Eleven hundred pages of manicured gentility, women sitting behind curtains, sleeves wet with tears, gardens, Ourobouros family trees, moongazing, sexual assault, and, to quote Blackadder, "endless bloody poetry". Relatable moments and striking imagery are few and far between, but they are to be found, like when someone's "nose and then the whole of his wary, bewhiskered face was crimson, and his mouth was twisted as if in a growl" or when Kaoru tells Oigimi, in a piercing access of true love, that all he wants is "to be with you. To spend our days together, talking of things that do not matter."
Kaoru, the "perfumed prince" whose distinctive fragrance renders him incapable of sneaking up on unsuspecting maidens like the other male characters, is more complex and convincing than Genji and the others, but not much more likeable even though he's the only one familiar with the word "consent":
Had the visitor been anyone but himself, matters would by now have come to a showdown. His own want of decision suddenly revolted him. Yet here she was, weeping and wringing her hands, quite beside herself. He would have to wait until consent came of its own accord.
He gets a paragraph just before this which is a rare moment of complex introspection ("I may be hurt, I may be furious, and there I stand like a post, knowing perfectly well how ridiculous I am"). Genji, on the other hand, is almost devoid of self-insight ("it astonishes me that you still think me a trifler" protests the serial trifler to one of his conquests), allowing the author to cast very occasional shade ("it was when he had little else to do that he offered such advice" after a little sermon to his son about being cautious and avoiding scandal).
It's the women, though, who provide the most emotional moments, albeit exclusively because of the searing cruelty inflicted on them by polygamy. The agony of Higekuro's first wife, when she's being supplanted by Genji's daughter, is visceral:
Suddenly she stood up, swept the cover from a large censer, stepped behind her husband, and poured the contents over his head.
She's punished by a brutal "exorcism", beaten by priests until she agrees to go away. And Kumoinokari is just as fucked off by Yugiri's philandering:
"Do you know where you are?" she said finally. "You are in hell. You have always known that I am a devil, and I have merely come home."
"In spirit worse than a devil," he replied cheerfully, "but in appearance not at all unpleasant."
She snorted and sat up. "I know that I do not go very well with your own fine looks, and I would prefer just to be out of sight. I have wasted so many years. Please do not remember me as I am now."
And then there's the story of the maid Ukon's sister, who is exiled because one suitor killed another over her through no fault of her own. This kind of thing is hard to stomach, but that's how it was back then, and still is in some places. And for me <i>Genji</i> was worth reading for its uniqueness, for the foregoing, and the following bits and bobs:
Peculiarly Japanese oddnesses
— The ludicrous habitual luxury: "not wishing to attract attention, he had only ten outrunners […] and his guards were in subdued livery."
— The "ritual bestowing of trousers".
— "One poem celebrating the thousand years of the pine is very like another" — no kidding.
— "It would not help the prospects of one daughter if the other were to be abducted."
— "Numbers of dogs had come bounding up and were barking most inelegantly". Yeah, what philistine taught those dogs to bark?
On fiction (all great fictions at some point discuss the nature of fiction)
Genji could not help noticing the clutter of pictures and manuscripts. "What a nuisance this all is," he said one day. "Women seem to have been born to be cheerfully deceived. They know perfectly well that in all these old stories there is scarcely a shred of truth, and yet they are captured and made sport of by the whole range of trivialities and go on scribbling them down, quite unaware that in these warm rains their hair is all dank and knotted."
He smiled. "What would we do if there were not these old romances to relieve our boredom? But amid all the fabrication I must admit that I do find real emotions and plausible chains of events. We can be quite aware of the frivolity and the idleness and still be moved. We have to feel a little sorry for a charming princess in the depths of gloom. Sometimes a series of absurd and grotesque incidents which we know to be quite improbable holds our interest, and afterwards we must blush that it was so. Yet even then we can see what it was that held us. Sometimes I stand and listen to the stories they read to my daughter, and I think to myself that there certainly are good talkers in the world. I think that these yarns must come from people much practiced in lying. But perhaps that is not the whole of the story?"
She pushed away her inkstone. "I can see that that would be the view of someone much given to lying himself. For my part, I am convinced of their truthfulness."
and
If the storyteller wishes to speak well, then he chooses the good things; and if he wishes to hold the reader's attention he chooses bad things, extraordinarily bad things.
A 4th wall-breaking 1000 year-old headache
Though no one has asked me to do so, I should like to describe the surprise of the assistant viceroy's wife at this turn of events, and Jiju's pleasure and guilt. But it would be a bother and my head is aching; and perhaps — these things do happen, they say — something will someday remind me to continue the story.
Painting and Go the only two innate talents
"It is true of every art," said the prince, "that real mastery requires concentrated effort, and it is true too that in every art worth mastering [...] the evidences of effort are apparent in the results. There are two mysterious exceptions, painting and the game of Go, in which natural ability seems to be the only thing that really counts."
As someone who sucks at painting and Go — even at Backgammon — I'm sorry to say I agree.
