The Tale of Genji Is Not a Romance

The Tale of Genji is often described as the world’s first novel and, almost automatically, as a great romance. It contains lovers, longing, exquisite poetry, moonlit encounters, and scenes of extraordinary emotional intensity.

Yet to read Genji as a romance is to misrecognize its central logic. Murasaki Shikibu does not write toward fulfillment, reciprocity, or emotional resolution.

She writes toward exposure—of power, of harm, and of the slow, inescapable working of impermanence.

Romance promises mutuality. Genji is structured around asymmetry.

From the outset, Genji’s desirability is inseparable from his position. He moves through the world with an ease that is never available to the women he encounters. His beauty is repeatedly described as overwhelming, even dangerous, and people respond to it as if to a force of nature rather than a personal quality. At one point, his presence is said to leave others “unable to resist him,” a phrase that recurs in different forms throughout the narrative. This is not the language of courtship; it is the language of inevitability.

Women’s consent in Genji exists within narrow bounds. Refusal is often impractical, sometimes impossible, and frequently reinterpreted as coyness or encouragement. Silence is dangerous because it can be read as acquiescence; resistance can invite pursuit. When Genji acts, the narrative rarely pauses to ask whether he should. It asks instead what will happen afterward.

And what happens afterward is harm. The women of Genji do not suffer because they love unwisely. They suffer because intimacy with power destabilizes their lives. Some are hidden away, their existence narrowed to secrecy. Others are displaced by rivals, consumed by jealousy, or slowly erased by neglect. Even those who appear briefly favored live with constant precarity. As one woman reflects, happiness feels “like a dream from which one must wake.”

This is not incidental. It is structural.

Murasaki returns again and again to the aftermath of desire rather than its spark. The emotional weight of the novel lies not in consummation but in what lingers: waiting, shame, fear, and remembrance. Love does not organize the world into meaning; it exposes how little protection meaning offers.

This is where Genji reveals its Buddhist core. Attachment is not treated as sin, but as condition. To love is to bind oneself to loss. Beauty heightens this risk rather than redeeming it. A perfect moment only sharpens awareness of its ending. One character observes that nothing lasts “even for a single night,” and the novel repeatedly stages scenes where joy is immediately shadowed by foreknowledge of decline.

Impermanence is not a theme layered onto the story; it is the story’s engine.

Even Genji, who moves freely and leaves devastation in his wake, does not escape this logic. His later life is marked by fatigue and regret. Pleasure loses its brightness. The emotional costs of his earlier actions accumulate, not as punishment but as consequence. By the time the narrative approaches his death, he is no longer the triumphant lover of earlier chapters but a figure weighed down by memory.

Crucially, the novel does not end with him.

After Genji’s death, the narrative widens, following others into repetition, longing, and disappointment. This continuation is one of the clearest signals that Genji is not a romance. There is no final pairing that resolves the story, no emotional closure that redeems what came before. Desire persists beyond the hero, reproducing the same patterns of attachment and loss.

Romance offers consolation. Genji withholds it.

What Murasaki Shikibu offers instead is a diagnosis of how love operates in a world structured by inequality and impermanence. She shows how power shapes intimacy, how beauty disarms resistance, and how women disproportionately absorb the costs of attachment. The novel’s elegance is not a mask for cruelty; it is part of the mechanism by which harm occurs so quietly.

To read The Tale of Genji as a romance is comforting. It allows readers to dwell on elegance rather than injury, longing rather than consequence. But Murasaki does not write to soothe. She writes to see clearly.

Genji is not a story about love fulfilled. It is a story about how people love in a world that does not protect them—and how even the most exquisite attachments dissolve under the weight of time.