literature

The first emperor to appear in The Tale of Genji  is ‘Emperor Kiritsubo’（桐壺帝）. He ascended the throne at a young age, probably after some political upheaval.

During the Heian period, the quickest way to gain power was to become the emperor’s maternal grandfather. The upper nobility competed with each other to get their daughters into the imperial court. The upper nobility was a small world, mostly relatives. At that time, polygamy was the norm in the aristocracy. As the children belonged to the mother’s clan, siblings from different mothers were brought up separately. In addition, siblings from the same mother often did not get on well with each other. This was because their greatest rivals were brothers who had the same mother.

During the Nara and early Heian periods (8th to 9th centuries), there were frequent political conflicts, especially between the imperial families, which could be described as killing each other.In the mid-Heian period, when the upper nobility became more powerful than the imperial family, political disputes also shifted to the upper nobility.

Tennryuu-ji(天龍寺）京都フリー写真素材　

If history is anything to go by, by the time Emperor Kiritsubo ascended the throne, a significant number of the nobility had lost political power.
The first chapter of The Tale of Genji, the Kiritsubo Scroll, describes the prehistory of the story in silence.
We can draw an analogy to what the author does not say by asking, “Why is it not told?