The Genji Poetry Database is a project created by Professor J. Keith Vincent and his students in LJ250 “Masterpieces of Japanese Literature” at Boston University. The database contains all 795 poems in Murasaki Shikibu's tenth century masterpiece, The Tale of Genji. The poems are searchable by chapter, speaker, and addressee and can be accessed in the original Japanese, in transliterated Roman letters (romaji), and in five different English translations by Arthur Waley, Edward Seidensticker, Royall Tyler, Dennis Washburn, and Edwin Cranston.
This website follows in a long tradition in Japan of reading the poems in the Tale of Genji independently of their narrative context. Use it to read the poems on their own, or follow along as you read the Tale. When you finish a chapter, you may want to reread the poems here as a way of reviewing the emotional contours of the chapter. Use the database to see all the poems written or received by a given character, or follow the poetic dialogue between pairs of characters over the course of the novel. Compare the translations and see how vastly and wonderfully different they can be. Use the filters and keyword search to find patterns. And enjoy! We plan to add more functions to the website soon, so check back often.
The painting above is from the Tale of Genji Scrolls (Genji monogatari emaki), Azumaya I, in the collection of the Tokugawa Art Museum.