Saoirse Killion ’21 Featured in BU’s Department of World Languages and Literatures Journal
Saoirse (BUA’21) graduated this spring from Boston University with a BA in Comparative Literature and a BFA in Painting. While at BU, her comic Ukifune was featured in Alexandria, a student-led journal within BU’s Department of World Language and Literatures. View Saoirse’s comic below and read more about Ukifune, along with insights into its origins, meaning, and the creative techniques.
Ukifune, a comic based on the last ten Uji chapters of Murasaki Shikibu’s early 11th century novel The Tale of Genji visualizes castaway Princess Ukifune’s experiences with beauty, social class, and femininity as she writes about her past, fraught relationships with two handsome but overbearing suitors. Murasaki Shikibu was a lady-in-waiting for Empress Shōshi during Japan’s Heian period (794 – 1195) and an accomplished writer who, in her masterpiece often considered the world’s first novel, depicted the personal lives of high courtiers in the Heian capital. Ukifune’s source text is British sinologist Arthur Waley’s (1889 – 1966) 1920’s translation of The Tale of Genji. The comic visualizes Ukifune’s psychological struggle with her physical beauty and low social standing, drawing inspiration from both American and Japanese visual narrative techniques, and emakimono (12th century Japanese scroll paintings). The comic is ink and brush on calligraphy paper, materially mimicking Ukifune as she, now a Buddhist nun, claims ownership of her body and psyche with poetry.
Ukifune recites to herself, as “a theme for writing practice”, the following poem:
To those who thought my troublous course was run tell it not in your palace, sovereign moon, that thus I loiter in the world.
