Just
as the Tale of Genji has been called the world’s first psychological
novel, so these scrolls may be the world’s earliest psychological paintings.
What makes this difficult for us to understand are the highly stereotyped
faces of all the figures in the Genji scroll. Both men and women are represented
simply by dashes for the eyes and a hood for the nose. Every face looks
very much the same, and none show any obvious expressions that might convey
an individual personality, much less a psychological state.