. . . So young a boy attracted little attention and indeed little deference from the guards. He left Genji at an east door to the main hall. He pounded on the south shutters and went inside.

`Shut it, shut it!' shrieked the women. `The whole world can see us.'

`But why do you have them closed on such a warm evening?'

`The lady from the west wing has been here since noon. They have been at Go.'

Hoping to see them at the Go board, Genji slipped from his hiding place and made his way through the door and the blinds. The shutter through which the boy had gone was still raised. Genji could see through to the west. One panel of the screen just inside had been folded back, and the curtains, which should have shielded off the space beyond, had been thrown over their frames, perhaps because of the heat. The view was unobstructed.

There was a lamp near the women. The one in silhouette with her back against a pillar -- would she be the one on whom his heart was set? He looked first at her. . .

So begins the famous passage in the third chapter of The Tale of Genji that, centuries later, inspired some of the most elaborate woodblock prints ever made in Japan or anywhere else. The scene of Prince Genji spying on the two court ladies at go, endlessly adapted to different circumstances, was one of the subjects the public liked best during the last two decades of the Tokugawa period. This great novel was written between the years 1000 and 1015 by a woman of genius who is known to posterity as Murasaki Shikibu. She was a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Akiko. The novel circulated at first in the form of manuscript copies and soon made her famous. It quickly became a classic, and indeed eventually achieved a status almost equal to that of the canonical Buddhist texts.

The painting of important scenes from different chapters of the novel became a popular pastime in aristocratic circles, many members of which, like ladies and gentlemen of Victorian England, were trained artists. By the 13th century such paintings had evolved into a new art form called `Genji pictures'. Guides were prepared for the use of amateur and professional artists that specified the pictorial requirements of each scene -- someone standing here, two women seated over there, a lamp on that side, a distant view of a garden through the window, the season to be mid-summer, and so on.

As the novel's fame spread century after century to an ever wider public, some of these scenes became set-pieces for artists working in a variety of different forms ranging from huge, twelve-fold screens down to tiny netsuke. Some of these scenes appear in album illustrations and woodblock prints of the 17th and 18th centuries, but it was not until near the middle of the 19th century that Genji prints reached the height of their sumptuousness and popularity.

The impetus behind this development came from two directions. The first was a ban on prints of actors and courtesans, a measure imposed by the Tempo Reforms of 1842, which forced artists and their publishers to turn to historical and literary themes for their subjects. The second was the publication of the novel Nise Murasaki Inaka Genji (A Sham of Murasaki's Rustic Genji), a hugely successful, affectionately written burlesque of Lady Murasaki's tale. Written by the brilliant samurai-novelist Ryutei Tanehiko and extensively illustrated by Kunisada, it appeared in 38 installments (172 fascicles) from 1829 to 1842. In that year the government forced the author to stop, and he committed suicide. Popular enthusiasm for the novel, however, remained at a high pitch.

In 1851 the actor Danjuro VIII achieved a great hit in a dramatization of the novel under the title Genji Moyo Furisode Hinagata (Dress Patterns in Genji Style) -- Japanese play titles have a flavor all their own -- produced at the Ichimura Theater in Edo with costumes and sets based on Kunisada's designs. Together the novel and the play created a boom in Genji-ism, lasting well into the 1860s. Much of the credit for the success of Tanehiko's novel was due to Kunisada for his imaginative illustrations based on sketches made by Tanehiko himself. The result was that Kunisada and his pupils became, in effect, the official designers of Genji prints. His friend and rival Kuniyoshi, the great designer of warrior prints, tried his hand at some as well, but the Kunisada group had prior claim and were prolific enough to dominate the market for many years.

In spite of the ban on actor prints, which remained theoretically in effect through most of the 1850s, many of the faces seen in these Genji prints are recognizable today as well-known actors of the time and would have been immediately familiar to contemporary theatergoers. But because the actors were not identified by name in the prints, as had been customary up to that time, publishers were able to keep up the pretense that they were only displaying figures from classic literature.

The scenery, costumes and manners displayed in these Genji prints have more the flavor of Tanehiko's own time than of an earlier age, yet the subject gave artists virtually unlimited scope for picturing elegant men and women in beautiful costumes placed against richly decorated interiors. Publishers, too, rose to the occasion by using, to an unprecedented degree, the expensive and laborsome oban triptych format and by employing engravers and printers whose technical skills have never been surpassed. The Edo public, bedevilled in the last years of the Tokugawa Shogunate by economic troubles, government restrictions, and by a rising tide of malaise, found in such prints a gentler and happier world than its own, and was entranced.

The hero of Tanehiko's Rustic Genji is, as the name suggests, not identical with the hero of Lady Murasaki's 11th-century novel but rather a kind of 19th-century avatar. Just as the original Genji was the bastard son of the Emperor, the rustic Genji, whose name is Prince Mitsuuji, is the bastard son of the Ashikaga Shogun, Yoshimasa. The plot of the novel unfolds from Prince Mitsuuji's loyal efforts to unravel a conspiracy against his father's government. In the course of the action he is required to masquerade as a libertine and engage in many amorous adventures. In its construction the novel recalls the main events of The Tale of Genji, and many important scenes are mitate, or burlesques, which depend for some of their effect on the reader's familiarity with parallel scenes in the original.