The eleventh-century masterpiece The Tale of Genji casts a long shadow across the literary terrain of the Heian period (794-1185). It has dominated critical and popular reception of Heian literary production and become the definitive expression of the aesthetics, poetics, and politics of life in the Heian court.

But the brilliance of Genji has eclipsed the works of later Heian authors, who have since been displaced from the canon and relegated to critical obscurity.

Charo B. D'Etcheverry calls for a reevaluation of late Heian fiction by shedding new light upon this undervalued body of work. D'Etcheverry examines three representative texts—The Tale of Sagoromo, The Tale of the Hamamatsu Middle Counselor, and Nezame at Night—as legitimate heirs to the literary legacy of Genji and as valuable indexes to the literary tastes and readerly expectations that evolved over the Heian period.

Balancing careful analyses of plot, character, and motif with keen insights into the cultural and political milieu of the late Heian period, D'Etcheverry argues that we should read such works not as mere derivatives of a canonical text, but as dynamic fictional commentaries and variations upon the tropes and subplots that continue to resonate with readers of Genji.

The Tale of Genji (ca. 1008), by noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, is known for its sophisticated renderings of fictional characters’ minds and its critical perspectives on the lives of the aristocracy of eleventh-century Japan. Unreal Houses radically rethinks the Genji by focusing on the figure of the house. Edith Sarra examines the narrative’s fictionalized images of aristocratic mansions and its representation of the people who inhabit them, exploring how key characters in the Genji think about houses in both the architectural and genealogical sense of the word.

Through close readings of the Genji and other Heian narratives, Unreal Houses elucidates the literary fabrication of social, architectural, and affective spaces and shows how the figure of the house contributes to the structuring of narrative sequences and the expression of relational nuances among fictional characters. Combining literary analysis with the history of gender, marriage, and the built environment, Sarra opens new perspectives on the architectonics of the Genji and the feminine milieu that midwifed what some have called the world’s first novel.