My rating is 3.5 stars

Written in the 11th century by a 'gentlewoman' of the Imperial Court, The Tale of Genji recounts the life of The Shining Prince, Genji, his relationships with numerous women, and palace politics.

That's a reductionist summary of this epic work spanning a few hundred pages. I read Royall Tyler's abridged translation, which is said to stay true to the Japanese original.

The Tale of Genji is a complex work, along the lines of Homer's Ulysses, that paints a vivid portrait of court life during the time. It's a world where everyone has a rank based on their relationship with Genji. Tyler explains in the introduction -

"Below his single Empress he had several Consorts and lower still, a number of Intimates. His Mistress of Staff, in theory a palace official, could also be his junior wife."

The novel has a poignant start with Genji being married off to Aoi at the tender age of 11. Genji, the boy, has no idea of what it entails, and he continues to live with his father. From there, each chapter shows the "devastatingly handsome" Genji's progression as he comes of age and reaches adulthood.

Genji is a multifaceted, finely drawn character and invokes a myriad of emotions. For instance, on one hand he is a philanderer and his pompous, insensitive behaviour with all the women he meets is off-putting.

“It is frailty that gives a woman her charm, though. I do not care for a woman who insists on valuing her own wits.”

Yet, it’s moving to see that he gets increasingly lonely as he rises in position and power and continues his search for meaningful love.

Reading The Tale of Genji is a challenge on many levels. It requires time, focus, and patience. The biggest challenge, for me, was to fight the temptation to give up on reading about yet another of Genji's romantic conquests. Various characters make their appearances on and off making it difficult to keep track. Between that and referring to the copious footnotes the reading experience is not smooth. But the book is larger than that and one that must be read for the sheer size of its canvas.

Verdict: Read for the dreamlike world that Shikibu sketches and, of course, because it’s the world’s first novel!

The person who convinced me to read this is no longer on Goodreads, so I cannot tell you what meanings I thought I would discover within this work. Even the collective 'meanings' is a poor word choice, because my relationship with literature is one to which only the pair of mentor and mentee of the male variety has claim in the bowels of history and pop culture. It is my lot to be mentee to a few of the living and far more of the dead of various forms and nationalities; the only commonality is we have never met and, even in the case of the alive, will never do so. Thus, I do not have the benefit of consultation on even the most arduous or rare or fleeting of terms, nothing to enable an inheritance of a complete whole of the older and the wiser. What holisms I make, I make alone.

n  He had a great contempt for people who renounce the world and then appear not to have done so after all. But she was leaving him.n

It is tiring to think on how academia would have processed us had it caught I and the work together. Thinking of it is unavoidable when one is interested in literature and not institutionalized definitions of such, and it has been a long time since I've forborne from writing what I knew classrooms would not like, but I am not yet aged enough for unconcern to come without resistance. Aspiring professors of English do not build their critical evaluation on video games and animated televisions shows and an uneasy consciousness of the Other, even when the evaluation is of the most loving nature. Technically this work is not found in the English curriculum, technically a proper understanding of this goes far beyond what my academic career is aimed towards, but I have not yet broken past the mental block of the ivory tower that dogs my every self-reflexive thought.

n  She liked his bemused way of cocking his head to one side as he contemplated his unhappiness.n

My favorite video game of all time is called Okami, and I firmly believe my understanding of The Tale of Genji was aided immeasurably by my history of playing. It is funny, it is menacing, it is lengthy and complex, but above all it is gorgeous in the most life affirming of ways. I neither sniff at cities nor sentimentalize the countryside, but in Okami the goal is to restore growth of flora and fauna to the world through the power of writing. Add music and art and heartbreak that does not happen through war torn horrors, and you have as close to my ideal as reality can currently come.

n  Such a difficult, constricted life as a woman was required to live! Moving things, amusing things, she must pretend to be unaffected by them. With whom was she to share the pleasure and beguile the tedium of this fleeting world? Since it choose to look upon women as useless, unfeeling creatures, should it not pity the fathers who went to such trouble rearing them? Like the mute prince who was always appearing in sad parables, a woman should be sensitive but silent.n

One thousand one hundred and thirteen pages and what I found of my Eurocentric feminism could be numbered off in concentric quotes with the fingers of a single hand. Even if the owner of the historically granted nom de plume of Murasaki Shikibu hadn't been female, my vein of 'outside reading' would have sought out my definition of evidence she was there. It is the usual lack of objectivity I favor after so many centuries of venerated others pretending otherwise, but this is one thousand and more years ago, this is one of the most auspicious pieces of literature known thus far, and above all else, this is Japan. Here, Orientalism is the name of the game, and my fascination does me no good if I do not make an effort.

n  How could she even consider giving herself to a man? The first overtures, capable of arousing such tenderness, must lead to unhappiness later. No, it would be better for them to go on as they were, neither of them demeaning the other and neither going flagrantly against the other’s wishes. Her resolve was firmer than ever.n

Some of you may be familiar with Japanese anime. It's something I grew up with and have a great deal of fond feeling towards, but after learning of Hayao Miyazaki's distaste for the industry, I've had to critically evaluate my relationship with something that has entertained, sustained, and stabilized through various periods of my life. I've commented on similarities between Japan and the US before, and while a few animes are truly great and humanizing works of art, it is the worst that the media and the mainstream community sustains itself upon. The most obvious characteristic is the treatment of women, an objectifying and dangerous flaw that not even my beloved Okami escapes. Even this most esteemed of tomes builds itself upon systematic patriarchy; what is different is the deliberate separation of the realities of life from the feelings of the characters.

n  Listen to them. They seem to have no notion that I might be ill because I misbehaved.n

Works such as Middlemarch may be easier to the eye of Eurocentric sensibilities, but this work here has as much to offer of real people thrown into social roles. It is much, much, much harder to see, and it's highly likely that what I'm actually seeing is my own desires of female affirmation in a world of ubiquitous male power. What I do know is Shikibu deconstructs the stepmother stereotype, the suicidal maiden stereotype, the manipulative wife stereotype and the useless hag stereotype and the wife in the madhouse stereotype and even the evil witch stereotype, all these women pulled and pushed along the lines of Genji and his descendants in a reality where feeling is both emphasized and shuttered away, where the next bite of food hinges on the calculus of relations and the spider web of public opinion. It is beautiful in the way all poisons are and, of course, I may be misleading myself entirely.

n  Still, one would not wish to describe him as merely perverse. Had he been a man of reprehensible tendencies, the emperor would surely not have insisted upon having him for a son-in-law. In high matters of state, one would imagine, he showed uncommon talents.n

There's no war, or plagues, or any physical conflicted more violent than a doubly misguided tryst that ultimately ends in mutual hilarity. In light of that, I know many readers will find it boring, and there were times I wished I could be moved more by the usual things and not have to spend so much time with the ancient and the lengthy and the subtle. However, so much of that 'usual' is built up on what our world has become since the time this was written, and every so often I need something that unspools my brain from modern hegemonies and places the emphasis on what I can appreciate rather than how much I can understand. Proust came close, but I did not know how soothing the repetition of years with its poetry and its seasons and its flowers and colors and songs and dances could be until I began understanding the references without the help of the footnotes, and that is not something that can be acquired through an obsession with exact details. This work, masterful in its beauty, came down to us because only women wrote the much scorned fiction; I know this world should not survive, but I would become the woodcutter with their rotting ax handle in a heartbeat.

n  Soon it would be sunset. Mists were rising, and the mountain fastness seemed already to be receding into night. The air was heavy with the songs of the evening cicadas. Wild carnations at the hedge and an array of autumn flowers in near the veranda caught the evening light. The murmur of waters was cool. A brisk wind came down from the mountain with a sighing of deep pine forests. As bells announced that a new relay of priests had come on duty, the solemnity of the services was redoubled, new voices joined to the old. Every detail strengthened the spell that was falling over him. He wanted to stay on and on. The voice of the priest who had come down from the mountain was grander and more solemn than the rest.n

When enough time has passed, I will come back here to rest. It is a matter of the heart I will never be able to reconcile, but its existence is enough.

I simply cannot believe this book is celebrating it's 1000th anniversary this year. The characters are so complex, with such a human range of emotions. There are so many characters, yet each one is unique. She has so calculatedly dialed in each character, subtly conveying how close they come to her view of perfection - Murasaki being at the top of this, and (in my opinion) Niou and others being at the bottom.
It is so easy to see how this book still influences literary styles in Japan today... the fatalistic & existential as well as the methods of characterization -- these same methods can be seen in anime and manga today. It is definitely not an exaggeration to say that Genji's writing has influenced Japan as much as Shakespeare has influenced English literature.

Shikibu also reveals the nature of Japanese culture with such eloquence. When I first started reading it, I was split between boredom w/Genji (and the author's obsession with his beauty) and fascination with the complexity of 9th century Japanese court. But as I read further I became more and more amazed at the beauty and subtlety of Shikibu's writing and poetry. I felt I was being spoiled - the writing felt so luxurious and conveyed so much atmosphere in each scene. It was easy to envision each room, each wilderness.
The fact that the poetry has been translated from archaic Japanese that was laden with metaphors and double meanings --which are completely lost in the translation -- and still reads beautifully says a lot. She can convey so much without directly saying it, and with such intimacy it feels like you're reading a letter from a close friend (though I'm sure part of this is owed to the translator). I love how she occasionally speaks to the reader, I love how she goes into detail about the clothes and gifts and gardens (the number one indication a woman wrote it), the nuances of each characters handwriting, and how this has bearing on the true substance of that character.

It is undeniable that -- while the plot may be dull and a bit trivial -- Shikibu's writing is truly genius.

Turns out Genji's not the little dog. Huh.

I guess the big lesson here is that it really matters what translation you get of a thousand-year-old Japanese novel. The one published by Tuttle Classics, translated by Kencho Suematsu, is terrible. At first, I figured, hey, thousand-year-old Japanese. Going to be turgid. But then, I noticed, the footnotes couldn't write their collective way out of a paper bag either:

"Sasinuki is a sort of loose trousers, and properly worn by men only, hence some commentators conclude, the attendant here mentioned to be a boy, others contend, this garment was worn by females also when they rode."

You can't blame that on Murasaki, Kencho. I've seen the original scrolls. No footnotes.

Also, this edition (ISBN 0-8048-3256-0) has different chapters than Wikipedia says it should (17 chapters versus 54), and is 208 pages long, whereas other editions are ~1,200. On the other hand, I kind of read 1,200 pages because I had to reread each sentence about six times. I have no idea what I read. Maybe the real Tale of Genji *is* about the little dog.

The thing I read, I *think*, is about a decadent quasi-royal slut, but it's hard to say because the intimate encounters are all implied. On the other hand, there wasn't much of anything else. It mentioned he had a sword once, but that was probably a double-entendre. So no swash-buckling, no comedy, no suspense. Mostly I read something that's like listening to a person on a phone describe a trashy chick-flick they're watching. It had that "once removed" feeling to it. I never felt like I was reading the story, just what somebody who had read the story felt like telling.

Read a different edition.

This is a new translation by Royall Tyler, I have a Kindle copy, but many chunksters await my attention that I haven't read before. I'll get back to it. I look forward to getting back to it!

What a remarkable and unique work of literature! It took some patience and a lot of eye rolling but the beautiful poetry and painstakingly detailed descriptions of a world long gone while exposing human folly (all in over a thousand pages) make this book an incredible achievement.

The nightmare’s finally over. This book does not deserve the one star that I gave it.

I get that I shouldn’t hate this book, because well, it’s the world’s first novel, and it’s written by a woman. But I can’t bring myself to even mildly like it. It’s absolutely loathsome.

This book tells us so well that there was never a time that was a good time to be a woman. Which is, believe it or not, sth I knew without having to read 1200+ pages of misogyny and rape. And wet sleeves.

Genji (18) looks at a 10 year old (Murasaki) and thinks (in subtle language dripping with euphemism of course), “Dang. Such a beauty. I bet she’ll be a babe when she grows up. I should kidnap her, take her away from everything and everyone she loves and knows, raise her, groom her, then rape her whenever I deem her grown up enough.” And that’s exactly what he does.

And then, once the man’s old, he adopts girls, makes a whole show of being admirable, but tries to rape them too. Such a charmer.

There was absolutely no positive to the book whatsoever. Genji and the future generations raped women, harassed them to the point that the women either died of worry and/ or sickness, or even tried committing suicide.
Also, if one guy rapes his friend’s love interest, it is apparently the woman’s fault. She’s the ‘sinner’. She tries to stop someone’s advances, she’s cruel and uncouth. She tries to die, she’s the worst sinner on the planet, etc.

Genji died a peaceful death. Murasaki suffered and wasted away, but Genji died a peaceful death after taking religious vows.

Please don’t waste your time. If you have to read it, read an abridged version (most are less than 300 pages).

كتب_تنتظر_قرائتها#

كل من قرأ كافكا على الشاطىء قد واتته غالباً رغبة شديدة في قراءة سيرة الأمير جينجي
التي كان يلتهمها كافكا الصغير في المكتبة العامة اليابنية

مراساكي شيبوكو هو الإسم الذي عُرفت به المؤلفة و ليس إسمها الحقيقي
وقد عاشت عمرها في البلاط الإمبراطوري وروت مما عايشته فانتازيا مذهلة تشابه ألف ليلة وليلة العربيةالتي ربما لا يعرف أغلب كتاب العالم سواها عن أدبنا العربي
حتى أن أنيس منصور عندما سأل الكاتب سومرست موم عما قرأه من الأدب العربي أجاب ألف ليلة وليلة فقط
ما أغضب بالعقاد بشدة
قائلا أنه رجل جاهل وأن الأعمى الذي لا يرى الشمس
"يقصد نفسه خصوصاً :D"
العيب فيه لا في الشمس
!

وحتى إيزابيل الليندي أو ماركيز أو حتى البرتو مورافيا وغيرهم لا يعرفون عنا شيئاً باستثناء هذه الفانتازيا الخيالية مجهولة المؤلف إلى الآن


سيرة الأمير جينجي هو عمل من أهم كلاسيكيات الإنسانية
و يعتبر أول رواية مهمة في الأدب العالمي
والرواية تسرد حكاية هيكارو نو جينجي
واحد من نبلاء القصر الإمبراطوري ومغامراته

وندرة هذا العمل ليست فقط في أنه تراث قديم حيث تمت كتابته في أوائل القرن الحادي عشر
ولكن أيضا لأن من ألفه امرأة في عصور لم تكن المرأة فيها إلا زينة وديكور إنساني مسلوبة الحقوق


لوحات تصويرية عن الرواية

Considered one of the earliest novels, this book was written by a lady in waiting of the imperial Japanese court in the 11th century. It features the romantic misadventures of Genji, the son of the emperor. Genji is a bit of a rogue, who takes advantage of his powerful position to get what he wants. He seduces young women, and sometimes carries them off to a remote location away from prying eyes.

As I read it, I kept reminding myself that it is a piece of history, written in medieval times to entertain the women at court. It provides us a glimpse of the culture and class distinctions of the era from a person who lived through it. The prose and poetry are beautiful in places. I found it reasonably entertaining, though the protagonist engages in some pretty reprehensible behavior. A modern reader may get a little impatient with the slow pace and repetition. I think it is wonderful that we have preserved this piece of historic writing.

Let me spare you 1100+ pages. In Japan, there was a beautiful palace, filled with beautiful people who were very bored. Because they were very bored they would spend a lot of time sending vague (not particularly good) poetry back and forth, playing instruments, playing board games, and having soap opera-style love affairs.

The affairs would go something like this. Man would get a vague glance at woman and determine that she was attractive. Man would pursue woman. Woman would get freaked out as she had spent most of her time hiding behind a curtain with other women. Man would sexually assault woman. Woman would decide she loved man. Man would decide other women were more attractive and woman would waste away in agony, eventually dying. Also, there was a lot of wet sleeves due to all the crying. This was a rough ride...the length and repetitiveness made it more formidable than Gravity's Rainbow. If you are REALLY curious about his one, buy the reader's guide, and save yourself a lot of time.

.5 star for writing quality: Hard to say-translation. I want to give credit to Murasaki for doing what she did, when she did it.
0 star for plot: See above.
.5 star for characters: Genji is definitely complex, but I loathed him so much that by the time he changed I wasn't buying it.
1 star for setting: There were some beautiful setting descriptions-even if the aristocracy felt that anything outside of their backyard was the disgusting, never-to-be-visited-backwoods.
0 star for personal taste: This one completely put me off reading any long ancient works just for this sake of saying I read long, ancient works.

The only thing that I'm grateful for is this book inspired me to double-down on my meditation practice and start playing Go.

I'm dipping into this splendid work from time to time but it's going to take forever to read. So at the moment it's a "browsing book".

Genji Monogatari or The Tale of Genji, was published early in the eleventh century and is considered to be the world’s first novel.

It is remarkable in several ways: its detailed descriptions of Japanese court life of the time, though rather too full of poetry writing, the soulful playing of music and conversations which are more about etiquette than content. It is still amazing that it was written at all and, in a strongly matriarchal society by a woman. The geography of the practical arrangements is always well described. There are lyrical descriptions of the world of the ruling class: the Emperor's court, the aristocrats, and their courtiers. We get to go inside the protagonists apartments and their compounds, see the salubrious estates they enjoyed and go with them on their journeys through the countryside.

Prince Genji himself is a privileged character who is frequently described as destined for great things and often complimented for his culture, wisdom, beauty and general excellence, yet does not actually do much. Except pay court to numerous girls and women throughout the land and throughout the story. We do not get much in the way of politics or the machinations of the court, though it’s hinted at. However, rather than carp, one should be filled with wonder that this work of some intricacy and maturity created so long ago should exist at all.