The Genji Album (1510) in the Harvard Art Museums is the oldest dated set of Genji illustrations known to exist. In The Tale of Genji. A Visual Companion, published by Princeton University Press in 2018, Melissa McCormick discusses all of the fifty-four paintings by Tosa Mitsunobu and calligraphies in the album, thus providing a unique companion to Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh century masterpiece of prose and poetry, The Tale of Genji.

Ricarda Brosch is an Assistant Curator at the V&A’s Asian Department, East Asia section. You can follow her on Twitter: @RicardaBeatrix.

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