I have to say that I wholeheartedly agree with reviewer Spike Gomes when he wonders how some people could ever read anything written before 1970 given their moral indignation at the actions/beliefs of the characters in those works. Sure, the Tale of Genji is not everyone's cup of tea, but its standing as the greatest work of Japanese literature will not be challenged by allegations that it somehow "endorses rape", "lacks a plot", or is "shallow". I would suggest those individuals read the book a bit more carefully before making such judgments.

For one, I originally thought the book would be ponderous and boring, something I would be made to read in college for an East Asian history course. But when I actually picked up the book and read it, its psychological depth and subtle hints at a larger narrative theme---that all great and beautiful things fade---kept me going for all 1000+ pages. We follow a man of considerable aesthetic sensitivity from his early years of foolish womanizing through a middle age of happiness and political greatness to finally a decline and fall when his past mistakes finally catch up with him. Genji himself is not just a literary device to showcase all the wonderful women he encounters in the tale, but as Virginia Woolf says, "one after another they turn their clear or freakish light upon the gay young man at the centre, who flies, who pursues, who laughs, who sorrows, but is always filled with the rush and bubble and chuckle of life." The rest of the tale, though incomplete, shows that this process is a cycle, and hammers home the point that even the moral failings of the past somehow outshine the virtues of the present. Although I may disagree with that last point, the fact that no one has been able to pick up where Murasaki left off seems to strengthen that argument a bit. And this is what I managed to pick up on a first reading. The tale has a richness that invites repeated readings, like all great books.

Royall Tyler, translator of the most recent English edition of Genji delivered a wonderful lecture on the greatness of the work entitled "Genji Monogatari and The Tale of Genji". He also commented on the recent decline in reputation the work has suffered:

Perhaps the trend that turned a masterpiece into a dull catalogue of grievances against a mindless playboy—that is to say, a book quite unlike the one known to Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton—will end, since it had a beginning. However, it has done the tale’s reputation in English no good. While The Tale of Genji continues to flourish in campus Japanese literature courses, where its importance is taken for granted, and while it has a following among consumers of Heian-derived fantasy novels written by American, British, and Australian authors, it seems no longer to be taken seriously in English as great literature.

As for Tyler's say on why he thinks the tale is so great:

Nothing could therefore demonstrate more vividly the tale’s richness and greatness, or its capacity to stand as a world classic, than the way the narrative itself has supported and rewarded my effort to read it from outside its own culture. Did the author “intend” it to be read as I read it? I have no idea. However, I am satisfied that The Tale of Genji excludes neither tragedy nor a powerful succession struggle and its aftermath, and that since a reader like me can find these in it, they can also serve to describe what The Tale of Genji is about more intelligibly, for readers of English, than talk of love affairs and sensibility—talk that tends to turn the tale at best into a novel as engaging but structurally weak as one by the late nineteenth-century American writer Sarah Orne Jewett.

So yeah, there's a lot more to the story than what you see at first glance. It's not an easy book to read, but it will reward you if you make the effort.

Genji Monogatari es considerada la gran novela nacional japonesa, por muchos la primera novela moderna, una de las joyas de la literatura universal y la gran pionera de la literatura firmada por una mujer, entre muchas cosas. Como lo es también, ser un relato fidedigno de protocolo, eventos y costumbres de la época Heian, en Japón, hace 1000 años. Una visión muy cercana de los usos de la corte, un compendio, por la densidad intrincada de sus citas, de la poesía japonesa e incluso china. Y una obra en la que la escritura misma, la forma en que se desenvuelve el escribir, se va retratando a sí misma.
Alberto Manguel habla de ella como una muestra de la escritura entre paredes, la escritura de mujeres, tan rica, que se refleja también en el Libro de Almohada de Shoei Sonagon, y en los diarios de corte de damas, uno de los que se conserva también perteneciente a Murasaki Shikibu. Una escritura que contempla como un mundo completo lo que es simplemente el atisbo que se le permite a la mirada femenina, protegido o sepultado por cortinas, paredes, persianas fijas y móbiles, y que ve el boato y los nombramientos, pero desconoce o no le es permitido hablar de las intrigas y las artes y sutilezas políticas.
No es una obra fácil de leer, debido a la manera de nombrar a los personajes, ya sea por el cargo que detentan o por el lugar donde viven, en vez de por su nombre. También, por la forma en que los acontecimientos son tratados, a veces en detalle, a veces someramente o elusivamente. Y sobre todo, y eso es además un gran valor en esta narración, por esa multiplicidad de sentido del texto, en que la cita de poesías clásicas, y la forma de la escritura y literatura japonesa, crea una multiplicidad de capas que se añaden al sentido del texto. Murasaki y su texto se suponen antecedente de Proust por ese cuidado por el detalle y esa densidad significativa, así como por el tratamiento melancólico de un tiempo recordado que se desvanece en humo.
Desgraciadamente, esta versión no es directa del japonés, sino que sigue la inglesa de Royall Tyler, en traducción al español de Jordi Fibla, que también reproduce y vierte las notas correspondientes de dicha edición. El que la mujer de Fibla sea japonesa, y el que esta edición esté respaldada por Casa Japón, supone un respaldarazo a su fidegnidad. Pese a eso, no estamos nunca seguros de que la nota, pertinente en la edición japonesa, sea siempre adecuada al traducirse al español. Y no digamos ya del texto en sí, que se nos aleja a través del filtro de la traducción inglesa.
Dividida en dos tomos, este muy voluminoso primer tomo recoge las dos tercias partes de la obra, conteniendo la vida de Genji, desde que nace hasta que muere, así como la vida de su dama, la excepcional Murasaki. Sin embargo, esto hace que nos encontremos con un inmanejable volumen de gran dimensión y de 1000 páginas, que se deteriora a la primera lectura, pese a el cuidado que uno pueda hacer de ella en su uso.
Aparte, de esta versión y la de Xavier Roca-Ferrer, que apareció al tiempo que esta en 2005, pero para Destino, sigueindo en este caso la edición de Arthur Waley de 1931, recientemente la Asociación Peruano Japonesa ha publicado, en tres tomos, una traducción por fin completa y DIRECTA del japonés, a cargo de Hiroko Izumi Shimono e Iván Pinto Román. Edición que cuenta con el beneplácito de Carlos Rubio-zhan, pero que apenas tiene difusión y que no ha llegado a España.
Es una pena que una edición tan cuidada sea una traducción indirecta, y es una pena que su primera impresión, que es la que yo tengo, esté llena de erratas de trazo grueso, que afectan al sentido, que incluso llegan hasta las ilustraciones, y que incurren incluso en repetir una página completa y a suprimir una extensión similar del texto que seguiría al texto repetido.
Otra cosa, muy discutible, son las ilustraciones, que son descriptivas de objetos que se citan, como si esto fuera un diccionario para colegiales, pero que a veces poco dicen al lector. Uno desearía alguna ilustración en lámina interna como las de la portada, que aportaran una visión al mundo de la corte Heian. Estas ilustraciones provienen, como las notas, de la edición de Tyrell, y se supone que replican las ilustraciones que se encontrarían en ediciones clásicas, y perdidas, del Genji Monogatari.
Pese a eso, mientras que la nueva traducción logra tener una mejor difusión, como todos esperamos, nos queda esta versión, que podemos comparar con la de Roca-Ferrer, para reconstruir o que es la original. Suena a placer interrumpido, pero es obligado dejarse llevar por la magia de la prosa de Murasaki Shikibu y el mundo resplandeciente, no exento de sombras, de Genji.

Putting this aside as it is not made for leisure listening on the side. I listened to 15 hours and it's so complicated to keep track of who's who and what is happening.
I'm happy to have given it a try, but not in a place right now to invest the attention and time a proper read would need.

I’m still just getting my thoughts together on The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, which was an epic that took me by surprise. Considered by many to be the first known novel, written in the early 11th century in Japan by a woman at court, this book is full of drama, wit, poetry, and messiness.

Genji is his father’s favorite. A beautiful, naturally charming prince, he is considered to be too good to be true—there was an idea that if too beautiful, you would be doomed to die early. His father is unable to name him crown prince due to court politics, and so he is a commoner at court, but one of tremendous influence. Genji is in love with love, and chases after women left and right—but is very serious about these affairs, making it a point not to abandon the women he seduces. It is a story of romance, intrigue, and growth.

One thing I was surprised by is the modern-feeling self-awareness of the text. Many analyses identify the 2nd protagonist, Kaoru, as possibly the first anti-hero, but I’d argue Genji is. Like many early mythic figures, he is loved by all but not without flaws. When he adopts (kidnaps) Lady Murasaki at a young age specifically to groom her into a future wife, the text does not shy away from how inappropriate it is. Characters disapprove, and the text is often cynical or wry about Genji’s choices. It does the same when Genji’s seductions turn coercive. It forgives Genji, but does excuse him, and that was something I did not expect from such an early text. This reflectiveness is part of what makes the book feel like a novel, rather than an epic poem of some kind.

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Genji is not a perfect person, but there’s a purity to him, a beauty that’s clearly meant to be lauded, particularly in contrast to later chapters. He’s in love with love, a true romantic, and his sometimes unwise affairs are motivated by a true sense of love. He never abandons one of his lovers, which in this time is crucial. No matter the shame it brings to himself, he tries to find a way to honor the women he’s fallen for. He’s charming. No one can not love him, or ultimately forgive him his faults.

The age of Tale of Genji had strict rules of romance—of how flirtations worked (largely intermediaries and poetry), of how commitments worked, of how aloof vs. present it was appropriate to be (it’s good to commit but bad to hoard or become jealous). It was possible to love too much. Genji is accused of this, but he always remembers to care for the people he is responsible for—once he grows up that is.

Early in the text, he neglects his wife, and he also neglects “the Rokujo lady.” The Rokujo lady becomes so jealous and enraged that her spirit begins to sicken his wife. This ghost returns more than once over the course of the text. She has grown sick from obsession and neglect, and Genji pays the price for it. It’s part of what motivates him to always care for the women he romances for the rest of his life.

Later, in the “Uji” chapters, young Kaoru and prince Niou also love too much. Niou is impulsive like Genji but also flighty, and Kaoru is serious like Genji but also obsessive. Both men pursue the women at Uji with insistence that the text can’t quite forgive as it could for Genji. Both, somehow, go too far—perhaps in their attempts to hoard, or in their impatience.

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Lady Murasaki Shikibu’s narration is itself fascinating in Tale of Genji. She breaks in now and then as a narrative voice, but that voice is not one of an oral storyteller. It is a created narrator, a fiction. She frames herself as if she was a lady in Genji’s court, and often mentions that she “forgot to note down” a poem or “couldn’t hear” something, despite having a near-omniscient perspective for most of the novel.

Her narration isn’t meant to be direct—it’s more of a conversation with her readers. A wink, an inside joke. Pretending to be a lady at court frames it like real gossip, like stories shared in confidence, but also gives a small nod to the fact that while she is writing this story, she won’t tell us everything (won’t “bore us with the details”).

It’s fun to see an unreliable narrator (so to speak) in Genji as well. Stories shift as he ages, and he looks back on things differently from how they happened. The text actually comments on this, making fun of him a little when he treats himself more kindly in memory.

On a technical note, the translation of Genji by Edward Seidensticker seems very good, and is complete. My one complaint was that sometimes the footnotes claimed a line had an unknown meaning when the metaphorical implication felt obvious—I think because there are so many poetic allusions in the text, when there was a poetic line that couldn’t be identified, the translator felt like it had to be explained.

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“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 chose 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. The balance was certainly difficult to maintain.”—from the perspective of Lady Murasaki in Tale of Genji

I’m so glad I read all of the Tale of Genji. It was dense but rarely difficult reading, full of intense romantic and family drama. It was moving, funny, infuriating, and fascinating in turn. The characters had all the complex reality of a historical tv drama, and the translator did an excellent job of keeping the text both rich and accessible. And I continue to be thrilled and happy that the first novel—and what a novel!—was written by a woman, and that her text went without equal for many, many years.

I made a chart showing all of the connections between the characters that was immensely helpful. Names can be a little tricky, as women don’t use their personal names at this time and so are referred to as “the 3rd princess” or “the lady of the evening faces” in the text. It didn’t help that some online guides and translations Anglicize some of these names in ways that can be confusing in a quick google search.

But my chart helped. If you’re interested in reading Genji, please hit me up for my chart! I have a fewer-spoilers version for the 1st chunk of the text, and then the full one that technically has spoilers but is also a full and complete guide to the characters you’ll need to know.

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Content warnings: sexual assault, age-gap relationship, grooming, ableism, gaslighting, suicidal ideation, suicide.