“Quiet as it's kept, The Tale of Genji is a queer text.” So begins Reginald Jackson's book on Genji monogatari (ca. 1008), a study that succeeds admirably in its quest to continue, in a new and fascinating key, conversations about a tale that has been triggering talk for well over a millennium. Jackson puts the tale in conversation with queer theory at a moment when the latter has veered away from its earlier preoccupation with issues of “sexuality, identity, and embodiment and toward questioning broader normative paradigms” (4). In Jackson's terms, to say that the Genji queers, means “that it imagines alternatives through its questioning of inherited structures of thought, action, and feeling. Queering does not need to center on sexuality and antinormative subversion; it can instead bring attention to the embodied experience of contingency, instances where physical or psychic stability is threatened” (5). Bookended by a preface, a conclusion,...
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