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Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Storms
At several points during The Tale of Genji, a storm rages, the antithesis of peace and calm. This is most obvious during Genji’s exile from the imperial city. Nature regularly provides access to harmony, as when Genji gazes at mountains in the distance and feels a profound sense of peace and satisfaction. But storms are the explicit opposite of peace and calm, raging and battering the coast with uncontrolled force. They suggest that the world is out of harmony, out of order. They represent this disharmony when, at the start of “Exile at Akashi,” the violent storm is accompanied by a dream that makes Genji miserable. He dreams, as well, that his deceased father urges him to return home. Although he is pleased to read in a letter from Violet that the weather in the capital is also dreary, the storm manifests his misery in exile, urging him to risk everything to return to his rightful home. His willingness to face the storm’s wrath provides a test of his increasing maturity and preparation to return.
Silk
Silk represents the power of exchange in Genji’s world, and fabric appears often in the novel, covering bodies and screens. Of all the fabrics that appear, silk is the most important, valuable both as a gift and as a canvas for art. Its ability to absorb color, and to capture the delicate transition between colors, makes it ideal for the kinds of scarves and screens that Heian-era Japan prized as gifts. Its tactile properties, as well as its strength and warmth, means that silk could operate on multiple senses simultaneously. These many qualities are most evident in the episodes feature Cicada, especially when her scarf is likened to the delicate translucence of the insect’s wing. Silk adds materially to the exchange between Genji and Cicada, and it is similarly important at other points across the novel.
Flowers and Flowering Trees
Flowers and flowering trees are central symbols in The Tale of Genji, representative of the transience of natural beauty. Flowers provide names for many of the key female characters—Princess Wistaria and Violet, most prominently—as they gesture to forms of beauty that flourish in nature, independent of human arts and embellishments. Genji is especially attracted to flowers, as he first demonstrates in “Evening Glory,” when his eye is caught by a climbing vine with white blossoms. Readers soon learn that these flowers symbolize a blossom within, as well as outside the house. His attention correlates, in other words, to his fascination with women, for Genji has an exceptional sense of what brings loveliness into the world. Perfumed, delicate, and lovely, flowers symbolize, finally, the Heian-era ideals on display across the novel and exemplified in the dazzling Genji.
