Describe Books To The Tale of Genji (源氏物語 #1-56)
| Original Title: | 源氏物語 [Genji Monogatari] |
| ISBN: | 014243714X (ISBN13: 9780142437148) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | 源氏物語 #1-56 |
| Characters: | Genji, Fujitsubo, To no Chujo, Murasaki, Yugiri |
| Setting: | Japan |
Murasaki Shikibu
Paperback | Pages: 1182 pages Rating: 3.72 | 9927 Users | 914 Reviews
Ilustration Toward Books The Tale of Genji (源氏物語 #1-56)
A princess likes stories. One of her ladies-in-waiting is good at making them up. Over years, the lady spins a long, elaborate story containing the princess's favorite theme: hot dudes nailing chicks. Crucially, the lady writes it down and here we are with history's first novel, the origin story of Japan, their Homer and their Star Wars, the winding and weird Tale of Genji. This is around 1000 CE. In Europe, someone was writing Beowulf about hacking the arms off monsters. The world of Japan couldn't have been more different. This was the Heian Period, an effete and decadent time where folks spent most of their time writing poetry to women hidden behind screens and then weeping about the beauty of a sunrise.
Things one might write a poem about
Sea grass
Tears
Chrysanthemums
Dew
Sleeves (wet, inevitably, with tears)
Autumn leaves
The phrase "How long must I..."
You can practice this at home. Try it!
How long must I wait until iHop opens
my sleeves wet with my tears
Sea grasses bend with the foamy tide
as I bend into my couch to binge Nashville
There's almost a poem a page in this book, so get used to it, unless you're reading one of the bullshit translations that duck the poetry altogether. I read Seidensticker's translation, and perhaps skipped a few parts here and there because listen, it is lengthy. The Scheherezadian author kept tacking chapter after chapter onto the thing; it ambles on into the next generation and it ends up being like 1100 pages and I will perhaps catch up with the rest of these poems after I retire.
That author, that lady-in-waiting, we never got her name so we call her Lady Murasaki after the primary love interest for our handsome prince Genji, and here's the first thing you should know about that love interest: she's like ten. I mean not forever, but definitely when Genji first notices her and goes like "what a babe," she's a babe indeed, and this whole book is squicky as all fuck. Not like Lolita squicky? He doesn't actually have sex with Murasaki when she's ten! He just kidnaps her and saves her in his palace for slightly later, which is also not great.
But hey, he also rapes and impregnates his stepmother, so. Rape is a little murky here - encounters that seem unambiguously to start with rape evolve into consensual affairs. I don't know if this was the time or the author or what. And this is as close as we're getting to a plot: Genji seduces a series of women with various levels of consensuality.
I mean, but it's not actually that simple, and this is the wild thing about this ancient book: Genji has real psychological depth. The characters are consistent and they change over time for logical reasons. There's a certain circularity; Genji's crimes will come back around to haunt him. The book seems to have more of a handle on how a novel might operate than other early experiments like Don Quixote, and I'm not fucking with Don Quixote, it's great, but certainly the second half is on a different trip than the first half is.
So Genji isn't just a historical landmark, it's for real good reading. The setting is like nothing you've ever read before - if you want some nonfiction on the Heian period, by the way, the unanimous choice is The World of the Shining Prince, which is pretty good. The characters are memorable, sophisticated, and ambiguous. And if nothing else, it's extremely easy to parody. Genji is just constantly moping about with a guitar, writing poems on fancy stationary that's described in exactly the same loving detail as the business cards from American Psycho, while women swoon over how good his handwriting is.
it's long and weird, but worth it
Like an autumn moonrise, or my dick. 
Define Regarding Books The Tale of Genji (源氏物語 #1-56)
| Title | : | The Tale of Genji (源氏物語 #1-56) |
| Author | : | Murasaki Shikibu |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 1182 pages |
| Published | : | 2003 by Penguin (first published 1008) |
| Categories | : | Classics. Fiction. Cultural. Japan. Asian Literature. Japanese Literature. Historical. Historical Fiction |
Rating Regarding Books The Tale of Genji (源氏物語 #1-56)
Ratings: 3.72 From 9927 Users | 914 ReviewsCriticize Regarding Books The Tale of Genji (源氏物語 #1-56)
Putting this back on my TBR. I started reading it and then realized I had accidentally picked up the abridged version at the library - I thought it looked small! I just think if I'm going to read it I might as well go the whole way.(view spoiler)[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 (hide spoiler)]
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...
Arguably the first novel ever written (using a modern definition of novel), and at the very least the first novel written by a woman, this essential work traces the life of a prince in medieval (Heian) Japan. The novel is intensely psychological and manages to very consistently portray the lives of hundreds of individuals across half a century or more. Aside from the insight the novel provides into the extremely rarified culture of the Japanese court in the middle ages, a reader comes away from
Oh yes, I totally want to read about all the affairs Genji, the "shining" prince, had with dozens of other women. Not to mention most of these women looked like his mother in some way or another. (Freud would be esctatic.) One of these women wasn't even a woman at all, but a small child he pretty much abducted. Of course, this young girl looked like his mother.The fact that this is the first true psychological novel in the world is interesting, it really is. But just because it is so doesn't
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.
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