SOURCE: Konishi, Jin'ichi. “Prose in Japanese.” In A History of Japanese Literature, translated by Aileen Gatten, edited by Earl Miner, pp. 355-64. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Konishi discusses the Tales of Ise as a collection of fictionalized episodes based on actual events and handed down from oral sources. He also compares the stories to similar tales of the same era.

Most prose works composed in Japanese during the tenth and eleventh centuries have characteristics embracing the monogatari, the nikki, and the shū. Assigning them to one or another category involves assessment of preponderant qualities. Not infrequently, the most outstanding aspect of a work provides the basis for determining its tentative classification. One clearly discernible group consists of monogatari narrating fact rather than fiction. There are two kinds of monogatari within this group: those resembling shū, in which waka forms the core of...