Word: genji
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Citizens of the Western world who think of Japanese civilization as dating from Matthew Calbraith Perry (1794-1858) would change their minds after reading Lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji. Written some time ago (1001-15) by a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Akiko, it has been a widely-known classic in Japan since 1022. When British Scholar Arthur David Waley brought out the first volume of his translation (1925), critics tumbled over themselves to get within wreath-throwing distance. The Tale of Genji was compared to Proust, Jane Austen. Boccaccio. Shakespeare. Its translator calls...
What strikes modern readers of Genji most surprisingly is its up-to-date-ness. The psychological novel is apparently no modern invention after all. Formal, slow-moving, ceremoniously polite, Lady Murasaki's court romance is peopled by very human beings (some 800 in all). Hero is Prince Genji, illegitimate son of an emperor, a Japanese Don Juan without Byronic weaknesses or vulgarities. By the end of the fourth volume his love-affairs and political maneuvers have landed him in exile. In a lapse of eight years between the fourth and fifth volumes Genji dies: the last two volumes tell...
Other volumes (in order) : The Tale of Genji, The Sacred Tree, The Wreath of Cloud, Blue Trousers, The Lady of the Boat (TIME...
Artfully translated by Arthur Waley the first four parts of Lady Murasaki's 900-year-old Japanese masterpiece, Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji, The Sacred Tree, The Wreath of Cloud, Blue Trousers), have given many an Occidental reader an appetite for the dainty psychological morsels of antique Nippon. With all its predecessors' inimitable flavor, The Lady of the Boat tells a simple story, though its characters are modernistically complex...
...Author. A lady as irreproachable in her own behavior as her characters were worldly, Lady Murasaki (Murasaki, no Shikibu) belonged to a junior branch of the Fujiwara family, married a kinsman, joined the court of the Empress Akiko when he died. The Genji Monogatari, in 54 books, was finished in 1004 or a little earlier. Tourists who visit the Lake Biwa Temple of Ishiyama can see what legend calls Lady Murasaki's room and a scrap of the handwriting in which she composed the first Nipponese novel, some 700 years ahead of England's Fielding...