Genji Monogatari Emaki

　

The Genji Monogatari Emaki (源氏物語絵巻^?), also called The Tale of Genji Scroll, is a famous illustrated hand scroll of the Japanese literature classic The Tale of Genji from the 12th century, perhaps c. 1120–1140. The surviving sections, now broken up and mounted for conservation reasons, represent only a small proportion of the original work (if it was complete) and are now divided between two museums in Japan, Tokugawa Art Museum and the Gotoh Museum, where they are only briefly exhibited, again for conservation reasons. Both groups are National Treasures of Japan. It is the earliest text of the work and the earliest surviving work in the Yamato-e tradition of narrative illustrated scrolls, which has continued to impact Japanese art, arguably up to the present day. The painted images in the scroll show a tradition and distinctive conventions that are already well developed, and may well have been several centuries in the making.

The word emaki stems from the word "emakimono" meaning "picture scrolls". The emakimono picture scrolls consisted of two designs: Pictures that were painted on a scroll with text added to the same scroll or a number of paintings that accompanied passages of text and were joined together in a scroll. The first known picture scroll was produced in Japan during the late ninth or tenth century. The Genji Monogatari picture scroll, however, was produced in the early twelfth century. Not only is the Genji Monogatari Emaki the oldest surviving monogatari scroll but it is also the oldest surviving non-Buddhist scroll in Japan. There is no exact date to the scroll, but it is estimated to being sometime between 1120 and 1140, in which case it was created just a little over a century after Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji.

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