audiobook of the week

Librivox has the main part of the Tale of the Genji for your listening pleasure. (the second part about his kids might not be part of the original story). It is considered by some to be the world's first novel, which was written by a court lady 1000 years ago.

Genji, the son of the emperor by a concubine, was designated a commoner so that he could serve the court but never be their rival. One result is that as a youth he goes around being a famous playboy seducing one woman after another... but after seducing the wrong woman, he is sent into exile and so in the last part of the book he actually grows up.

I was impressed by the Buddhist influences in the book: one of the alternatives for unhappy women was to become a Buddhist nun (often staying home in a small chapel).

this lecture puts it into cultural perspective:



Note the educated women used a different script for their books because hey, women weren't supposed to be involved in the government.

this article discusses the hiragana script.

Kanji represented the world of careers in Japan, and Hiragana was more related to leisure, hobbies, or cultural aspects of life. Writing novels, writing a love letter, exchanging poems in Hiragana helped Japan to attain its uniqueness and its own culture to bloom. The first significant literary masterpiece in Japanese history, “Genji Monogatari“, was written by a noble woman using Hiragana in the 11th century.

I'm not an expert on the complexities of Japanese writing systems but there are lectures about these things on Youtube if you want to investigate this aspect of the book.

There are lots of translations of Genji out there, and internet archives has several versions to borrow and this one to download:
Ebook here, and manga version here.

Summary HERE. and the main site has links to places mentioned in the book and lots of beautiful photos.


Wikipedia describes the technical details of the novel and the problems of translation.