Abstract
Matsukaze Chapter of the The Tale of Genji, Hikaru-Genji made a visit to Akashi-no-kimi in Ooi. Meanwhile, Murasaki-no-ue was only able to stay at the capital, waiting for his coming back. So, before the departure, Murasaki-no-ue, by quoting the Chinese folktale-Ranka,satirized that Genji's visit would take such a long time that even the handle of an axe was decayed.
The folktale Ranka tells a story about a man who visited an alien world by accident. Lingering for a short while in the alien world, he came back to the real world only to find that time flows away and everything has changed a lot. Namely, time passes slowly in the alien world.
Previous studies about Ranka in Matsukaze are limited to the quotation of the story or the analysis of Murasaki-no-ue's satire at Genji. However, this thesis argues that Genji's visit to Akashi-no-kimi as a whole can be analyzed by the sense of time of the axe-handle decaying.
Behaviors of those characters during this visit ― especially Genji, Akashi-no-kimi, Tou-no-chujou and one minister ― indicate their lost in the still time. Moreover, the original two-day visit was prolonged into four days, which kept the emperor and Murasaki-no-ue in the state of waiting. Genji, like the man in Ranka, lingered in the alien world, in which time flowed slowly than in the real one, and then came back. The quotation of Ranka works not only in rhetorics but also in interweaving the framework of the folktale and distortion of time into the Tale of Genji.
