The Tale of Genji
Written in the eleventh century, this exquisite portrait of courtly life in medieval Japan is widely celebrated as the world’s first novel. Genji, the Shining Prince, is the son of an emperor. He is a passionate character whose tempestuous nature, family circumstances, love affairs, alliances, and shifting political fortunes form the core of this magnificent epic. Royall Tyler’s superior translation is detailed, poetic, and superbly true to the Japanese original while allowing the modern reader to appreciate it as a contemporary treasure. Supplemented with detailed notes, glossaries, character lists, and chronologies to help the reader navigate the multigenerational narrative, this comprehensive edition presents this ancient tale in the grand style that it deserves.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
25mentions
24people
2009–2026years
8% recommend92% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Anna Karenia is still on my list, but here's what I did for Jane Austen and the Tale of Genji: Just read one chapter a night. My old AP Lit teacher gave me that advice, said you need to treat these books like a soap opera, because they're written with the same idea in mind.
- Tale of Genji
Brave New World
- I really loved Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet! Very succinct. Currently working through The Tale of Genji (slowly) and Play It as It Lays (because I will read anything by Joan Didion).
- Are you sure? If anything, spelling along makes it hard to read Chinese or Japanese. Examples: can Japanese people correctly understand this: “かんじをせんねんいじょうつかっていたけいいからかんじをはいしするとぶんしょうによるいしのそつうにへいがいがしょうじるからです”？ In fact, the following two different sentences both have the same above kana：
「監事を専念異常浸かっていた敬意から監事を配しする飛ぶん商による石の疎通に兵が意を招 じる空です。」
「漢字を千年以上使っていた経緯から漢字を廃止すると文章による意思の疎通に弊害が生じる からです。
Or how about くさくさくさくらくらくさくさくさくさくさくさくらさくさんさくさんくさくさくらんくらくら？
Or how about こうないしゃせい？Is it 校内写生 or 口内射精?
In all seriousness, even Koreans still debate whether they should continue to use some Chinese characters, and they do so in poems and literatures. For instance, 악유원 means shit, yet 乐游原 has layers of meanings. Chinese and Japanese have too many homephones to use a spelling system like Korean. Unlike Chinese, where individual characters correspond closely to morphemes and carry distinct meanings, Japanese is organized around words as the fundamental linguistic units. Furthermore, because Japanese employs a pitch-accent system rather than the kind of lexical tones found in Chinese, writing some native Japanese words (和語) entirely in kana typically does not create confusion.
Also, Japan had at least three major attempts to remove Kanji. First time: The Tale of Genji, the world’s first novel, was written by a woman entirely in kana, with only a small number of Buddhist terms in kanji—terms which, in theory, could also have been rendered in katakana. This demonstrated that early Japanese could be expressed systematically and fully without using any Chinese characters at all. Nevertheless, the Japanese chose to retain kanji.
Second time: During the Meiji Restoration, slogans such as “Abolish kanji, or East Asia will never grow strong” were popular. In the end, Japan found that it could modernize, prosper, and even become one of the five permanent members of the League of Nations while still keeping kanji. The decision was made to continue using them.
Third time: After World War II, General MacArthur commissioned a team of American education specialists to work with Japanese experts to discuss whether to abolish kanji entirely, and to consider the possibility of fully romanizing the Japanese language. Yet, they decided to keep Japanese.
- I'm not sure I agree with your second footnote. Beowulf is written in Old English, which is quite hard for modern English speakers to read on account of being German. Middle English, however, I think you'd find fairly palatable. For example, the Peterborough Chronicle (https://adoneilson.com/eme/texts/peterborough_40.html) is _roughly_ contemporaneous with the Tale of Genji and is readable by modern English speakers.
- It's not superficial in the slightest. There is a cult of creativity that leads people to say things like "a neural network can never do anything creative" and instead that it just parrots back exactly what it's been told but no, it has an ability to generalize, which is why diffusion models trained to draw pornography draw girls with 7 belly buttons and you don't have to be worried that ChatGPT will tell you how to build a bomb because it will tell you how to build a hydrogen bomb using shaving cream and ski wax.
When I read a book it changes connections weights between the synapses in my brain. I don't retain an exact copy but I recall the gist of the book and some facts (imperfectly) I have the ability to generalize this information (I can read The Tale of Genji and retell a story based on it that is set on a Mars Colony in 4712AD) and it can improve my linguistic abilities in general.
