This stunning compendium also includes English translations and Japanese transcriptions of the album’s calligraphy, enabling a holistic experience of the work for readers today. In this book, the album’s colorful painting and calligraphy leaves are fully reproduced for the first time, followed by McCormick’s insightful essays that analyze the Genji story and the album’s unique combinations of word and image. Melissa McCormick provides a unique companion to Murasaki’s tale that combines discussions of all fifty-four of its chapters with paintings and calligraphy from the Genji Album (1510) in the Harvard Art Museums, the oldest dated set of Genji illustrations known to exist. Much may be lost in translation, but modern readers are charmed to identify with familiar emotions in such a remote context, and fascinated when characters’ responses and attitudes prove startlingly unexpected.Written in the eleventh century by the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji is a masterpiece of prose and poetry that is widely considered the world’s first novel. Fiction works its magic to bridge the historical, cultural, and linguistic gulf between Murasaki’s world and our own. In this lies much of its enduring appeal. The Tale of Genji opens a window upon a distant, exotic world-the aestheticized, refined court life of medieval Japan. With Genji sidelined, the book moves on to a darker portrayal of the succeeding generation, before ending apparently arbitrarily-opinions differ as to whether the work is unfinished or deliberately inconclusive. Forced into exile as the result of a politically ill-judged sexual adventure, Genji returns to achieve wealth and power, then, grieving after Murasaki’s death, retires to a temple.

The young man undergoes complex emotional and sexual vicissitudes, including involvement with the mother-figure Fujitsubo and with Murasaki, whom he adopts as a child and who becomes the true love of his life. Written at least in part by Murasaki Shikibu, a woman at the imperial court at Kyoto, its loose structure revolves around the love life of an emperor’s son, the handsome, cultured Genji. The Tale of Genji is the earliest work of prose fiction still read for pleasure by a substantial audience today.

The tale of genji novel