![]() 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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