Six books in four years attest to the vitality of this field of scholarship in Japanese literature. The number also presents a challenge for a multi-book review. Without preamble, let me launch into consideration of the individual works, making comments that connect the works along the way.
Michael Emmerich's The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature traverses enormous ground in detailing the history of the Tale of Genji’s reception from mid-nineteenth-century Japan through a “global translational loop” in the twentieth century that has resulted in the placement of the Tale of Genji at the top echelon of both the canon of national literature within Japan and the canon of world literature. His study is divided into two parts.
The first part imaginatively reconstructs the early modern reading of the Nise Murasaki Inaka Genji (A Fraudulent Murasaki's Bumpkin Genji). The Inaka Genji, produced between 1829 and 1842,...