Rivals surround the court like ninefold mists
That obscure my view . . . all that I can do
Is imagine the moon above the clouds.
—poem from The Tale of Genji
Last year, he was the most trusted advisor to the world’s most powerful man. His compound is filled with consorts and children. People pore over his aphoristic writings and envy his wealth.
I’m not talking about Elon Musk but rather the eponymous hero of The Tale of Genji, the thousand-year-old novel written by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady of the Japanese court. The book’s hundreds of pages of prose and poetry comprise the cornerstone of the Japanese literary canon. The Tale of Genji is arguably the world’s first novel and depicts what may be the first antihero. Murasaki Shikibu authored it at the height of the Heian era (794–1185 AD) in the vernacular language, part of a lush flowering of great women writers, who outpaced the men still fettered by the use of classical Chinese.
Genji is the favorite son of the emperor by a lesser concubine. Just as Musk’s foreign birth bars him from the presidency, Genji can never be emperor himself because of his mother’s low social status. Yet he is the most celebrated man of his era, his person, dress, manners, and artistic talents peerless. To contemporary eyes, he leaves something to be desired, particularly when it comes to his treatment of women: he’s selfish, sexist, self-pitying, and deceitful. In the throes of a crippling oedipal complex, he sleeps with his stepmother, the empress, who passes off their son as the emperor’s issue, thereby disrupting a line of succession that sprang from a sun goddess. He grooms his favorite wife, the author-namesake Murasaki, as a child to be his paramour and perfect companion, and he gaslights her whenever she dares to be jealous about his dalliances. Worst of all, he regularly ravishes women without their consent. Even his surrogate daughter isn’t safe from his advances.
Still, Genji is beloved of emperors, court ladies, courtiers, and commoners alike. He’s the cynosure of a hothouse culture in which the ability to write highly allusive poetry is the prerequisite for social success. In those days, poems were commonly 31 syllables long—about the same length as the average post on X. Even when Genji barges behind the screen that keeps an aristocratic woman hidden and forces her to have sex with him, she must produce a morning-after poem celebrating their coupling. Genji’s literary exertions are as adept as his seductions. At one banquet to celebrate the full bloom of the cherry blossoms, Murasaki Shikibu writes, “When it came time to present the poems, the official lector had a difficult time even getting through Genji’s—people constantly interrupted his reading, making a big fuss and lavishly praising every line.”
As Elon Musk raged through the capital as Trump’s chosen emissary at the start of his second term, I kept being struck by parallels between him and Genji and wondered what we could learn from them. As a friend asked me, What does he want? Heian literature can’t answer that question, but exploring a woman’s portrayal of medieval court power may illuminate what has been happening and remind us of an ink-stained weapon of resistance.
**
Together we share that poignant sorrow
Secretly the breeze of an autumn dusk
Seeps to the very core of my being
The Heian court of Genji’s time perpetuated itself through propinquity. Dennis Washburn, translator of the most delectable English version of Genji, explains in his introduction,
The familial structure of the early court made proximity to the throne an overriding concern for those clans serving the imperial household. Such proximity was secured in part through official access provided by the acquisition of rank and the privileges of bureaucratic titles. However, a more important and direct way to gain proximity was through blood alliances created by marrying daughters into the imperial clan and, if male offspring were produced, into the line of succession itself. As a result of this system, the authority of the emperor was diluted over time by the efforts of rival families to gain political control.
In fiction and reality, families vied to send their attractive daughters to court, thereby placing them within the emperor’s fuck zone. Mating with him was tantamount to binding oneself to a god. At the same time, it was a gateway to greater temporal power for the men of the family, made possible through the sexual and childbearing labor of women.
In Trump’s court, unequaled access to power is also gained through proximity, which is why Musk camped out at Mar-a-Lago and hung around the White House, Trump’s two palaces. Like the Heian court, Trump’s palaces are deep states of patriarchy, but Musk secured an unprecedented level of access without giving Trump an heir. Rather than using the mediation of nubile women, his access was achieved through obsequiousness and—as it was with Genji—possession of something that Trump admires and wants for himself. In Genji’s case, it was his lambent beauty and literary gifts; Murasaki Shikibu writes that Genji “possessed an aura that prompted the courtiers to call him ‘the Radiant Prince.’” With Musk, it’s safe to say that his wealth is what Trump simultaneously respects and covets, even now.
As it happens, and as Genji and his class equals did, Musk is also buttressing his own seat of power through enthusiastic procreation with multiple partners. Musk’s obsession is not with breeding with the emperor but with breeding, period. One remarkable thing about both Trump and Musk is the extent to which they have flouted the decades-old veneer of the faithful political husband. Musk is openly polyamorous and has committed to having as many children as possible and housing them and their mothers in lavish Texan villas.
Genji is considered by other characters to be relatively bereft of children, siring only three by most counts despite his innumerable conquests. Rather than a full nursery, he pursues passion’s fleeting sunset. He raises promiscuity to an art form and then uses art to pacify his many wives and encourage their peaceful cohabitation. In the second half of his life, Genji builds a vast compound to house all of his wives, each of whom is granted a garden cultivated to bloom most exuberantly during their favorite season. Despite these amenities, the women continue their genteel rivalry through poems transmitted via impeccably dressed attendants:
The leaves began to change color in the ninth month, and the garden in front of Umetsubo’s residence was spectacular beyond words. At dusk, as an autumn breeze was blowing, she mixed various flowers and leaves in the lid of a box and sent them to Murasaki’s quarters. She chose one of her pages to deliver the gift. This girl, who was tall and statuesque, wore a woven, patterned robe of pale violet lined with blue over a short, dark purple singlet and a diaphanous outer robe of pale russet. … For her reply Murasaki spread moss in the lid of the box, placed some stones on top to suggest rocky crags, and then added a small five-needle pine tree to complete a miniature landscape.
The exquisite metonymy of Genji’s concubines is likely not to be found in Musk’s home court, for which he cites existential peril as the raison d’être. In the service of stopping the declining rate of (white) births, Musk is stocking his 14,400-square-foot mansion in Austin with his lovers and offspring; he has “at least fourteen” according to Gileon Jacobs in an April 2025 article in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Like the Radiant Prince, he is dedicated to spreading his seed, reportedly offering it to acquaintances. His shrill cries about the “moral obligation” to have children—he posted that “It should be considered a national emergency to have kids”—stink of both Genji and Gilead, not to mention eugenics. Musk has bemoaned the fact that some impressive women elect not to procreate: “I notice a lot of really smart women have zero or one kid. You’re like, ‘Wow, that’s probably not good.’” Musk’s father, meanwhile, struck a distinctly Genjian note when he married a former stepdaughter.
Musk’s pronatalism and his chagrin with women, including his two-time wife Talulah Riley, who dare to prioritize a career over childbearing echo Genji’s thoughts about his ideal woman:
I don’t care much for women who are clever and learned and won’t do what they’re told. By nature I’m not very good at being responsible . . . so I prefer for a woman who is soft and gentle—the type who, in a careless moment, might allow herself to be fooled, but in fact remains guarded and constant and acts according to the desires of her man.
Just as the second coming of Trump has already proven disastrous for trans Americans, women’s rights were further threatened as Musk whispered into the ear of a president found liable for sexual assault. The aura of masculine permissibility that is central to the allure of Trump’s political brand and Musk’s business empire—and indeed, all of Silicon Valley—could rapidly erode hard-won gains in gender equity. Recent polling has already clocked an increase in Republican men and women who want the latter to return to their “traditional” roles. One function of a court, after all, is to impose grandeur and a strong narrative of progress despite a regressive reality, blinding the populace to their grievances or options for resistance. In the kingdom of the bros, feminism starts to seem less aspirational to many of its subjects.
Besides, the cost-cutting by Musk and his DOGE goons will make the traditional role of stay-at-home mom simultaneously harder to avoid and harder to afford. Emily Klancher Merchant and Win Brown argued in The Conversation that it is pronatalism—not social security, as Musk has claimed—that “is a Ponzi scheme. It relies on new entrants to produce returns for earlier investors, with the burdens falling most heavily on women, who are responsible for the bulk of childbearing and child-rearing, often without adequate medical care or affordable child care.” As Musk chainsawed his way through programs that deliver education, medical care, child care, and other forms of material assistance to families, he ensured that for the women with children who live outside of his compound, that burden will be even more onerous.
**
Those who pass away, those who remain behind
All belong to a realm as fleeting as dew
How vain it is to brood and cling to this world
Many are bracing for worse to come, not just those of us who identify as women. Everything feels tenuous now. The Heian court was rooted in an aesthetic of impermanence called mono no aware, which swooned over the brief lives of cherry blossoms and love affairs. In a way, it lies diametrically opposite the “move fast and break things” motto of Musk and his tech cohorts. If that motto shrugs at the branches snapping in the winds of so-called progress, mono no aware is fully present in the storm. The blossom is beautiful because it is falling; passion is precious because it fades. Therefore, we need to pause and enjoy both to the utmost while accepting inevitable loss. The characters in The Tale of Genji exchange poems that stoically acknowledge this transience of love, pleasure, and solace. As Murasaki is dying, Genji observes, “Our lives are fragile dewdrops vying to disappear.” The upshot of both philosophies is that we must be pliant in the face of instability.
In fact, these philosophies may be two sides of the same coin: fatalism dressed up beautifully in color-coordinated robes on the one hand, and robed in a tech support t-shirt on the other. In the Heian court, everyone, no matter how privileged, was doomed by the nature of mortality. The slash-now-fix-later Silicon Valley culture that Musk epitomizes could be seen as a modern-day embrace of transience that disproportions worldly suffering to the non-rich. In Trump’s court, non-billionaires are sacrificed to inevitability on the delusions of a self-serving tech titan who purports to a desire to save mankind but really just wants a ginormous tax break.
**
How cruel of those chill waters of lustration
To grant but a glimpse of your reflected image
Reminding me all the more of my wretched fate
What will likely torment non-red-pilled citizens throughout the next four years is the kaimami enabled by social media posts. Kaimami is a culturally specific type of voyeurism that peeks out of the classical Japanese literary canon—and through hedges, slatted screens, and other interstices. For characters in The Tale of Genji, revelation comes through stolen glimpses. Kaimami reads fragments closely, microscoping details—the flutter of a hand, moon shadow on tresses. With kaimami, chance is romanticized, the ephemeral view eroticized. In one memorable scene, Genji releases a host of fireflies in a dark room so that an aristocratic suitor can be dazzled by a brief vision of the knockout he’s passing off as his daughter; in another, a storm and a cat contrive to push curtains aside and reveal Murasaki to his son by another woman. Kaimami assumes opulence. The space and trappings of wealth, including ladies tucked behind ornamental partitions, are required for its epiphanies.
Musk dazzles onlookers through glimpses in a manner similar to Genji. While the former has a much higher profile by the nature of the era he lives in, he has gone to great efforts to shield his private life, albeit with mixed success. What is most frightening about a man like Musk is that he seems to be everywhere and nowhere, maximally impactful yet secretive and unassailable. Wealth both amplifies and shields his person, and the form of his messages augments their effect. While the prose of The Tale of Genji is interspersed with nearly eight hundred poems, formalizing the theme of evanescence, Musk’s communications are usually delivered through the textual-visual hybrid genre of a social media post, formalizing disruption. The least hysterical of these have the power to create mystique and allow readers to project onto this nearly mythic figure whatever they desire him to have or to have themselves: intelligence, strength, foresight. Musk knows how to play to his audience. Even otherwise perceptive people of my acquaintance fawned over Musk until his recent antics. As Tressie McMillan Cottom argued in a New York Times op-ed, Musk ingeniously transforms “corporate shenaningans . . . into content for his fans.” Since the inauguration, “he is making the same kind of chaos-as-content in the federal government” for Trump’s base.
What consoles me is remembering that a millennia ago, a woman conjured a Musk-like figure and supercharged a publishing trend among a previously disenfranchised group. She reminds me that we have the power to frame Genji-like men through our words. Murasaki Shikibu portrayed kaimami but gave us big-picture perspective about imperial shenanigans. That telescoping perspective is what we need right now. Instead of panicking while we peer through the slats of doomscrolling, we must calmly survey the flawed men fumbling an empire and write about how to resist them.
**
Recently, Musk self-exiled from the court. But Genji did too, acquiescing to temporary banishment to the backwoods of Suma for sleeping with one of the emperor’s consorts, only to return to his old position at court, another wife in tow, after a seemly break. At present, Musk seems to be beating a tactical retreat after a very public meltdown, which may intimate a wish for a similar restoration down the road.
Exiled or not, as long as he’s the richest man in the world during a reign of billionaires, Musk will continue to wield a Genji-like influence. Ominously, Trump remarked upon his exit, “He will always be with us, helping all the way.” It’s not over yet.
You bask in the Emperor’s gracious light, as radiant
As the morning sun you gaze upon . . . but do not forget
The frost that clings to the underside of the bamboo grass
In The Tale of Genji, that poem is written by a suitor to a girl about to go into sexual service at the palace. But it’s also a lovely metaphor for the resilience of the downtrodden, those who would resist—buffeted by autumn winds, yet massing in the shade.