I have been skipping ahead in the book (shame!), and I've been trying to think why I find Genji himself so hard to get a grip on. Murasaki and Aoi and his poor dead wife are all clear in my head; Genji remains a mystery ( Read more... )

I bought the Royall Tyler edition so that I could join in with the cool kids. It's a very helpful edition; not only does it have footnotes, it has sidebar vignettes from Heian woodcuts illustrating sidelocks, blinds, and such ( Read more... )

Again, since there's been summaries already, I'm just adding cultural footnotes. If I don't say where I got the info, it was pretty much ripped off directly from the footnotes in Tayler's translation.

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So behind, now! I figure, instead of doing full summaries, since others have done that already, I'll stick with cultural footnotes.

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Here's a question: in the "Narration, Courtesy, and Names" section of his Introduction, Tyler asserts that

The narrator of Genji is acutely aware of social rank and assumes the reader is, too. She seems to be a gentlewoman telling a tale to her mistress . . . . The fictional narrator speaks from within this structure, and for her, good manners ( Read more... )

Links to my original Genji posts. I'm reading the Royall Tyler translation. I also tend to incorporate cultural notes as I run across them, from footnotes in the Tyler or from Ivan Morris' The World of the Shining Prince.

• Chapters 1-3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Minor random commentary, mostly not serious