The Tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century narrative follows the radiant Prince Genji through the salons, gardens, and bedrooms of the Heian court. Politics and poetry are inseparable; a man's worth is measured by his calligraphy as much as by his rank, and love affairs unfold through intricate layers of silk, incense, and allusion to poems everyone is expected to recognize. The world is vanished, but the social mathematics remain exacting.Edward Seidensticker's two-volume translation for Random House, presented here in an art slipcase, is the English version most readers encounter first. The Genji is long, mannered, and occasionally exasperating, but it is also the beginning of the novel as a form—an insider's account of a court culture that understood beauty as a kind of power and grief as a matter of etiquette.
