Palace of Poetry

The Tale of Genji is a sprawling story of love, lust, grief, and ambition a thousand years ago. Orbiting around the shining prince Genji, a handsome playboy and charismatic politician, the tale also introduces hundreds of others, from elegant retired empresses to diplomatic serving-women. While most adaptations focus upon the episodic early chapters, the heart of the book is the middle third of its fifty-four chapters. Genji's star rises, and very different women gather within the four quarters of Genji’s palace. The action shifts to maneuvering his children and foster children into advantageous positions. How can they elevate Genji's foster daughter to the throne and help her thrive there? Who should raise Genji's young daughter to best prepare her to become empress eventually?

Written by a pseudonymous lady in the imperial court, the Tale of Genji sits at the center of Japan's literary canon. Within two centuries of its writing, all authors, male and female, needed to know it. Every Japanese schoolchild now works their way through the Tale, and Virginia Woolf reviewed a partial English translation in Vogue magazine in 1925. Its elegant poetry and careful circumlocutions, captured by several excellent English translations, are a velvet glove over the iron hand of family constraints, despair, and love. Our goal with this visual novel is to help teachers of world literature or history guide interested readers through the curtains of Heian manners to their complex humanity.

In Palace of Poetry’s first-person narrative, the player personally interacts with the women of Genji’s palace in a way that introduces Japanese culture, history, gender roles, and day-to-day life. The game dives deeper into each of the characters, taken directly from the text, and provides visuals and quests that parallel similar events in the story to make the novel more accessible to a new audience.

Available to download on itch.io: Palace of Poetry.