Quantitative analysis of the authorship problem of “The Tale of Genji”
Abstract
This study involves quantitative research on the authorship problem of “The Tale of Genji,” which is the most famous Japanese classical literary work, using statistical analysis methods. “The Tale of Genji” was written by Murasaki Shikibu (around 930-1014), who is one of the most famous female novelists from the Heian period (794-1185). It is a full-length tale set at the Heian Imperial Court that depicts the love story of Hikaru Genji, the main character. The tale has been widely read across generations. There is a theory that the final 13 volumes were penned by different authors because of differences in the stage and the main character. Japanese literary research has been unable to resolve this authorship problem, and it is still unclear whether there had been one or more authors for this literary work. This study applies quantitative methods to solve the authorship problem of this tale. In this study, a word n-gram and word length n-gram were used for analysis in order to resolve the authorship problem, but the result showed no difference in measurement characteristics between the final 13 and the other volumes of “The Tale of Genji.” The authorship problem of the literary work has been discussed for a long time, but the quantitative analysis performed by this study shows that there is no evidence supporting the theory that there might have been multiple authors of “The Tale of Genji.” It can, therefore, be concluded that “The Tale of Genji” was likely written by a single author.
Abstract
This study involves quantitative research on the authorship problem of “The Tale of Genji,” which is the most famous Japanese classical literary work, using statistical analysis methods. “The Tale of Genji” was written by Murasaki Shikibu (around 930-1014), who is one of the most famous female novelists from the Heian period (794-1185). It is a full-length tale set at the Heian Imperial Court that depicts the love story of Hikaru Genji, the main character. The tale has been widely read across generations. There is a theory that the final 13 volumes were penned by different authors because of differences in the stage and the main character. Japanese literary research has been unable to resolve this authorship problem, and it is still unclear whether there had been one or more authors for this literary work. This study applies quantitative methods to solve the authorship problem of this tale. In this study, a word n-gram and word length n-gram were used for analysis in order to resolve the authorship problem, but the result showed no difference in measurement characteristics between the final 13 and the other volumes of “The Tale of Genji.” The authorship problem of the literary work has been discussed for a long time, but the quantitative analysis performed by this study shows that there is no evidence supporting the theory that there might have been multiple authors of “The Tale of Genji.” It can, therefore, be concluded that “The Tale of Genji” was likely written by a single author.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Editors’ Foreword V
- Contents VII
- Why does negation of the predicate shorten a clause? 1
- The co-effect of Menzerath-Altmann law and heavy constituent shift in natural languages 11
- Does the century matter? Machine learning methods to attribute historical periods in an Italian literary corpus 25
- Too much of a good thing 37
- Linguistic laws in Catalan 49
- Dating and geolocation of medieval and modern Spanish notarial documents using distributed representation 63
- Cross-modal authorship attribution in Russian texts 73
- Free or not so free? On stress position in Russian, Slovene, and Ukrainian 89
- Unpacking lexical intertextuality: Vocabulary shared among texts 101
- The Menzerath-Altmann law in the syntactic relations of the Chinese language based on Universal Dependencies (UD) 117
- Statistical tools, automatic taxonomies, and topic modelling in the study of self-promotional mission and vision texts of Polish universities 131
- Quantitative characteristics of phonological words (stress units) 147
- Explorative study on the Menzerath- Altmann law regarding style, text length, and distributions of data points 161
- Quantitative analysis of the authorship problem of “The Tale of Genji” 179
- Revisiting Zipf’s law: A new indicator of lexical diversity 193
- A time-series analysis of vocabulary in Japanese texts: Non-characteristic words and topic words 203
- Authors’ addresses 217
- Name index 219
- Subject index 227
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Editors’ Foreword V
- Contents VII
- Why does negation of the predicate shorten a clause? 1
- The co-effect of Menzerath-Altmann law and heavy constituent shift in natural languages 11
- Does the century matter? Machine learning methods to attribute historical periods in an Italian literary corpus 25
- Too much of a good thing 37
- Linguistic laws in Catalan 49
- Dating and geolocation of medieval and modern Spanish notarial documents using distributed representation 63
- Cross-modal authorship attribution in Russian texts 73
- Free or not so free? On stress position in Russian, Slovene, and Ukrainian 89
- Unpacking lexical intertextuality: Vocabulary shared among texts 101
- The Menzerath-Altmann law in the syntactic relations of the Chinese language based on Universal Dependencies (UD) 117
- Statistical tools, automatic taxonomies, and topic modelling in the study of self-promotional mission and vision texts of Polish universities 131
- Quantitative characteristics of phonological words (stress units) 147
- Explorative study on the Menzerath- Altmann law regarding style, text length, and distributions of data points 161
- Quantitative analysis of the authorship problem of “The Tale of Genji” 179
- Revisiting Zipf’s law: A new indicator of lexical diversity 193
- A time-series analysis of vocabulary in Japanese texts: Non-characteristic words and topic words 203
- Authors’ addresses 217
- Name index 219
- Subject index 227
