M. Childs

Maggie Childs

The Nature of Love in Japanese Court Literature

Description of Research:

I first became interested in medieval Buddhist short stories because of a few tales that describe homosexual love affairs between monks and acolytes.  Many Buddhist narratives have a strong didactic element and were thought uninteresting but I found them to be quite complicated and engaging and published a book of translations and analyses: Rethinking Sorrow: Revelatory Tales of Late Medieval Japan. 

When teaching The Tale of Genji in premodern Japanese literature classes, my students often struggled to see Genji as a hero.  I realized that Seidensticker's translation was often inaccurate and that my students needed help understanding the cultural values embedded in the tale, so I set out to re-translate certain key scenes and to analyze attitudes toward love and romance as found in Heian and Kamakura period literature. 

My next project is to re-translate Yowa no nezame, a late Heian work inspired by The Tale of Genji, about a woman who was raped by her sister’s fiancé.  Her rapist falls in love with her, and she ends up having to depend on him.  It shows male characters as hopelessly romantic and the heroine as sensible and practical.  A previous translation, never published, is full of errors, but it is a fascinating text.