Love In Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale Of Genji

What Women?

Murasaki Shikibu fills her novel, The Tale of Genji, with love story after love story, seduction after seduction. Lyric poetry flows freely between lovers, and male protagonists sweep women of every rank off their feet, seldom failing to obtain the object of their desire. Upon further examination, however, these men act not for the sake of love but for their own selfish gain. Through the characters of Murasaki, Ukifune, and the men who supposedly love them, Murasaki Shikibu portrays how men of the Heian period often loved women not for the women themselves, but pursued them in order to fulfill their own wants and desires. Murasaki Shikibu shows competition as a driving force beneath the pretense of love through the complex
Although apparently more sincere than Niou, Kaoru's treatment of Ukifune also derives from selfish desires. Rather than pursuing Ukifune for her own personal worth, from the very beginning he finds himself attracted to her solely based on her sisterhood to Oigimi, his dead love. When seeing her for the first time, "…he knew that this girl [Ukifune], even if not the same [as Oigimi], promised real consolation" (970) simply because of the blood tie of half-sisterhood she shares with the one he loved. As he progresses in his attentions towards her, her existence comforts him although she never becomes much more than a symbol of past memories and happiness for him. As he takes the drastic step of moving her to the mountains to keep her for himself, images of Oigimi keep overlapping (1003), showing how he has taken Ukifune as merely a replacement. Even when he discovers the affair between Ukifune and Niou, Kaoru does not react in jealousy the way a person truly in love would; rather, he decides that "…he would just let her go on being whatever she was to him" (1036), fully aware that he keeps her with him as a stand-in for his true love, Oigimi, who no longer inhabits this
At ten years old, Genji sees Murasaki as little more than a blank slate on which to write anything he desires. From the very first day she comes to live with him, he wakes her up saying "'A woman should be sweet and obedient.' And so began her education" (107). Paralleled to the father-daughter role in Heian society, he obsesses with raising her and creating in her the ideal female figure and says to himself, "I certainly brought [Murasaki] up properly, if I say so myself" (596) taking full credit for the outcome. From poetry, to music, to manners, he fulfills his own wants through his training of her, and ultimately falls in love with his creation, never knowing what kind of woman would have existed if not for his obsession to train