アーサー・ウェイリー最晩年の源氏物語観

抄録

　Arthur Waley (1889–1966) was silent about The Tale of Genji after he completed the English translation from the original Japanese in 1935, except for his book review on Professor Kazuo Oka’s Genjimonogatari no Kisoteki Kenkyu (1954, Tokyo).

　This was in striking contrast to his voluminous and numerous achievements in the Chinese field made after he completed the translation of Genji. However, we are able to understand Waley’s views of The Tale of Genji in his closing days, by his book reviews on Ivan Morris’s The World of the Shining Prince — Court Life in Ancient Japan — (1964, Oxford). In this book review, Waley still holds fast to his own views which appeared in 1935, that the ending of The Tale of Genji is perfect. In opposition to Professor Morris’s conclusion, Waley thinks that it is quite definite that The Tale of Genji is complete. He considers that the last line of The Bridge of Dreams appearing in the last chapter of this Tale is a perfect ending to which the wavering and suspicious character of of Kaoru comes into effect. Waley suggests that if The Bridge of Dreams was continued by the authoress in order to make readers “know something more about Kaoru’s and Niou’s reactions to Ukifune’s retirement to a nunnery”, as Professor Morris thinks, The Tale of Genji should have become like one of the works of Wilkie Collins.

　It may be said in the conclusion that if the points of the technique in The Tale of Genji consisted in the elasticity of time, for instance, “flash back”, “anticipation”, “digression”，and “sudden acceleration” in the time sequence of plot, which characterize the turn of Western novels in this century, Waley’s views on The Tale of Genji being perfectly complete must have appeared under the atmosphere of his Bloomsbury group.

　In writing this paper, I am indebted to Madly Singing in the Mountain — An Appreciation and Anthology of Arthur Waley, edited by Professor I. Morris in 1970.