Tale of Genji: Dream at Dawn Volume 1 by Waki Yamato

[spindizzy]

First published in the 1980s and 90s, Waki Yamato’s renowned adaptation of Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century literary masterpiece is still gorgeous to behold and is considered one of the greatest novel-to-manga adaptations of all time. Prince Genji falls in love with his stepmother, and so begins a forbidden love that will make him suffer his whole life. Genji's love story involves him falling for many women and begins with his love for Princess Fujitsubo — his father's wife, and his stepmother. And Genji will cross that line which he should never cross.

I'm going to be upfront with you: I don't recommend Tale of Genji: Dreams at Dawn. It's a manga adaptation of Murasaki Shibiku's Tale of Genji, following the son of an emperor who falls in love with his stepmother (who is apparently the spitting image of his dead birth mother), and pursues several other women in an attempt to find a replacement for her. Including the ten-year-old cousin of his stepmother, who he takes in as his ward, who will – according to character summary at
the back of the book – become his wife when she's older.

Yeah, that was the face that I made too.

The art has a weird combo of eighties manga charm and same-face syndrome for the female characters, which means that for most of it I was relying on context to tell the characters apart. I don't know if I wasn't paying enough attention, or if it was actually a clever metatextual touch, in that all women look like his mother to Genji. When the art works well though, it has the framing and staging of a woodblock print, which is effective for the story being told.

As for the story itself, I feel like it went past at an incredible speed. It's not surprising, considering it's trying to cover nineteen years in the space of a few pages, but it meant that the cast of women around Genji come on stage and leave again before we really have a chance to get to know them. I would have liked more about them, because most of them do seem to have their own lives and histories separate from Genji, but alas, they're all written out before we get it. But it does mean that there are some odd gaps in the story; did the woman who tried to kill Genji's mother suffer any consequences? Did Genji ever mention to his best friend that he found the lover and child that the friend had thought missing for years? I would much rather have had the stories of the women around Genji than Genji himself, although I feel like that might not have fixed the cruelty of a chapter where the "joke" is that the woman Genji is pursuing isn't as beautiful or cultured as he expected.

I think the most interesting part for me was the creator's notes in the back where the author talks about the process of researching and adapting The Tale of Genji. Her initial conception of it was specifically as a
shoujo manga, which I found fascinating! It's also where I realised that thankfully I wasn't supposed to like Genji, which made me feel more warmly towards the manga as a whole!

As an introduction to one of the world's oldest works of fiction, it's fairly interesting, but I don't think I would read this for its own merits.

[Caution warnings: incest, mentions of grooming in future volumes, dubious consent, death of parents] [This review was based on an ARC from Netgalley.]