In the eleventh century Murasaki Shikibu, a lady in the Heian court of Japan, wrote the world’s first novel. But The Tale of Genji is no mere artifact. It is, rather, a lively and astonishingly nuanced portrait of a refined society where every dalliance is an act of political consequence, a play of characters whose inner lives are as rich and changeable as those imagined by Proust. Chief of these … these is “the shining Genji,” the son of the emperor and a man whose passionate impulses create great turmoil in his world and very nearly destroy him. This edition, recognized as the finest version in English, contains a dozen chapters from early in the book, carefully chosen by the translator, Edward G. Seidensticker, with an introduction explaining the selection. It is illustrated throughout with woodcuts from a seventeenth-century edition.
more
“If only you were a boy, how proud and happy I will be,” said the father of Shikibu Murasaki, the author of this renowned first novel of the world.
The story was set in the Heian Period, the golden age of Japan’s literature prowess. The strength of this novel was its characters’ driven story. Although it consists of almost a hundred characters, …
This novel is written around the beginning of the 11th century in Japan and is probably the oldest novel ever. This translation runs over more than 1200 pages and contains over more than 400 characters.
This is the story of a medieval Japanese noble who lost his mother at the age of three and developed a major Oedipus complex because of that. …