There are lots of tales in this world of ours where the reader wants to say to the narrator: “You can’t just tell us what happened. Now, this approach doesn’t amount to squat, when a narrator is describing beings whose moral status is perfectly clear, but the effect becomes exciting and engrossing for readers the second they find themselves longing to be told what to think. Her characters are selfish and generous, foolish and wise, from one minute to the next, and she simply tells you what they said, thought, and did, without overtly judging them. The narrator, in fact a court lady who all her life dealt with Genjis and sub-Genjis and all their women and all their children, tells the story with a very modern-seeming strategic restraint.
Later, it’s about the next generation: Genji’s son, and these other ones, including a guy whom everyone thinks is his son…ĭoesn’t sound all that interesting, right? Oh, but it is! Because of the way the material is handled. What’s it about? It’s about the life (especially the erotic life) of a very glamorous, heart-crushing, multi-talented dude: Genji.
At any rate, it’s like with Proust: one narrative, a half-dozen novel-sized books. Now, what do I mean by “super-long.” I mean 1,135 pages in the handy one-volume version of the Arthur Waley translation (originally published in six volumes, 1925–1933), 1,090 pages in Edward Seidensticker’s translation (two volumes, 1976), and I don’t know how many pages in Royall Tyler (2001) and in Dennis Washburn (2016). (Probably a lot of purple things in Japan are named after Lady Murasaki.) There’s a Japanese ink, purple of course, named after Nippon’s #1 purple girl -$20 a bottle on Amazon, if you’re into purple ink. It was written by a woman whose personal name is lost but who acquired the nickname “Murasaki” on account of its being the name of the most important female character in the book. The Tale of Genji-what is it? It is a super-long, super-detailed proto-novel, written in Japan in the early years of the eleventh century. A woodblock print from 1852 featuring a scene from The Tale of Genji
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