THE NARRATIVE TIME OF 'GENJI MONOGATARI'

Two distinct times flow simultaneously in a narrative: one in which events of the story take place, and one in which the narrator tells his story. These two times--story's time and narrator's time--are normally distinguished by the use of two separate tenses, the past tense for the former and the present tense for the latter. In Genji monogatari, however, they are combined and presented in the present tense, a narrative mode that helps to create a physically immediate and psychologically intimate world in which narrator, narrative, and audience are united.;The "Wakamurasaki" chapter of Genji provides ample opportunities to test the validity of the proposed interpretations of keri and the other suffixes, since the chapter is primarily concerned with a process of discovery and realization, in which the relationship of past and present, known and unknown, is intrinsic to the development of plot and character. As the young Genji tries to cope with his yearning for a mother whom he never knew, the narrator describes what is visible and what is hidden, what others think Genji is and what he really is. Fujitsubo, the surrogate mother figure, emerges before the audience during the course of the narrative, but remains hidden from most of the characters. The author demonstrates how the truth may lie buried beneath the surface, how Genji's seemingly frivolous behavior in abducting the ten-year-old Murasaki is in fact a desperate--and successful--bid to restore the past and heal a childhood grief.;The author's artistic success is in large part due to the narrator she creates, a narrator who is capable of tracing both the external and internal realities of characters and events. The key to this integration is the present tense of narration that allows the narrator's consciousness to merge with that of both her characters and her audience.;The key to unifying the two times is the verb suffix keri. It possesses a unique function in Heian Japanese: it brings past events into the narrative present. The Genji narrator employs this suffix deftly at the outset of the narrative to establish the story's past at the narrative present and uses it with economy thereafter to maintain the narrative flow. Other verb suffixes which pertain to the maintenance of the flow are tu, nu, ri, tari, and ki. Tu and nu can be defined as suffixes of processional and resultative realization respectively; ri and tari as suffixes of simple duration and realized duration; and ki as the past tense marker. Keri, a combination of ki and ari (i.e., the past tense and durative aspect indicator), presents a past event at the time of narration. The fundamental procedure in correctly interpreting keri is to identify the past event to which reference is made. When the past is only implied by the context, keri usually signifies the speaker's discovery of something hitherto unknown to him.