The importance of emotion to the novel…

Murasaki Shikibu lived from c. 973–c.1014. In her novel The Tale of Genji, Hikaru Genji might have expressed Lady Murasaki’s own views on the role of emotion in writing.

The novel includes the following passage:

He smiled and went on: “But I have a theory of my own about what this art of the novel is, and how it came into being. To begin with, it does not simply consist in the author’s telling a story about the adventures of some other person. On the contrary, it happens because the storyteller’s own experience of men and things, whether for good or ill – not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of – has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart. Again and again something in his own life or in that around him will seem to the writer so important that he cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion. There must never come a time, he feels, when men do not know about it. That is my view of how this art arose…”

See Murasaki Shikibu, On the Art of the Novel, from Sources of Japanese Tradition Volume 1, Columbia University Press, New York, 1964.