearable to repeat), and an unlikely heroine whose centrality to late Heian court fiction has much to suggest about the differently imagined arrangements of domestic space, power, and erotic relations in court fiction (and perhaps even actual court life) after Genji.

Edith Sarra is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Adjunct Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at IU-Bloomington. Her book, Fictions of Femininity: Literary Inventions of Gender in Japanese Court Women’s Memoirs (Stanford UP, 1999), tracks patterns of feminine self-representation in four memoirs of the mid Heian period. Her current research centers on issues of gender, fantasy, and domestic architecture in fictional narratives of the late Heian and early Kamakura periods.