Word: genji
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...tale of Genji is very old and very new, a novel about love and society that also, along with Proust's masterpiece, is one of the world's great representations of the passage of human time. It immerses us deeply in a strange and distant culture, whose graceful decadence initially seems light-years away from the haste and thirst for progress of modern Japan. But 21st century Japan shares the same sense of fecund decay as Genji's Heian period?in both eras, society has become complex, gaudy but, finally, ennui-inducing. Now, as then, it is more rewarding...
...share the most secret thoughts and longings of The Tale of Genji's characters, as if we were reading a modern psychological novel, and yet these same people use a language (and belong to a culture) that is inaccessible to native speakers today. There are at least six translations into modern Japanese, as well as two notable previous renderings (by Arthur Waley and Edward Seidensticker) into English. Royall Tyler's new translation (Viking; 1,174 pages) is a genuine labor of love, and makes a special virtue of attending to a certain ceremonial indirectness in the way the characters address...
...Genji was written a thousand years ago, and the name of its author has not come down to us. (It is attributed to Murasaki Shikibu. Murasaki is the name given to a charming character in the book, later attached to the writer as a joke or compliment that stuck. Shikibu is the name of an office the character's father once held.) The English-language equivalent for the general linguistic distance would be something like Beowulf, recently translated by Seamus Heaney, but the very comparison also points up the difference. The Tale of Genji depicts no guttural warriors and marauding...
...hero for the first 40 chapters is Genji himself, the son of one of the Emperor's intimates. He is handsome and graceful and charming, and irresistible to women. He is also unable to resist his own fancies?appetites would be too crude a word for them, although he does manage to get the Emperor's favorite consort pregnant. This is not good news even in a poly-gamous world. Early on, the narrator wonders whether she should be telling us all about Genji's naughty doings. "No doubt," she solicits, "I must now beg everyone's indulgence...
...Genji was something of a one-off. Modern Japanese fiction begins more or less with Natsume Soseki, born in 1867 shortly after Japan's opening to the West. Twentieth century Japanese literature was often preoccupied - formally and thematically - with the tortured attempts to come to terms with Western influences. Western readers may sometimes feel that they are looking through a telescope - only to see a telescope turned back in their direction...