A set of illustrated handscrolls produced in Japan during the first half of the 12th century, estimated between 1120 and 1140 CE, contains the earliest surviving pictorial rendering of The Tale of Genji, the 11th-century novel by court lady Murasaki Shikibu. The scrolls are painted in ink and mineral pigments on paper, with text sections written in hiragana calligraphy on paper decorated with tiny pieces of gold and silver foil sprinkled across the surface. The four surviving volumes measure approximately 22 centimeters in height, with individual scroll lengths ranging from 472 centimeters to 817.3 centimeters. What survives today amounts to roughly 15 percent of what scholars estimate was the complete original work. The original is believed to have comprised 20 rolls covering all 54 chapters of the novel, with more than 100 paintings and over 300 sheets of calligraphy extending to approximately 137 meters in total length. The surviving portions contain 19 paintings, 65 sheets of text, and 9 pages of fragments. Three of the four volumes are held at the Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya, donated to the Owari Tokugawa Reimeikai Foundation in 1931 and transferred to the museum when it was founded in 1935. The fourth volume, which belonged historically to the Hachisuka clan, lords of Awa Province, passed to collector Masuda Takashi during the Meiji period before being donated to the Gotoh Museum in Tokyo when that institution opened in 1960. Both holdings carry designation as National Treasures of Japan. The scrolls are displayed publicly for approximately one week each November and are otherwise kept in controlled storage due to their extreme fragility. The identity of the artists who produced the scrolls is unknown. The work was formerly attributed to court painter Fujiwara no Takayoshi, but this attribution has been revised through subsequent research. Evidence in the techniques used points to multiple calligraphers and painters working in close connection with the court, likely under aristocratic patronage.
Material and Craftsmanship
The scrolls were produced on fine Japanese paper prepared with a decorative ground of tiny gold and silver foil pieces, a technique reflecting the luxurious material standards of Heian court patronage. The silver portions have oxidized to a dark tone over the centuries. The paper served simultaneously as writing surface and visual element, its shimmer contributing to the overall aesthetic of the text sections.
The painting technique used is known as tsukuri-e, a layered approach in which artists first laid down an initial drawing in ink, then built up opaque mineral pigments over the lines in successive applications, and finally redrew the ink outlines on top of the pigment layers to restore definition and crispness to the figures. This four-stage process, beginning with scene selection, moving to ink underdrawing, then pigment application, then ink reinforcement, produced dense, richly colored surfaces where the original sketch lines are buried beneath the paint. Some sections of the scrolls, particularly in the 49th chapter Yadorigi, appear to show compositions where the process was not fully completed, with certain plant details remaining at the underdrawing stage.
Pigments were mineral-based and applied thickly. White areas used shell white, produced by grinding and processing oyster shells. The palette included deep reds, rich greens, blues, and black, all derived from ground mineral compounds. The calligraphy sections employed five distinct styles, including the compact Sesonji-ryu script written in gold and silver inks, deliberately varied across contributors to create visual rhythm across the text panels. Fine brushes were used throughout, for both the calligraphic passages and the detailed figural painting.
Form and Features
Each of the four surviving volumes follows the same structural pattern: a section of text, referred to as kotobagaki, precedes a painted scene illustrating the episode described. The text and painting alternate across the scroll's length as the viewer unrolls it from right to left. The kotobagaki do not function as straightforward narrative captions but as literary passages in their own right, written in a style so stylized and calligraphically refined that even educated Japanese readers today find them difficult to decipher. The aesthetic of the calligraphy was considered as important as its content.
The paintings use two distinctive compositional techniques that define the visual character of the scrolls. The first is fukinuki yatai, meaning "blown-off roof," in which interior scenes are shown from a high diagonal angle with the ceiling and roof removed, allowing the viewer to look down into the rooms of aristocratic residences. Architectural details including sliding screens, standing curtains, and floor mats are rendered with precision. The second technique is hikime kagibana, meaning "a line for the eye, a hook for the nose," a convention in which all faces are rendered with a horizontal line for each eye and a small hooked stroke for the nose, producing features that are essentially identical across every figure regardless of their identity or emotional state. Despite this uniformity, character differentiation is achieved through clothing, hair arrangement, posture, and position within the composition. Only one of the 19 surviving paintings departs from hikime kagibana, depicting a face with more individualized features.
Figures are shown with elongated proportions, their bodies largely concealed beneath layered robes. Limbs are rarely visible. The emotional content of scenes is conveyed through indirect means, including the positioning of figures relative to one another, the density of textiles and furnishings, and the selective visibility of faces. In several scenes, a principal character's face is turned away from the viewer or obscured entirely.
Cloud-like bands of opaque color, rendered in gold-toned pigment, appear in portions of the compositions to mask transitions or guide the viewer's eye through the scene. These decorative clouds are characteristic of the Yamato-e style and appear in later Genji illustrations as a codified element of the tradition.
Function and Use
The scrolls were produced as prestige objects for the Heian court aristocracy, who were the primary audience for both the original novel and its visual adaptation. Viewing emaki was a private, intimate activity. A small group of viewers would gather, unrolling the scroll gradually from right to left, pausing at each text passage before proceeding to the accompanying painting. The physical act of handling the scroll, the weight and texture of the paper, the sheen of the gold and silver ground, and the gradual revelation of successive scenes were all part of the experience.
The literary source, The Tale of Genji, was written by Murasaki Shikibu approximately a century before the scrolls were produced. It was already established as a central text of Heian aristocratic culture at the time of the emaki's creation. The decision to illustrate it in this format affirmed and extended its cultural prestige, making the narrative accessible in a visual form to viewers who might engage with the images and the calligraphy as aesthetic objects regardless of their ability to fully read the archaic text.
The scrolls also functioned as demonstrations of court refinement, representing the high standard of painting, calligraphy, and materials that Heian aristocratic workshops could produce. Commissioning such an object required substantial resources and access to skilled specialists, making the scrolls a marker of status and taste for their patron.
Cultural Context
The Heian period in Japan, spanning 794 to 1185 CE, was defined by the dominance of the Fujiwara clan, who effectively controlled the imperial court through a system of regency politics while maintaining the emperor as a ceremonial figurehead. Court culture during this period placed enormous value on aesthetic refinement, particularly in literature, poetry, music, and visual art. Women at court played a central role in literary production during the Heian period, writing in vernacular Japanese at a time when formal Chinese was the official language of government and scholarship. Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, written around 1000 to 1010 CE, is the most celebrated product of this literary culture, and is regarded by many scholars as the world's first novel.
By the early 12th century, when the emaki was produced, Japan was entering a period of political transition. The retired emperors Goshirakawa (1053 to 1129) and Toba (1103 to 1156) exercised influence through a system of cloistered rule during the period to which the scrolls are dated. The emaki was produced within or closely connected to court circles during this period, maintaining the aesthetic traditions of the Heian aristocracy even as political power began shifting toward the warrior class that would eventually establish the first shogunate in 1185.
The Yamato-e style of painting in which the scrolls are executed developed in Japan as a distinct departure from the Chinese-derived painting traditions that had been dominant in earlier centuries. It emphasized Japanese subjects, Japanese seasonal and architectural settings, and Japanese aesthetic values including mono no aware, a sensitivity to the transience and emotional texture of experience. The Genji Monogatari Emaki is the oldest surviving work in this tradition and established the visual conventions that subsequent generations of Yamato-e painters, including the Tosa school and its successor workshops, followed for centuries.
Discovery and Preservation
The scrolls did not require archaeological discovery in the conventional sense. They were preserved continuously through aristocratic and later feudal family collections. The three volumes now at the Tokugawa Art Museum passed through the Owari branch of the Tokugawa family, one of the three main branches descended from shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, and were donated to the Owari Tokugawa Reimeikai Foundation in 1931. The Tokugawa Art Museum was established in Nagoya in 1935 specifically to house and preserve this ancestral collection. The fourth volume, the Gotoh-bon, was documented in the possession of the Hachisuka clan in 1849, passed to collector Masuda Takashi during the Meiji period, and was eventually donated to the Gotoh Museum, founded in Tokyo in 1960.
For preservation, the three Tokugawa-bon volumes were separated from their scroll format and mounted as individual framed sheets in 1932. This measure reduced the mechanical stress of repeated rolling and unrolling on the fragile paper. Between 2016 and 2020, they were remounted again into scroll format to better reflect their original structure and facilitate long-term preservation under current conservation standards.
The scrolls are exhibited publicly for roughly one week each November, a schedule determined entirely by conservation concerns. Extended exposure to light, temperature fluctuation, and humidity accelerates pigment fading and paper degradation. High-resolution digital facsimiles and printed reproduction editions, including a full-size facsimile published by Maruzen-Yushodo Co. Ltd. in 2003, have made the complete surviving visual content accessible to researchers and the public without requiring additional handling of the originals. A 1911 modern copy of scroll two is held at the National Diet Library in Tokyo.
Why It Matters
The Genji Monogatari Emaki is the oldest surviving illustrated narrative handscroll in Japan and the oldest surviving example of the Yamato-e painting tradition. It preserves the oldest known text of The Tale of Genji itself, making it a document of primary literary as well as artistic significance. The visual conventions established in its 19 surviving paintings, including fukinuki yatai composition, hikime kagibana figural rendering, and the alternating text-and-image scroll format, defined the standards that Japanese painters followed across subsequent centuries when depicting the tale and other literary subjects. The scrolls also provide the most detailed surviving visual record of Heian aristocratic interiors, clothing, and spatial conventions, information that cannot be recovered from the novel's text alone. Their survival through nine centuries of war, fire, political upheaval, and institutional transfer across multiple family collections makes them exceptional among fragile works of this period and age.