The problem with amazingly beautiful and refined prose that relies on suggestions and allusions is that it's a bitch to translate - and since "The Tale of Genji" was written a thousand years ago at the Japanese imperial court, there are very few people now who can read it in the original.

I like thinking that the people who didn't really enjoy this were mostly those who came across bad or average translations, which made reading the story a chore rather than a delight. Me, I found *my* translation - it's Dennis Washburn's, and its clarity and style clicked beautifully with me (even with a few anachronic phrases thrown in), although I hear others are more accurate or poetic.

Prince Genji is the son of the Japanese emperor, born of one of the lesser courtesans. Since her rank wasn't high enough, the emperor employed a Korean seer to tell him about the child's future - and the seer replied he'd be a marvelous servant, but a disaster as an emperor, so he was removed from the line to the throne and turned into a noble.

However, Genji grows up to be radiant, elegant, and very attractive - he has his faults throughout the book, and I despised him, loved him a little, hated him occasionally, wanted him dead and felt bad when he reached his end. He's a bit of a womanizer who chases many affairs and seduces many women - in some cases, it isn't clear that he doesn't rape them.

But the "Tale of Genji" is masterfully written. It's poetic in itself and it contains the poetry exchanged between lovers, and it has the sensibility and beauty of a refined culture, even when it comes to seduction. As great ladies hide their faces from men, and as they are hidden from prying eyes, it's a quest to see them, and exchanges take the form of poetry written on scented paper or leaves, with servants making the arrangements for the two to meet.

"It was dark outside her sleeping quarters, and so he could make out the dim flickering of an oil lamp inside her curtains. Thinking he just might catch a glimpse of her daughter, he stealthily peeked through a gap where the curtain panels had not been completely stitched together, and in the faint light he could just make out the scene inside. The lady was reclining on an armrest, and her hair caught his attention at once. Cut short now that she was a nun, it was quite alluring all the same. Her beauty was breathtaking - a figure so lovely he wished that he could have a portrait done of her just as she was. And there, on the east side of the sleeping quarters, was a young woman reclining as well." (p. 335)

Or, another time, he's passing by a house falling into ruin, which is surrounded by flowers called 'evening faces'. He orders one brought to him, but a child comes out of the house and hands him an elegant, perfumed white fan, on which someone has written:

"In the dazzling light of pearly dew
Is it not you who adds such luster
To the bloom of evening faces"

He inquires who's there, and it seems like the house belongs to a reclusive noblewoman who's fallen into poverty.

"As usual, when it came to women he could not resist the impulse to undertake the chase. He pulled out a piece of folded paper from the breast of his robes and, taking care to disguise his own distinctive handwriting, set down his reply:

I long to draw near, to learn for sure...
Was that glimmering evening face
Briefly glimpsed in twilight really you" (p.65)

The whole book is about beauty, poetry, and romance - but it's more than that. Occasionally, it's a horror tale in which supernatural beings awaken. Sometimes, it's about his own fickleness in love and the unfortunate consequences it brings. He isn't a necessarily likable character (he often isn't, actually), but his adventures are memorable.

And the "Tale of Genji" changes its tone - it begins with the prince being youthful, charming, and seducing a woman per chapter, and it becomes later about the fragility of life, about loss, about the ephemeral quality of happiness, about possibly damning others with one's selfish love.

Interestingly, it doesn't end where you'd expect - there is a point where Genji dies, then the story is continued with the next generation, and its very different love affairs and problems. (one could say it doesn't end at all; it might be that Lady Murasaki died before she could complete it, but it's unknown if that's actually the case)

It's a book that's very much of its time - one of the biggest problems in reading it is the cultural difference between our world and Genji's. I couldn't tell if some of the rapes were rapes, or merely "rapes" (could it be that the truly refined woman must always be a bit reluctant?). I could tell that some rapes *were* rapes and nothing happened to those who did them. It was unclear what people did at court, aside from producing art and having affairs. I am still not in the clear about what makes a wife an actual wife, and not a mistress or concubine, except that the man should decree it so (could it be that that's all it takes?).

However, Genji was still very readable and beautiful despite my barging into reading it with barely an understanding of what the Heian era was actually like. The characters were complex and memorable in ways I hadn't expected them to be and the the tale in itself isn't ever predictable.

Wow. Amazingly, the perhaps oldest realistic novel turns out to be pretty much the best as well. That is to say aside from the Renaissance bias for symmetry in form, The Genji Monagatari delivers in spades in terms of detail, pace, romantic interest, drama, psychological insight, moral or ethical dilemmas, attention to social conventions, and realistic detail--and even a little bit of Gothic horror, superstition, and religious convention to please those of us less fond of realism than more imaginative narrative forms.

Thus my praise for all of those elements is practically boundless--not to mention my admiration for our author's dedication to narrative itself, as well as the pithy little moments of meta-narrative in which she wistfully teased us with her presence as the mistress-manipulator of all. She, after all, is the arch-seductress in a novel full of clumsy male seducers who spend endless amounts of time tripping over their genitalia, ruining women, and their own reputations in a social world clearly arranged almost entirely for their pleasure but in which none of them are ever very content--lest of all the female characters, pawns in this game (I believe Angela Carter, in her review in The Guardian, calls it, justifiably, a "meat market"). Indeed it's all delightful, tied up in the neat little bow of classic realist ambivalence, which, in the case of Murasaki, reads like patience, like the adult narrating the adventures of her children to us. We never do feel her either morally condemn nor approve of her characters. She is so patient with them as to appear godlike.

As for what some of us in this post Renaissance Occidental sphere--bubble?--would find to criticize here, I will say that the text as we have it today is really two separate novels, the second unfished in my opinion. The first four of the novel's six books are indeed the tale of Genji, the last two, however, follow primarily Kaoru (Genji's second wife's illegitimate child by Kashiwagi) and his several ill-fated love affairs. I say this not only for the shift in characters (for the topic of love affairs and social convention does not shift) but also the tone and style of narration. For the whole of the manuscript seems to represent a slow veering from fairy-tale to a harsher and harsher depiction of reality. The two most notable shifts in the style being after the very first chapter (Waley even has a footnote telling us to ignore the fairy-tale style of the opening chapter as it's not a sign of things to come. Funny, I always tell my Dante students the same thing about the Inferno as the allegorical first canto is not at all a good preface to the rhetorical realism of the description of hell that follows) and immediately after Genji's death at the end of the fourth book. Kaoru's story is not at all like Genji "The Shining One"'s story, neither in deed or tone. Sadly, while I do think we can tell, more or less, what happens after the final page, the ending is far too abrupt to please. One gets the feeling that, given world enough and time, Murasaki's pen would never have run out of ink. Perhaps she's still writing the Genji Monagatari today in some Buddhist paradise or other, so many, many pages, so many generations' stories already told and many, many more still to tell.

I write about the entire book here, and do not tag spoilers; as this is one of the great 'plot'-based novels, perhaps avoid reading it if you want to enjoy the book with virgin eyes.

In DH Lawrence's book, The Rainbow, there's a scene where a young couple are trying to fuck for the first time, sitting together in a little barn unsure how to proceed: after a turbulent internal aporia, the young lady feels a sudden explosion of desire & gestures to her boyfriend with an intense, pure provocative look, and sees in her boyfriend's face a brief paroxysmal moment of doubt, alienation, and indifference before an enormous surge of lust which leads him to initiate the encounter, yet this one moment's hesitation perturbs the lady, who spends the encounter softly resisting & thereafter experiencing the coitus as something of a rape. I've always greatly admired this scene as an incredibly high fidelity presentation of the strange nuances of desire, something extremely rare; the Tale of Genji uses this type of scene as one of its main elements, presented in no obscurer detail than in mr Lawrence, and indeed often even more specific & true. Similar indeed in scope to the Rainbow, this book is effectively a psychological novel (something Borges called it) which takes as its scope the motion of generations, giving a character's entire life in a few paragraphs before zooming in to relate their most traumatic moment in fifty or a hundred pages, before leaving them as background characters for the next drama, full of poetic significance that its author, Lady Murasaki, seems to arrange with the utmost care & irony.

The plot of this book is rather in two parts: the first, about 700p, being about the life of Genji, a young prince traumatized by his mother's early death and who becomes at first a prolific philanderer, but who as he ages reforms his ways and manages to put his household (full of wayward mistresses and his children) in perfect harmonious order; the second, about 400p, is about two descendants of Genji (one a cuckold product not actually related to him) and their romantic adventures, which is a dramatically smaller scale and more focused novel unto itself. The same manners of plot happen over & over again, with nearly every possible variation: a man falls in love with a woman he perhaps shouldn't, courts her in an elongated and difficult process, finally woos her, and then some tragic outcome occurs, whether it be the lady's death, a reputationally difficult pregnancy, or an unhappy marriage. Put like this, not least because of this text's date of 1000ad, the book may seem as though boring and formulaic, but rather proceeds with incredible depth of psychology and social etiquette, a wide & varied soap opera-like cast of characters that ends up in the dozens, and a careful balancing of implicit, wider-scope arcs. There is a cumulative effect, as the arcs begin to mirror & shed light on one another, until an enormous image of life is created.

What is this image? One of Murasaki's great fixations is a fully formed & perfect appreciation of mimetic desire: Genji, growing up without a mother, seeks for her image in every woman he can find, and none of them is ever enough. Every woman he falls in love with only increases his desire for more, and for the first 300p or so he becomes almost demonic in his relentless pursuit of every woman who reminds him of a lost lover. It is only with his turn to religious studies after a particularly embarassing scandal that he slowly matures into the proper statesman his princely status obligates; while he is never able to expurgate his incredible libido (although, I think it may be underappreciated, Genji's last true seduction takes place about 300p in, and spends the subsequent 400p of his life failing in every attempt he makes), his chivalry and above all his piety increase to levels where, in the final chapter of his life, he seems prepared for the metempsychotic transfiguration that zen buddhism dictates awaits his soul. There is a testy interplay between these two poles of existence, between love and piety. While from this characterization it may appear that this is the book of Genji's salvation through faith, Lady Murasaki seems to angle at a different connotation, with the entire novel's climactic scene: Genji dreams of his mistress and mother-in-law, now deceased, who tells him from the afterlife that she is burning in hell for their illicit affair (which, sacriligiously and unbeknownst to the public, produced a bastard child who became, technically illegitimately, emperor) and that the same fate awaits him; given that there are a plethora of scenes, even in Genji's most advanced age, where he continues after all his hard-learned lessons to attempt improper seductions, and is subject to the immense karma of being cuckolded near to his death, it seems likely that this tale is one where complete redemption is impossible, and fate is uncheatable.

This macroscopic image is told in miniature countless times throughout the novel, and in ways often profoundly tragic. Genji's sons both end up effectively damned in ways that seem unpreventable; Ryozen is cursed from birth due to his bastardry, doomed to have been an illegitimate emperor cursed by the Gods despite his early retirement into priesthood, whereas Yugiri, whom Genji forces into religious study from early age to stave off any possibility of degeneracy, becomes perhaps the novel's most depraved rapist. The novel's final two volumes, forming something of a separate sequel (sadly unfinished, it seems), tell about Genji's favorite grandson, who is little better than Yugiri, and Kaoru (unrelated to Genji) who is subject to 400p of romantic agony despite his perfect poverty. Lady Murasaki seems, as demiurge of this courtly world she's created, to have a distinct image of human life as as defined by a love (or controlled by a lust) which is incapable of producing anything other than agony -- like a twisted version of Plato's symposium, or more rather like Kristeva's analysis of proust, where all of the machinations and psychologies ultimately reduce down, at heart, to the sado-masochism at the bottom of the human soul & as the ultimate cause of all desire. Supposedly, in Japanese, 'beauty' and 'sadness' are understood as synonymous. The constant air of tragedy is indeed tempered by the constant beauty, with all the poetry & moments of love & holy ceremony & nature present in the book, and also moreover by the book's overwhelmingly religious atmosphere, with perhaps the idea that with enough reincarnation & piety the souls of these characters will someday attain nirvana, as indeed nearly every character ends their life having renounced the world & begun devoting themselves to religious studies.

It's almost baffling to read a novel like this, as something written in the eleventh century, which is genuinely comparable to Proust on a mechanical and philosophical level, and with a richness of narrative and symbol on par with any of the great western classics. It's almost impossible to convey how excellent this book is, given how surreal its very existence is-- I often held the book in my hands, flipping through the amount of pages, in awe that there were thousands of pages of something so beautiful & good. I recommend anyone & everyone read it, with the same urgency as though much of the reading public were carrying on unaware that there was such a thing as Ulysses or Moby Dick.

I read the Arthur Waley translation, which maybe explains my readiness to see parallels to modernist novelists contemporary with him, yet I don't think Waley distorts the text particularly much (other than at times to revolt against consensus among the prolific Japanese scholarship on Genji) and his footnotes are always particularly useful, both in explaining allusions/context and in helping the reader to keep track of the incredibly complex plot, which is often elliptically or implicitly conveyed. This particular edition, Tuttle Classics, has a great print & binding quality (it survived six months of lugging around and also an afternoon in my car with windows open during torrential rain) but appears to have been copyedited poorly, as there are abundantly many typos, especially with critical things like quotation marks.

“That reminder brought me straight to her. She was as open and trusting with me as ever, but her expression was very sad, and as she sat in her poor house, gazing out over the dewy garden and crying in concert with the crickets’ lament, I felt as though I must be living in some old tale.”


An Imperial Celebration of Autumn Foliage, by Tosa Mitsuyoshi (17th century).

The young man has never been here before. He notices a dim light and hears the subdued hum of whispered conversation. (What could it be about?) He makes his way softly to a crack he finds in the lattice shutters. A blind rattles. He stops for a moment, heart pounding. But no one seems to have noticed. He peers through the crack and sees three women sewing in the circle of the lamp’s brightest light. Then his eye falls on her, the girl he had seen that night, also by lamplight—it must be! She lies with her head pillowed on her arm, gazing into the lamp, her hair spilling over her forehead. Her whole figure stirs troubled yearnings in him.

We may condemn him for his voyeurism, but we’re twice as guilty, peering through a different crack into this vanished world. And like him, we fall hopelessly in love.

* * *

Around this time last year, when the plague struck and the world seemed to be coming to an end, I was looking for a new book to read. I can’t remember what made me decide on this ancient Japanese novel, but with all the time I was spending at home, I figured I could finish it in a month or two, over the summer before fall classes began. Ha! I couldn’t have been more wrong.

For a long time, there was no greater comfort than lying propped against my pillow, reading this book by lamplight. But as it often happens with very long books, I began to grow restless. The book has hundreds of characters (only referred to by titles and honorifics, which are constantly changing—if you’ve ever complained about Russian patronymics, just wait till you read this!), and it has nothing resembling a plot. The “action” unfolds at the breakneck pace of a Heian-period ox-drawn carriage (about two miles an hour). I was certain I’d made a mistake. But it was too late; I was already melting under the caresses of Stockholm syndrome. I just had to finish this. A year later and I finally have. I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long, but now I’m sad; the characters I’ve come to know over a year are gone.

“He felt her there beside him, just as she had always been on evenings like this when he had called for music, and when her touch on her instrument, or her least word to him, had been so much her own; except that he would have preferred even to this vivid dream her simple reality in the dark.”

The Tale of Genji was written in eleventh-century Heian Japan by Murasaki Shikibu, a court lady the details of whose life are shrouded in mystery. (It’s often said to be the world’s first novel, which isn’t exactly true, but I don’t think it matters.) It’s a strange, almost a haunted, book, with a beauty that seems not of this world. Its hero, Hikaru Genji, isn’t a samurai (which you might have expected—those would only appear in literature centuries later), but a man of the arts, the illegitimate son of the emperor, and, above all, a lover. Casanova’s exploits seem to pale in comparison. She tells of his adventures and many, many loves.

“The sight of her lying there, so beautiful yet so thin and weak that she hardly seemed among the living, aroused his love and his keenest sympathy. The hair streaming across her pillow, not a strand out of place, struck him as a wonder, and as he gazed at her, he found himself unable to understand how for all these years he could have seen any flaw in her.”


Murasaki Shikibu Gazing at the Moon, by Tosa Mitsuoki (17th century).

Murasaki’s themes are the eternals: love, lust, and loss—but mostly love. Heian-period gentlemen were rarely able to see the ladies they pursued. Court protocol required that women spent most of their lives sequestered behind screens and blinds, eagerly waiting for a poem on scented paper—or anything to break up the monotony—and all it took was the sight of a woman’s sleeves spilling out from underneath them to make a man burn for her. There’s much to enjoy here, but there are sections that make for, uh, uncomfortable reading. Men in the book sometimes force themselves on women. Sometimes, this is portrayed as romantic; at other times, it’s frightening. Murasaki’s tale is less about the hero than the women he’s involved with—“their feelings, their experiences, their fates,” as Royall Tyler writes in the introduction. One of the most fascinating things about the book is the way Murasaki acknowledges and critiques the patriarchal society that confines her and other women.

“Ah, she reflected, there is nothing so pitifully confined and constricted as a woman. What will reward her passage through the world if she remains sunk in herself, blind to life’s joys and sorrows and to every delight? What will brighten the monotony of her fleeting days? … What a waste for her to shut herself up in her thoughts…”

The Tale of Genji is often compared to In Search of Lost Time, a comparison that, at first glance, doesn’t seem worth taking seriously. But the similarities are striking. Both Murasaki and Proust always have their eye on the future—even the most seemingly insignificant details, however casually introduced, return triumphantly, like a motif in a symphony, hundreds of pages later. Both tell of their aristocratic milieu’s splendor and decline. And both are obsessed with time and its passing. This book’s central motif is mono no aware, the awareness of the impermanence of things, that everything comes to be and ceases to be, like the spring mist rising from a lake, like the light of fireflies, like the parting of lovers, like (of course) the blooming and scattering of the cherry blossoms. Our lifetimes are like a dream. Time passes quickly. Our dew-like lives will vanish before dawn. We should cherish every moment we have.

“The place was a little way into the mountains. the blossoms in the City were gone now, since it was late in the third month, but in the mountains the cherry trees were in full bloom, and the farther he went, the lovelier the veils of mist became, until for him, whose rank so restricted travel that all this was new, the landscape became a source of wonder.”

The characters in this book are always yearning for the irrecoverable; the scent of orange blossoms always drifts in to bring back the past unbearably to them. I’m still trying to understand why I love books (and films, and music) about memory so much. Maybe it’s because reading a book, especially one as all-encompassing as this one, is the closest we can ever get to living another person’s life; their memories become ours as well, and their sorrow, our sorrow. But I guess every book—every work of art, really—is an artifact of memory, someone’s memory, even from the instant the pen touches the blank page. It’s impossible to say where the present ends and where memory begins. What was once “contemporary,” with the flight of time, becomes a quiet rustle on the wind, a song, so subtle that you just might miss it, of the way things were and will never be again.

“Not that tales accurately describe any particular person, rather, the telling begins when all those things the teller longs to have pass on to future generations—whatever there is about the way people live their lives, for better or worse, that is a sight to see or a wonder to hear—overflow the teller’s heart. … To put it nicely, there is nothing that does not have its own value.”


A Boat Cast Adrift, by Sata Yoshirō (1966).

The Tale of Genji has taken its place among the actual experiences of my life. The book reaches to us through time. How strange it all feels, yet how familiar, how distant, yet how close! In a sense, it’s a lovely testament to the constancy of the human heart in an ever-changing world.

"Vivir aislado no es nada del otro mundo, salvo por lo solo que te sientes."

Durante 900 páginas y 2 semanas y media he vivido en la corte Heian, donde los amantes se intuían el uno al otro a través de cortinas translúcidas en habitaciones en penumbra. Un viaje a tiempos lejanos cuya nostalgia se parece mucho a la nuestra.

World Literature course for this summer autumn.

The Epic of Gilgamesh ✓
The Odyssey ✓
The 1001 Nights (ah jeez, these are going)
The Tale of Genji (to take a while)
The Lusiads ✓

I realized I have a billion pages here (normal readers can handle this; to me, this feels like a billion). I have a feeling that the summer course is going to last till winter.

*

The Tale of Genji is a very long romance...
I'll say. 1182 pages long.

Feb 16, 2016

I've come to realize that the 'right moment' to read a 1K+ novel never ever appeared on my doorstep so of course I thought fuck it and let's do it, that's how I roll

You know, this book is a lot of things (what 1000+ pager isn’t) but it’s nothing if not truthful. The character of Genji can be summed up in four totally accurate lines from the book:

“Genji felt like a child thief. The role amused him.”

“Difficult and unconventional relationships always interested him.”

“Self-loathing was not enough to overcome temptation.”

“Genji’s troubles, which he had brought upon himself, were nothing new.”

Genji is a total pedophile. Once, in true pervert style, he grooms a little girl to be his sex toy as an adult. Wait, did I say once? No, that happens like... three or four different times.

He also rapes a few women and statutorily rapes prepubescent girls and boys, not to mention a variety of women. Nbd.

Also, he’s Hugh Hefner. He has a huge arsenal of Bunnies who run around his Playboy Mansion waiting for his pretty “shining” self to come and give them their long-awaited cock. That’s tiresome.

It was a bit like a complicated Russian novel, trying to keep track of all his ladies. They have beautiful, poetic nicknames, though. Lady of the Evening Faces, the Lady of the Misty Moon, the Lady of the Locust Shell, Lady of the Orange Blossoms, the Safflower Lady. NTS reference one night stands with such lovely handles.

It’s a great novel, though. The reason it took me so ridiculously long to read this- like over a month, which for me is obscene- wasn’t lack of interest. It’s just too big a volume to lug to work, which is where I get the bulk of my reading done, so I pretty much just read smaller books there and kept this one aside, grabbing snippets of when I could. It sagged in the middle- mostly because that was peak character count and you just get so lost in how everyone’s related to one another- but it makes an abrupt recovery.

After reading Murasaki Shikibu’s diary, which was very dry, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get through this, but it was actually engrossing. I guess Lady Murasaki is just a lot better at fiction than fact.

I also feel it's worth noting that the last third- commonly called the Uji chapters, centering on events that happen after Genji's death, is better than the first two thirds.

I know it's been debated whether or not they're by the same authors, and I suspect they are not. The author of the Uji chapters doesn't hate her fellow women half as much as Murasaki Shikibu does. Honestly, it's amazing the first two thirds were written by a woman. I almost wouldn't believe it, except that Murasaki's diary was likewise pointlessly cruel to her fellow women, laced with petty jealousies, and quick to put individual men on golden pedestals. We never stop hearing about how damn shiny Genji is, in spite of the misery he wreaks on his "true love" Murasaki with his many affairs. And we constantly are told how idiotic Murasaki and his other mistresses are for being so jealous. Our hero of the Uji chapters, in contrast, Kaoru, stays pretty faithful to his dead love

“Life is not good to us women.”

For as long as human civilization has existed, men have made life difficult for women, even men who are otherwise thoughtful and kind. It is no different in The Tale of Genji, where the men, including Genji himself, have numerous wives, engage in many affairs, court (and even steal) very young girls, and sometimes sexually assault the women they desire. Some women, in turn, flee by ostracizing themselves (e.g., become nuns) or even by attempting to kill themselves. Yes, there are instances of true love in this novel and of spouses who are bonded strongly. To me, however, the silent suffering of women was one of the primary themes of this 1000-year-old book.

“It is a very uncertain world, and it always has been, particularly for women. They are like bits of driftwood.”

Another theme was that no matter who you are, no matter how much wealth or status you possess, no matter if you are the main character or one of his many wives and mistresses, and even if you are “frighteningly handsome” and the son of an emperor, you eventually die, and the world goes on without you. Thoughts of death and conversations about dying occurred with high frequency throughout this book, in both the prose and verse. And the structure of the book—especially, the last third of it—seemed intentionally designed to show how your death clears the stage of life for other people to step upon.

“With flowers that fade, with leaves that turn, they speak
Most surely of a world where all is fleeting.”

“It is sad to think about dying, of course, but I am determined not to care.”

One of the most enjoyable parts of this novel was the verse—the numerous poems included throughout the book. The characters themselves, and the culture they were enmeshed in, were obsessed with poetry and calligraphy. People were taught early in their lives how to write and were judged based on their writing. Some of the main characters even collected scrolls of writing that they considered “art of the highest order.” The poems the various characters sent to each other throughout the story dealt with a range of issues, from love and desire to anxiety and depression to sadness after loss.

“Though I leave behind a world I cannot endure,
My heart remains with him, still of that world.”

“One sees the clouds as smoke that rose from the pyre,
And suddenly the evening sky seems nearer.”

Other Memorable Quotes and Poems:

“They may not always work, but generosity and reasonableness and patience do on the whole seem best.”

“The only man you can trust is the man who is willing to make do with one wife.”

“You should treat any woman with tact and courtesy, and be sure that you cause her no embarrassment.”

“They say that a man is only as low as his thoughts. You must pull yourself out of it.”

“The finest of men—it was true long ago and it is still true today—can disgrace themselves because they do not have wives to keep them from temptation.”

“A man never knows how many years he has ahead of him. I would like to live my own life, see the people I want to see and do what I want to do.”

“Life is fleeting, you know, and so is everything in it. Do not make things worse with useless worries.”

“Superior is helped by subordinate, subordinate defers to superior, and so affairs proceed by agreement and concession.”

“Tears have obscured the blossoms these many springs,
And now at length they open full before me.”

“My heart goes after yon retreating moon.
No home, this world, in which to dwell forever.”

“Deep in the Snowy Mountains would I vanish,
In search of the brew that is death for those who love.”

“My thoughts of you: will they stay when I am gone
Like smoke that lingers over the funeral pyre?”

“Countless times your silence has silenced me.
My hope is that you hope for something better.”

“Deep into these mountains I would go,
But thoughts of one I leave still pull me back.”

If I still wrote reviews for this site I'd write a long one about how similar Genji is to Proust. How Genji is like a magical, animistic, haunted version of Proust, dreamed in the ancient world with customs alien to things I recognize, but as resonant, in a human sense, as anything written today. But I don't write reviews for this site anymore.

This epic-like Japanese novel is, of course, quite lengthy (54 Chapters, 1120 pages) and thus reading it would take your time and concentration. I thought I would never finish reading it but, after my visit to Japan for a week last April, I decided to resume reading it mixed with boredom and enjoyment.

This novel written by a court lady in the 11th century has been depicted on various, innumerable noble characters with illustrious noble titles unfamiliar to, I think, most of its readers outside Japan. Therefore, we should read its chronology (pp. 1125-1133) before/while reading each Chapter because it'd help to guide us on what happens, who're the key characters, what and why they do, what're the consequences, etc. As far as I know, only this edition translated by Royall Tyler offers this useful guide to its readers. This considerate approach, I hope, should lessen our boredom.

Surprisingly, I've never read any war scene or military campaign since it might not be her genre/expertise so we're always immersed in dream-like romance episodes related to various couples tinged by eventual psychological dilemma due to love or suffering. There are lots of Japanese-style word plays which we may read casually or skip some and I'm quite sure those readers who know Japanese may find them more enjoyable and understandable.

In brief, the whole plot of the novel essentially focused on various life cycles of those key characters, that is, from birth to death and along the way all dignitaries suffer their aging as well as illness in which all mortals simply can't escape from the ultimate cycle.

Nearing the end of this novel, I think Ukifune's decision to renounce the world by being a Buddhist nun is wistfully touching, remarkable and wise. However, her fate is similar to the young lady named Satoko Ayakura in the last chapter of "The Decay of the Angel," Book 4 of "The Sea of Fertility" by Fukio Mishima. I wonder if he's conceived the idea of such an end from this legendary novel.

In essence, this famous Japanese 'Tale' is not a classic best-seller or page-turner, rather it's a literary treasure penned by such a formidable scholar named Lady Murasaki Shikibu as her masterpiece for those interested in Japanese court/culture/ways of life who may try reading it and enjoy some unthinkable, romantic atmosphere 10 centuries ago in ancient Japan.

This paragraph suggests a tip of thought and action to some friends reluctant to read it or having started it but stopped somewhere: I think, first of all, we should be determined and constructive in terms of this a bit formidable literary mission, have no fear, just keep going, stay focused from what we're reading, find out some readable sentences, paragraphs, episodes, etc. and take notes as part of active reading. Then, I'd like to recommend my friends to read "The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan" (Kodansha 1994) by Dr Ivan Morris, one of the great Japanese scholars in the 20th century since this authoritative book would provide you with some backgrounds essential to our familiarity for better understanding and thus its more readability. Please allow me to confirm why we should read this key work by citing the following excerpt :

The World of the Shining Prince, ..., has been a standard in cultural studies for nearly thirty years. Using as a frame of reference The Tale of Genji and other major literary works from Japan's Heian period, Morris recreates an era when women set the cultural tone. Focusing on the world of the emperor's court -- ... -- he describes the politics, society, religious life, and superstitions of the times, providing detailed portrayals of the daily life of courtiers, the cult of beauty they espoused and the intricate relations between the men and women of their milieu. (back cover)

This review is of the first seventeen chapters of this book which has a total of fifty-four chapters. This was the scope of assigned reading for our book group in order to keep it at a reasonable length. The complete book is about 1,500 pages (72 hours audio).

If this story were set in today's world it would be an example of #MeToo on steroids. But it was written and takes place in Japan around the year 1000 (long before #MeToo), and it describes typical male behavior when given (almost) unlimited power and influence. The main character Genji is a son of the Emperor and favorite concubine. He is not in the line of succession, but he nevertheless is favored by the Emperor. His combination of good looks and protection of the Emperor makes him a man to whom you can't say "no."

This novel's account of Genji's life concentrates on his romantic life and describes the customs of Japanese aristocratic society of the time. Genji has a habit of sneaking into the beds of women at night and having his way with them, and in one case impregnates a wife of the Emperor. The subsequent son born from this encounter eventually ascends to become Emperor. Even though Genji is not in line of succession he is son of an Emperor and ends up being the biological father of an Emperor.

The first eleven chapters tell of his younger years when his sexual exploits were greatest. By chapter eleven he gets caught in the wrong bed at the wrong time and is forced to go into exile for several years. Chapters twelve and thirteen are about those exile years, but in Chapters fourteen to seventeen he's back in the Palace of Kyoto with all his former power. In these later chapters he is older and perhaps less wild because he is now checking to make sure all his former girl friends are taken care of.

The following excerpt from Chapter Eighteen is an example of the reputation Genji had developed. He was trying to get Akashi, one of his mistresses, to come stay at the Palace, but she is reluctant to do so because of his reputation.

He wrote frequently to Akashi and many times begged her to come up to the Capital. But she had heard so many stories of how others had suffered at his hands—how he had again and again toyed with the affections not only of humble creatures such as herself, but of the greatest ladies in the land, only to cast them aside a few months later with the most callous indifference. Surely it would be foolish not to take warning. If this was his conduct towards person of rank and influence, what sort of treatment could she, a friendless girl, expect? What part could she hope to play save the humiliating one of a foil to the young princess who was Genji's lawful bride?

It's my understanding that the story goes on from there with no particular plot other than everybody is growing older and by the time the reader reaches the end it's about the third generation descendants of Genji.

The following is a link to a New York Time article which discusses Tale of Genji:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/bo...