Thank you for a very interesting essay. Many years since I read the book and though I suspect I won't get round to reading it again it is good to retrospectively understand it a little better.
> A woman neglected by her lover sends her living spirit to possess his other lover and make her ill.
Was that a normal thing for women to be doing in Japan circa year 1000 ? As in, "my lover is stepping out with another girl, so for starters I'm going to cast 'Possession' on her, and if that doesn't work, I'll escalate all the way to writing a sad poem to the nearest Imperial official" ?
I was very curious about this now that you ask, so I asked AI. Belief in possession was very common then, apparently, but they didn't cast it on purpose. It was always like the body's unconscious desire coming out.
"Normal" in the sense that these people believed in the supernatural and this is a recognized type of supernatural happening (it's called an ikiryo, a living ghost), but not "normal" in the sense of being a common thing for a spurned lover to do. As normal as any other ghost story, I guess.
Also, it wasn't something you *did*, anymore than the Evil Eye was. You were envious, you looked bitterly at the person better off than you, and your Evil Eye sent misfortune on them without your consciously intending it.
It is, in fact, very like the Evil Eye in its core, though obviously the manifestation is very different.
Thank you for the fascinating and witty review, anonymous reviewer!
On a meta note, most entries in past contests were nonfiction books on big “how does the world work” topics: the foundations of morality! Land value tax! The transition from hunter-gatherer bands to complex state-level societies! In contrast, this year only two entries can sort of fit in that category (foreign aid and lobotomies). Other than that, we’ve got ancient fiction, a memoir, and two translations of weird texts by equally weird characters. What gives?
Whatever gives, it's working. Every review contest has had its share of entries that induced interest even when the topic held little, but this one has an extraordinary 100% hit rate so far.
With that in mind, I propose to occasionally rate the (non-)book review contests against each other, in a sort of meta review:
Format: (low effort) a poll, (medium effort) a singular (guest) post, or (high effort) a meta-review contest with the only allowable topic being "the past x review contests".
Frequency: every 10 years, the end of the review contest series, or the end of the blog, whichever comes first.
I remember Scott saying that he was going to apply affirmative action for fiction reviews at some point, so either that happened or reviewers got the message.
Thank you for this detailed and entertaining account, which assumes no prior knowledge, and explains cultural and literary aspects - including translation issues - thoroughly. Excellent! As for earliest novels, one reasonable view is that the Hellenistic Romances met the bill; Longus's Daphnis and Chloe certainly qualifies.
Yes, I also find the bit about the characters strange. There are published works that we unquestioningly call novels *today* that don't necessarily meet the criterion of having particular in-depth exploration of their characters (like your bog standard airport paperback mystery or thriller). I haven't read Daphnis and Chloe, but I have read Apuleius' The Golden Ass which I think would definitely qualify as a novel, and before that there's stuff like Lucian's True Story and other Hellenistic works as you mention. It seems hard to justify not calling any of those "novels".
Reading Genji in the Royall Tyler translation I had a slightly different experience, though I agree with some of your points.
1. With one very significant exception (the Empress Mother), everyone, as you say, loves Genji, often immediately; mostly women, but also from time to time men as well as the undead. The guy is just irresistible. Although almost all women love Genji, most of them don’t like him very much (possibly in part because all women love Genji) and some, including those closest to him, loathe him, such as the 10-year-old niece of his stepmother who becomes his wife. In reading Genji, I found it rewarding to pay close attention to the reactions of the women in the story and their psychology rather than their agency (because they didn’t have much). The author takes care to make their thoughts and feelings a big part of the story which makes it much richer and much more than just a tale of Genji’s “conquests.” As the author remarks several times, social convention forbade a woman from writing on topics - like politics - as freely as a man. So her powers of perception were focused perhaps that much more intensely on subjects that were allowed, including the psychology of the many women in Genji.
2. The world of the Heian court is very different but not wholly so. Its distinction between cultivated urban sophisticates and rural rubes and bumpkins and “mountain folk”, the high born vs. the menial and uncouth is a familiar one to us. Perennial one might say. While acknowledging the stereotypes, the author implicitly recognizes their falsity by giving many of those “uncouth” and uncultivated people their own personalities, thoughts, and feelings. She was not just interested in court life, but human psychology. Also, on sexual mores, though a very different world, Genji is not free to do as he pleases, though he does so often enough. There are always consequences and he is concerned to avoid appearing (as opposed to being, I guess) debauched which suggests that a lot of what he does is frowned upon.
3. There is a lot of what we would call voyeurism and voyeurism-adjacent behavior in Genji – there’s lots of lingering to peep and peer through latticework and trellises and such - in part because of the extensive use of screens to separate men from women, which put me in mind of the dual use of screens both to draw attention and to conceal, again, not unlike our own time in which our ubiquitous screens conceal a great deal while inviting us constantly to look at them.
4. On the necessity of footnotes I am in full agreement with you. The Empress Mother at one point in the text makes a disparaging reference to court “flatterers spouting the same nonsense as those who, they say, called a deer a horse.” Obscure by itself, a deft footnote explains that this is a reference to the Shiji – the official history of China from the beginning up to the reign of Emperor Wu of the Early Han dynasty, completed in 91 B.C. – which “tells of an evil official who tested his men’s loyalty by seeing whether they would agree with him in public that a deer was a horse” (Ch. 12 Suma). That, perhaps more than anything else, made Genji feel disturbingly familiar and contemporary.
Anyway, these were just a few quick thoughts. Thanks for writing a great review. I enjoyed reading it.
The deer thing may be obscure to English speakers, but to this day, the most commonly-used word for "idiot" in Japanese is written 馬鹿 "horse-deer". So even to a modern Japanese audience, this is roughly akin to a phrase like "forbidden fruit" in terms of "everyone understands and immediately knows where it comes from".
Second, it's extremely judgmental -- throughout -- of the novel's culture. I get it. I'd be judgmental of that culture, too -- maybe more than the writer is. But if you're going to read literature like this, at some point you have to suspend that and use your imagination to try to relate to people in that culture and get inside their motivations, and how you might have been in that culture. The reviewer never really seems willing to forgive any of the characters (especially the men) for not being western liberals or Christians, and it comes close to ruining the review (at least for me). A reviewer needs more sympathy to write a useful review, I think.
However, it certainly did give me a sense of what the novel is like, and of what life in that time was like, and I respect the reviewer for finishing it and telling us this much. In that sense, it was very interesting.
Ultimately, I think I'd probably agree more with Tyler than the reviewer. Many of the things that seemed to puzzle the reviewer do seem very relatable (a man being upset that someone won't marry his daughter?), and even the stranger ones can -- as the reviewer notes themselves -- be understood with a bit more effort and abstraction. I also wouldn't be so shocked if you can read it without footnotes and get a lot from it. We learn language that way as humans, and I've read enough stuff from very different cultures to know that you can get the whiff of life through it, even if you only later learn that curtains = sex. But the reviewer does make a reasonably strong case that you'd miss a lot by not reading the footnotes.
I'll probably never know, because I'm probably not going to read the Tale of Genji. Props to the reviewer for doing so. I still feel, oddly, that if I did read it, I might like the characters more than the reviewer.
Yeah, I had that feeling particularly at the beginning of the review. Being judgmental is always for me a no-no and the place *not* to be at when you read literature, but to each their own. I was going to say that that felt like a very conventionally American thing to do in the current literary-academic framework, but then the anonymous book reviewer is Finnish.
Thirding, I was surprised too. Well written, subtle and very informative, but the pervasive judgmental attitude grates. Also mildly surprised that it would come from a Finn.
I was a little surprised that he was so judgmental of a fictional story. While it obviously has some plotlines that would be horrifying today, it doesn't seem any worse than the thousands of romance-thrillers that we see on shelves today, much less what's published on the internet. People *like* reading about these awful people, not about moral paragons.
Well, to be fair, that judgement comes in the context of responding to a different review claiming that this is all immediately relatable to all of us... which is true, it really isn't. Even though we can see that ultimately people were always people with the same fundamental drives, there's just so much different culture on top of that which makes it hard to parse.
For me it's actually much more neutral/non-judgmental than I thought it'd be. Though maybe it's because I've been exposed to dumbest comments in reddit unfairly criticizing my beloved shows, but hey.
I think it is useful to highlight where the culture differs from ours. Otherwise people would instinctively round it up to what they are familiar with. Which could be nice, but historically unfaithful.
If the people in other cultures were alien to me, I want to know. I prefer that to e.g. the Hollywood movies where people in ancient Greece behave like modern Americans.
Taiwanese art house film, Three Times, does something similar. Film is in three segments, each taking place in different era: Japanese occupation, 1960’s, and Present (2005). It is same actors and they also chronicle mini stories on what it is like to have a romantic encounter in each era. How the structure of society determines romance
I liked this one, because it specifically focused on "here are the ways that Tale of Genji is surprising, or interesting, or just really different from other things you may have encountered."
There was almost no recounting of the actual plot. And that's fine! I've learned some things about the world; good review, would read more by this author.
Yeah it's refreshing sering a review emphasizing whether or not the reader should read the book or not. But I guess it's rare for a review here to even talk about the book reviewed.
If this review made you interested in Heian culture and kind of vaguely made you want to read, or to have read The Tale of Genji, but not so interested you're actually going to go through the whole giant edifice, try reading the other great work of Heian literature, The Pillow Book instead. Here's a review of it, which I recommend on its own: https://acxreviews.robennals.org/reviews/the-pillow-book
Why try Pillow Book? Same strange aristocratic sensibilities, but more accessible and dare I say, fun. Reads like a social media feed - no (or very little) overarching narrative, lots of fun or relatable self-contained entries, you can read 5 pages and get something out of it, the way you probably can't with Genji.
I can also recommend the board game called Genji, for more world flavor without a literary commitment. You get to combine poetry fragments, which are scored according to whether they are appropriate for the current season and fashion plus a "cuckoldry bonus."
And it's also from this year?? Damn, I guess ACX reader don't really consider it highly, but it's a very nice palate cleanser to contrast with this review. Thank you for the recommendation.
I don't know how to think about the idea that the world's oldest (and thus first?) novel is also an extraordinary masterpiece.
I can write convincing arguments to myself that its not possible, it's not likely, one doesn't have any bearing on the other, that the post author doesn't know what they're talking about, that I don't know what I'm talking about, etc...
Arguably a couple of Roman works are earlier novels, The Satyricon by Petronius, and "The Golden Ass" by Apuleius.
It's a damned shame the majority of the Satyricon hasn't survived, and one can only hope that the owner of the Philosopher's House in Herculaneum was a fan of Petronius so that one day more currently lost parts of the Satyricon can be read from the burnt scrolls. But from the scraps of boring philosophical works uncovered so far I'm not holding my breath!
Also, I think it is quite possible that Petronius pretended it was part of a larger work, to drive Emperor Nero crazy trying to find the non-existent rest!
The Golden Ass definitely counts for me. It's the story of one guy going through a bunch of adventures after a supernatural mishap incurred because he was too horny (funny how that goes). I think the weakest element from a modern perspective is the ending, where (SPOILERS!) the entire situation is resolved just by a deus ex machina which seems to double as religious proselytism. But then, modern writers sometimes do that too (looking at you C.S. Lewis).
Is it not still hypocritical to ask someone to come speak to you personally, and then criticize them for agreeing to do so? I don't know if hypocrisy is the exact right word, but that's definitely not just a double standard - that's having two different standards/stances towards a single subject (literally an individual in this case, not even women as a class).
Merriam-Webster (which leans more descriptivist than prescriptivist, for those of you who knows what that means and cares) defines hypocrisy as "a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not: behavior that contradicts what one claims to believe or feel".
In this case, I don't think asking someone to do X and then criticizing them for doing so feigns that they are something they are not, nor is it them feigning that they believe something that they do not.
As for an appropriate term, best I can come up with is "double bind" which Merriam defines as "a psychological predicament in which a person receives from a single source conflicting messages that allow no appropriate response to be made".
I think the hypocrisy exists there but is very implicit. When you ask someone to come speak to you personally, you strongly imply "I am the sort of person who approves of you coming to speak to me personally." I feel it's inherent in making a seemingly good-faith request that you'd approve of it being acted out. So then turning out to make statements based on the contrary does feel like the initial request feigned approval of a behavior that you in fact consider unacceptable.
Obviously it's far more complicated than that in courtship, ESPECIALLY very complex ritualized courtship in a traditional upper-class. Women being "meant" to resist wooing to display virtue is a trope extending to antiquity. But I'd still argue it's inherently a sort of hypocrisy - if very indirect and implicit - to ask someone to do something and then disapprove of them for agreeing "too easily."
In addition to being a pretty good entry, this was the most actual "review of a piece of literature" I've read in probably any of the review contests. We should recognize the achievement.
I read this in the preliminaries, and as I said back then, this is a fascinating analysis of a book it sounds like I would definitely not enjoy reading, so thank you for explaining it to us.
Sometimes I do wonder if all of this absurd social complexity was serving as an artificial selection mechanism for intelligence. Regardless of how "normal" all of this was for the people living during the time, it does take a bare minimum amount of intelligence to understand and participate in these systems to begin with, and failing to do so would have lethal consequences. Even the lowborn wouldn't be spared from observing the proper rituals and respecting their betters. All of this esoteric doublespeak would only increase the minimum threshold for survival.
I was under the impression that intelligence is a general thing. It's not as if these people were relying on subtle facial tells for communication. There was just a very complex and arbitrary set of rules that everyone was expected to learn over time. In fact, their culture was so unnatural that it should arguably level the playing field between neurotypicals and those on the spectrum.
I didn't get the impression that these were the kind of rules that are all able to be written down and studied.
If Genji is in favour with the emperor, can you send him a note given your current social standing? This seems like it is an extremely open-ended question! How in favour? Who are your relatives? Are they in favour? Are you in favour? How do you know who is in favour and out of it and to what degree? You must maintain a network of friendships to keep track of this stuff, right? So what do all your friends need, what can you give them, are they a net benefit to you, what are the consequences of remaining friends with the wrong person vs kicking them to the curb, who is fashionable vs unfashionable and do you still have to put up with the latter given the relative social standing, etc. And remember, people are segregated by gender, but they still have to interact face to face within their gender and deal with body language and nuance.
Thinking about this complicated social system for a few seconds makes it seem like absolute hell on earth for someone who is autistic. It sounds exhausting to me, and at least I'm outgoing and interested in gossip to some degree.
> There was just a very complex and arbitrary set of rules that everyone was expected to learn over time.
If the rules were never explained explicitly, and you just had to learn them from observing other people's behavior and correctly interpreting some hints, or if the explained rules were contradictory (e.g. accusing a women of being cold if she does not respond, and of improper behavior if she does) and you had to figure out the true rules behind the rules... then people on the autistic spectrum didn't have a chance.
There is a general factor of intelligence (typically called "g"), but that does not mean that all measures of intelligence have a correlation of 1.
As an analogy, there is a general factor of "AI stock prices": the stock prices of almost all AI companies have been shooting up rapidly in the last couple of years and when a company announces it's "pivoting to AI", its stock price also tends to shoot up. But each individual company's stock has some non-correlation, i.e. one of them can go up while another one can go down.
I think social complexity in societies (and this applies to the West as well) arises amongst wealthy, important, high-status people as a means of occupying their time, putting energies to work that are not harnessed elsewhere, and demonstrating that they deserve their status and position by being naturally superior ("high value human capital").
Being raised so you automatically know how to navigate these situations cements your position and differentiates you from the arrivistes and nouveaux riches who have to look up books of etiquette about "fish knives - yay or nay?"
Everything from Elizabethan court gallants to 17th century French, Italian and Spanish to 20th century snobbery (Nancy Mitford's U and Non-U):
Clearly these systems were not intentionally created to serve as a makeshift eugenics program, but there must be a reason they survive despite the obvious costs they inflict on themselves and society at large. Just like all those ridiculous mating rituals various animals perform never arose intentionally, yet they still serve a purpose.
The ability to extract the value of labour from others, and maintain the system that makes it possible, could definitely be cast as a eugenics programme.
It also provided an in-group identifying mechanism. Their scorn for provincials was very high, and this helped reinforce it -- they didn't know how to act!
To each their own! By my reckoning, the opportunity cost for really learning Finnish, for purely academic reasons to understand millennia old Japanese tales…. Is a very very steep cost. Major respect to the Finns, but even just within the realm of “hey I think I’ll learn a notPIE-derived language for fun and games,” there are at least a few other serious contenders. Sumerian or Akkadian, for Gilgamesh? Ancient Egyptian., for… all kinds of stuff? Or you know, just modern Japanese :-)
Nice review! I've read Genji (Spanish translation in two volumes, by Xavier Roca Ferrer; got Tyler's version in my bookshelves) and like it a lot (I do prefer Heike Monogatari though). I fit the 'Interest in (Japanese) history, literature, poetry, philosophy, or aesthetics. Willingness to suspend moral judgement. Stamina', as I've been a history nerd since my teens, an avid reader and a person with strong anti-realist moral intuitions, meaning I feel completely unattracted to judging the customs and mores of other cultures, fictional or otherwise. I found no difficulty empathizing with characters, including Genji and some others (I particularly have a soft spot for Suetsumuhana and the 6th Avenue Princess).
As for the universality of the text, this is a common Humanistic trope for justifying the value of reading classics. Personally, I find it holds *some* small kernel of truth, which you exemplify at the end: if you distance yourself enough, the characters *are* humans and have human emotions, reactions, behaviors, etc... that bar massive future transformation, are pretty understandable and easy even empathize with. Personally, though, I think the strangeness of the past is one of its more appealing characteristics, and Aristocratic Heian Japan somewhat asymptotically approximates what I imagine a successful post-AGI world might look like (particularly in the aesthetic cultivation and centrality of romance and art).
The Golden Ass is a novel 800 years older than the Tale of Genji. It is a lengthy prose work in which the main character is going through an overarching narrative and a literal and figurative transformation. That makes it a novel even if it's often broken by nested stories and is written in the style of menippean satire.
On the other hand, it turns the main character into a donkey.
When the novel (the "new") was being recognized as a genre distinct from the chivalric romance, turning a character into a donkey would put your work squarely into the romance category.
The "living woman's envious ghost" is -- well, it would seem more like the Gothic novels that Jane Austen parodied.
Review qua review: good enough, I got a decent understanding of this historic work I've heard about for ages but never actually looked into. Interesting bookend with The Epic of Gilgamesh review. The past is a different country, even if it's thousands of years later...
...but different does not mean incomprehensible. I kept running into, uh, I guess like "reverse typical mind" contra the author? It's not hard at all to comprehend a segment of society totally walled off from the concerns of ordinary men, absorbed entirely with beautymaxxing. In fact this is a common trope in fiction, frequently associated with elves! Similarly it's weird to remark on the odd and outre dictates of Imperial fashion while also admitting that such mores are socially constructed and ever-changing. Admittedly rationalists tend not to care about The Fashions, but basic observational skills can easily pick up on fads as they come and go. The trendy chunky dad shoe of today becomes the passe bargain bin embarrassment of tomorrow; muted naturalistic neutrals are in one day, loud bold colours are so back the next; many untrendy people have yet to get the memo that athleisure spandex now makes you look old instead of young. None of it necessarily "makes sense", but then trying to cram an evopsych explanation into such foibles is frankly a category error. Better to think of it as a costly signal of conformity and social awareness. (And so on for hierarchy, The Patriarchy, etc...I just find the surprise surprising.) (Later on the author mentions reading a Finnish translation, which at least hints at the large inferential divide between cultures, time notwithstanding. Like...I find the Tyler passages much more poetic? And not-incomprehensible? Whereas the other translations are over-explainy and flat, if unambiguous. Something is lost.)
One question that remains unanswered: what is so important about Genji's glove that makes it an enduring staple item in Final Fantasy games?
"One question that remains unanswered: what is so important about Genji's glove that makes it an enduring staple item in Final Fantasy games?"
Hikaru Genji, protagonist of the Tale of Genji, is so called because his father the Emperor makes him a Genji, a person belong to the clan of "noble civilians", those who are of royal blood but do not actually count as part of the imperial bloodline and thus cannot succeed to the imperial throne. This might seem like a dick move, but he does it due to his particular affection for Genji and his mother, in order to protect Genji from imperial political intrigue, particularly that of the Fujiwara clan of non-royal manipulative douchebags (who are deeply opposed to Genji because his mother was not a Fujiwara and their own power depends entirely on having each dowager empress force her son to marry a Fujiwara woman, so Genji acceding to the throne would break this chain and basically potentially kill their power totally). Genji's own actual personal name is never once mentioned in the novel; "hikaru" just means "shining, radiant" and is a reference to how rad and hot he is, so his conventional name is essentially an elliptical descriptor: "Cool Guy of the Genji clan".
This Genji clan is the same clan as the Minamoto clan which shows up in the Tale of the Heike – hence the name Gempei War for the conflict between the Minamoto and Taira clans ("Gempei" being a portmanteau word; the "Gem" part comes from "Genji" and the "Pei" part is from "Heike", both with a mutation of sound characteristic of the Japanese language). Simplifying very heavily for brevity, at the end of the Heian period the Heike seized power over the imperial court, marginalizing the Fujiwara; the Genji decided they didn't like this and (correctly) that they could fix it by killing a lot of people, which ultimately resulted in the first bakufu, the Ashikaga shogunate.
This brings us to the armor. The "Genji equipment" set (which is normally not just the gloves but also a body armor and helmet at minimum) refers to the type of armor worn by the Minamoto in this conflict, which is understood by convention to be the most ornate and high-quality type of o-yoroi, the early, heavy samurai armor. Thus, the Genji Set represents the sweetest and best samurai-style equipment you can obtain in the game (typically). You can compare this to the Chirijiraden, a common late-game sword which is typically one of the top three katanas in a Final Fantasy game and which is often described as having been "buried for a hundred years" or similar: chiriji and raden are two forms of extremely expensive decoration (gold-flake urushi and nacre respectively, IIRC), implying along with the description that the sword is a super-fancy tachi from this same era.
Fascinating, I kinda wish this had been a footnote in the actual review. It's easy to recognize various Japanese history things from their nerd culture equivalents, but knowing they actually do relate to true IRL history instead of just being conveniently referenced names is pretty cool. The friend who got me into the game once explained Sengoku Rance is a similarly loving homage to a ton of real history beneath the VN absurdity, although that's of course firmly not in the family-friendly category...
I seem to remember the Chirijiraden in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance being a mere regular "Sword", usable by Solders but not Ninjas or Assassins, the two katana-wielding classes. Although it was far and away BiS for that weapon subcategory, yes.
Yeah, the reason I keep saying "typically" is because there are about fourteen million Final Fantasy games so expecting full consistency in the details is a fool's notion. In FFTA specifically, the katana-using classes are all skulduggery-based as you note, so presumably the decision was that the honoraburu samurai stuff would be offloaded to the Soldier and Warrior; in "regular" Final Fantasy Tactics, though, there's a Samurai job, so there Chirijiraden is a katana. (And, come to think of it, in FFXII it's some sort of weird clunky-looking Indian sword and not remotely katanalike at all.)
I was very interested in the reviewer's discussion of footnotes, and the whole question of whether a work of fiction set in a different society or different time period requires the use of footnotes (or any other kind of interpolated explanation) in order to be as intelligible as possible. The question becomes even more urgent when the fiction in question was written in the past, in other words at a time when the temporal distance between author and reader was less than it would be today. A skillful author writing historical fiction in our day can avoid footnotes as long as they have the all too rare ability of shading in background information without force-feeding the reader with a barrage of mini-lectures. Case in point, Hilary Mantel's astonishing Cromwell trilogy, which does a masterful job of bringing Tudor England to life without resorting to a single footnote - and does so irrespective of whether her attempted rehabilitation of Cromwell's reputation ultimately proves convincing or not. The reviewer essentially convinced me that a reading of Genji undertaken for pleasure (or indeed intended to achieve even a minimum of understanding) requires the interpolation of a lot of explanatory material, and my preference would very definitely to have this explanation provided by means of footnotes, rather than force-fed to the main text.
"Case in point, Hilary Mantel's astonishing Cromwell trilogy, which does a masterful job of bringing Tudor England to life without resorting to a single footnote"
But Tudor England is near enough to us in time, from a culture we are familiar with, and which is often represented in popular media, so that there isn't this huge gulf of understanding between us. You might not know exactly what position a court official holds, but you can gather from the context that it's important. Whereas, in the example quoted, there are three translations giving us three different titles for the same official:
- the Dazaifu Deputy
- the Assistant Governor General of Kyūshū
- the Deputy Governor of Tsukushi
No way we as modern Westerners (and I'd have a bet maybe even modern Japanese) will understand if this is one guy, three guys, or three different places without footnotes. And which is higher rank: a deputy, an assistant governor general, or a deputy governor?
Oh, there is no question that Tudor England is closer and more familiar to some of us than medieval Japan. But my point was that a skilful writer can slip what I called interpolated information into a narrative without resorting to footnotes; as I concluded, footnotes are in my view inevitably necessary to even a partial understanding of Genji.
BTW, looking at your three variant examples of translation, there may be no contradiction between them. Tsukushi was one of the nine provinces of Kyūshū Island, and a Dazaifu was the name given to regional government offices in medieval Japan.
I think the important distinction is between author's culture and reader's culture, not between the setting and the reader's culture.
A writer of historical fictional today can still rely on shared cultural background with the reader to convey many things. If they're explaining things about the setting, they know which things need to be explained, which things don't, and how to explain them in a way familiar to the reader. Someone reading the same book 100 or 200 years later would be lost.
In that book we learn about a lady's maid who is close friends with her mistress. On the day of the lady's betrothal to a suitable lord, the lord celebrates by raping the maid. The lady reacts by beating the maid, ordering her other servants to beat the maid harder than she can, and then selling the maid into slavery.
Moving to something set in the present day, the first season of Friends sees Rachel dating a man named Paolo. Paolo makes an appointment for a massage with Phoebe, during which he propositions her for sex. Phoebe turns him down but obviously sees this as a crisis, and she consults the rest of the friend group, but not Rachel, for advice.
From the script:
---
Chandler: So what are you gonna do?
Ross: You have to tell her! You have to tell her! It's your moral obligation, as a friend, as a woman, I think it's a feminist issue! Guys? Guys?
You read this line as woman A finds out that her lover (man X) has forcefully assaulted woman B, and I think you further assumed the assault was sexual in nature. I agree, this is a common trope.
I think this isn't what the writer meant to convey though. The fact that Genjii was male, that would make his lovers female. The inclusion of the word "another" led me to read this sentence as: I (man A) find out that my lover woman X assaulted (non-sexually) woman Y. Now she (unclear use of the pronoun, so I'm not positive who specifically) must die." This implies that someone assaulting (or being assaulted) is so shameful to their associates that death is the only response.
No clue if my interpretation is correct, but if so, this is sufficient different to our modern conventions that I'd need some footnotes.
Compare this anecdote that the author chose from the story:
> A woman neglected by her lover sends her living spirit to possess his other lover and make her ill.
Yes, I read the later commentary as a reference back to this. I will stand by my interpretation that the author [of The Tale of Genji] wrote about an extremely common sentiment, and the author [of this review] chose to claim, for reasons of stupidity or willful blindness, that modern people no longer experience that sentiment.
> The inclusion of the word "another" led me to read this sentence as
...why? What's happening if a woman, addressing a man, asks him "is there another woman?"?
The one thing I wondered when I read (part of) the book: is all this appreciation for Genji sincere? Most of it seemed to come from people who were in position to flatter him. And I'm certain there would have been an entire art of Officially Sincerely Complimenting someone.
I wonder how this would have contrasted to the state of actual Japan at the time. Since in this same period the Shogunate was gaining power from head general to taikun. wonder what similarities there might have been between the Imperial Court and the Tent Government.
"when Genji falls in love with and subsequently kidnaps the 10-year-old niece of his stepmother. Instead, he takes her to his own palace and gives her the western wing as living quarters. He brings most of her original caregivers along and provides for them as well. He spends a lot of time with her as a father would, entertaining her with pictures and stories and teaching her how to play musical instruments and compose poems, essentially providing her with a great education. He forcefully has sex with—and subsequently marries—her four years later, when she looks more mature and is “of marriageable age.” Interestingly, he properly marries her, observing the traditional rituals, before he even tells her father that he’s been hiding her. So while it surely doesn’t hurt that she comes from a powerful family, Genji is determined to marry her regardless of whether her father approves or not, which is not typically how marriages happen in the rest of the story. He subsequently considers her his principal wife, and he loves and cherishes her above all the other women he marries or has relationships with, until old age."
'Older man raising young girl to be what he considers the perfect wife' was a wildly popular plot for 18th century plays.
The more sober version of wardship from the 16th century onwards was young heiresses (and sometimes heirs) being legally bought (their guardianship) precisely so that the 'guardians' could marry them off to their own sons and scoop up their inheritance. A blatant example of this was Charles Brandon, who got himself betrothed to his eight year old ward (yes, eight not eighteen) and thus got the presumptive rights to her title and property ("On 15 May, he was created Viscount Lisle, having entered into a marriage contract with his eight-year-old ward, Elizabeth Grey, suo jure Viscountess Lisle") but later married Mary Tudor, a sister of King Henry VIII, in what was a genuine love match (and which incurred penalties for both of them). Since he no longer needed his ward, aged ten by now, he sold off her guardianship and another marriage was arranged for her, but she died aged fourteen.
In a modern media example, "raising your ward into the perfect wife and then marrying her" is a possible ending in several of the Japanese "Princess Maker" games.
The descriptions of Genji's origin and attributes, combined with the meta-element of the serialized production of the work being popular in the royal court are very reminiscent of elements in _The Apothecary Diaries_!
Probably effect and cause in there. Ivan Morris (*World of the Shining Prince*) talks a lot about the Chinese influence. It was, in fact, particularly high at this point.
I always took the classic Star Trek episode “Darmok” to be a philosophically interesting, if highly improbable, premise. It seems I was wrong. There are actual case studies of human societies in which communication actually works like that
South Korea has a law which requires all air crews aboard any South Korean aircraft to talk to each other only in English. This law was passed after several crashes where postmortem had revealed that a co-pilot (or some other subordinate crew member) was aware of the danger, but was unable to communicate it to the captain, because in Korean language it is impossible for an inferior to speak forcefully with a superior. The tenses do not permit it.
Likewise, Fukushima happened because of indirect communication. The tsunami did not flood the reactors, but it did flood the emergency generators. (Why *emergency* generators were located at lower elevation than the main nuclear plant, is a separate issue.) The plant could have been saved if new generators were delivered fast enough, but the engineers who reported it, were unable to put into writing the urgency of the situation.
That was not a Japanese-to-gaijin miscommunication. It was a Japanese-to-Japanese miscommunication, forced by the obliqueness of Japanese language.
Re: Fukushima, surely the language allows one to matter-of-factly state "The reactor has lost cooling, we estimate it will explode in X hours if the generators are not replaced."
My understanding (and I may be wrong) is that people on the ground at Fukushima were more worried about being blamed than about the reactor melting down, and phrased their messages accordingly.
You may be conflating this with Chernobyl, where self-interested officials concerned about their culpability definitely did impede the effectiveness of the response. But to my knowledge this did not happen at Fukushima. Nor would it make sense to have happened; the cause of the meltdown was an extremely powerful natural disaster outside of any one person’s control.
• It was an airline policy, not a law. After a run of crashes (Guam 1997, Stansted 1999), Korean Air hired David Greenberg from Delta in 2000 to run flight operations. He demanded that cockpit operations be conducted in English, mainly because English is essential for radio communication with air traffic control. I know of no South Korean statute requiring crews to speak English to each other, and it didn't apply to "all South Korean aircraft". 
• The cockpit deference problem was real. Of the Stansted crash, British investigators found the captain rebuked his first officer, who had been giving the tower correct information. At Guam, the captain didn't respond to his junior pilot's warnings that they were too low.
• The linguistic claim is nonsense. Korean has honorific speech levels (verb endings), not "tenses" that prevent forceful speech. A junior can say "we're too low, pull up" perfectly politely. The difficulty was social hierarchy, not grammar.
• Where the story comes from. It is Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers (2008), ch. 7 (summary), which popularised the "ethnic theory of plane crashes". The Korean government has rejected that framing. In 2013, a ministry official called it outrageous to suggest Confucian culture contributed to the Asiana crash, while accepting that authoritarianism existed in cockpits until the late 1990s (Fox/AFP).
Fukushima
• "The tsunami didn't flood the reactors" is wrong. According to the IAEA, water flooded all the reactor and turbine buildings, the spent fuel storage building and the diesel generator building (IAEA). 
• Generator siting. The emergency generators were in the seaward side of the turbine hall basements, with switchgear next to them (Wikipedia timeline). The inundation reached 14–15m against a design tsunami level of 5.7m, on a site at about 10m.  
• Why new generators didn't save it. Speed of delivery was not the main problem, and nor was the wording of a memo. TEPCO's own account says the power supply vehicles couldn't reach the site quickly because of road damage and traffic jams, and were too heavy for Self Defense Force helicopters (TEPCO). Even once vehicles arrived, the switchgear used to connect them was in flooded basements. 
• The "engineers couldn't convey urgency in writing" anecdote. I have found no source for this and don't know where it comes from. I would treat it as invented unless someone produces a reference.
• Where the culture angle comes from. The Diet commission (NAIIC) chairman's foreword blamed "reflexive obedience" and "reluctance to question authority". But that appeared only in the English version, not the Japanese one, and it was widely criticised for that reason (AP). The Japanese text instead blamed collusion between regulators and TEPCO and the collapse of regulatory oversight (SSJ). That is regulatory capture, not language.  
In short: there is a real point about hierarchy and crew resource management, dressed up with a fake law, fake grammar, a wrong account of the flooding and an unsourced anecdote.
I'm inclined to give Lucian of Samosata's "A True Story" the "first novel" title out of the stuff I've looked into. One detail I love is, despite its absurdly, it seems to make an effort to keep an accurate count of his crew despite everything else being utterly nonsense. It's not very long and genuinely a fun read - my girlfriend and I blazed through it in a couple hours reading aloud and it'd probably be an hour-odd read normally.
As for this review, I think it's in kind of an interesting place where it's less "comprehensive overview" and more "consumer advice" - trying to go into subjective details that'd go into a "should I actually read this for myself?" decision, where many other reviews are quite good at making me feel enlightened in regard to the core subject matter and feeling like I've at least gotten the gist, and would consider reading more for the prose or completeness than for simple context. I think it does a pretty good job in telling me that, unlike some other old stories (like the aforementioned A True Story I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone reading if you wanna kill an hour lying in bed on your tablet or such) it'd be more of an endeavor into the alien to read and should only really be done as an academic exercise. The Pillow Book came across as far more inviting in comparison.
So you could say it did its job quite well in telling me that I probably wouldn't be interested in reading it, but I also don't know if I've really walked away with a deeper appreciate of the Tale of Genji in and of itself, rather than just "Heian culture is very peculiar in so-and-so ways." Still educational in a sense, of course, but I'd be lying if I said I found the review as captivating as its sister review of The Pillow Book.
I read genji about 15 years ago and really loved it, partly from the sense of being in a very different world with its own complex rules which you do not know, and partly from enjoying the sense of discovery involved in decoding and deducing what was actually going on. One thing in the translation I read (which maybe wasn’t the case with the reviewed translations) was that many characters weren’t referred to by name but only poetically (“lady of the orange blossoms”,”lady of the evening faces”) and that these changed as the story went on. I’m a fan of sci-fi world building, especially social (left hand of darkness, embassytown, babel 17 etc) so if you like that kind of thing you might like genji too.
I'd like to know a little more about where Lady Murasaki fits into Japanese literature. Did she have predecessors in writing something like a novel, or did she make a great leap forward herself?
this description of this particular old Japanese culture really makes it clear how Cetagandan haut culture in the Vorkosigan books is derived from that!
"now and again / O let your compassion touch this little pink with fresh dew!" - are the translators sure "little pink" refers to the couple's daughter? To me it sounds much more sexual - a woman writing to her absent lover that her "little pink" misses his "fresh dew"...
Very nice review. I did not find it extremely judgmental, unlike other commenters; I found it very informative about a 1,000-year-old (alien) culture. I was totally unaware about that until now.
Anyway you unlocked me another use for Claude! Just for fun, as I had some spare Fable 5.1 credits, here is the translation Claude gave me:
This is a waka (5-7-5-7-7) from The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (early 11th century), chapter 16, "Sekiya" (The Gatehouse). A small clarification first: Genji is not a historical poet but the novel's protagonist; the poem is his within the story. At the end of the ninth month he is travelling to Ishiyama temple and, near the Ōsaka barrier, crosses paths with the procession of the governor of Hitachi, who is returning to the capital with his wife Utsusemi, the woman who had rejected Genji years before. Some time later Genji summons her younger brother and sends her a letter containing this poem.
わくらばに 行き逢ふ道を 頼みしも なほかひなしや 潮ならぬ海
By rare chance
our roads crossed on the way,
and in that I had placed my hope;
yet it all comes to nothing,
a sea that holds no salt.
Three layers of wordplay (kakekotoba) are at work.
行き逢ふ, "to meet on the road", points to 逢坂 (Ōsaka, literally "Meeting Slope"), the barrier where the two parties crossed. Standing at the entrance to Ōmi province, it was the traditional site of partings and reunions, and classical poets used the place name as a pun on "to meet" (au), so the word carries a whole tradition of love poetry with it.
潮ならぬ海, "a sea that is not salt", is Lake Biwa, the freshwater "sea" (淡海) that gives Ōmi province its name (近江), which in turn echoes 逢ふ身, "one who meets". Commentators also note that fresh water grows no mirume seaweed, and mirume is homophonous with "eyes that see", i.e. the meeting that never takes place.
かひなし means "in vain" (甲斐無し) but also "no shells" (貝無し): a freshwater lake has no seashells, so the image itself explains why the encounter bears no fruit.
Utsusemi replies: 逢坂の関やいかなる関なれば繁き嘆きの中を分くらん, roughly "What kind of barrier is Ōsaka, that I must push my way through such dense laments?", where nageki puns on "lament" and "thrown branches", matched by shigeki, "dense", as of trees.
So it immediately knows that it's from Genji? I also asked the same about author's prompt, because the last time I tried something like this they'll know that it's not "just a classic japanese poem". So the AI will already know the "answer" of the interpretation.
(Though the author mentions that without deep thinking the AI doesn't get it so I don't know.)
Claude's training corpus almost certainly included a) Genji, b) a dozen-odd translations of Genji in many languages, c) hundreds of academic papers about Genji, and d) hundreds of thousands of Japanese student "In this essay I will write about laurel symbolism in Genji"-type essays. So I don't know how useful it is to look to an LLM's ability to translate poetry in this case.
About the hypocrisy of men, I think it sounds like a "normal"/modern courting dance where he expects his partner to simultaneously not be "too easy" or "too hard". I guess it's where all the "playing hard to get" thing comes from.
All I can say is that with all the complex hierarchy, subtle social cues, and formalised passive-aggressive behaviour, this place and time sound like they would have been my personal hell.
I haven't read Genji directly, but based on this review of Genji, it doesn't sound very alien or hard to understand at all, so I'm inclined to agree with Royall Tyler.
I do agree that without the footnotes, I probably would not have known that "What is it they call the leaf we all sport today?" was a reference to the Kamo festival, but I also think that you can probably enjoy the book just fine even if you didn't know that that was a reference to the Kamo festival (and hence knowing that is "optional", and hence the footnotes are "optional").
In general, lots of works of fictions (books, movies, tv shows, songs, video games, etc.) contain references that some portion of their audience will miss. Usually when you miss a reference, you don't even know you're missing a reference, and you just enjoy the work of fiction anyway.
I also feel like a lot of the things the review spends time explaining is like weeb info 101, like if you've watched more than 3 animes, you probably already know that Japanese has "a complex grammatical system that allowed for the precise communication of the relative statuses of everyone involved, which is largely lost in translation. Often it’s not obvious why something was offensive or that someone is trying to overstate their status, and sometimes the translator has to figure out who is talking to whom and about whom based on the politeness forms they are using in their speech. A lot of the time, characters behave in ways that can be difficult to understand without knowing their precise social standing." Etc.
Like maybe you can watch 1 or 2 anime without encountering this, but very quickly, you'll encounter a translator's note where they'll explain why it's significant a character chose to use "watashi" vs "boku" vs "ore" etc. as their first singular person pronoun (in English, we only have "I"), why they chose "kimi" vs "anata" vs "teme" etc. for the second person singular pronoun (in modern English we have only "you"; in older English we also had "thou"), or why they chose to use the honorific "san" vs "chan" vs "sama" etc. (in English, we have three, but we choose based on gender + marital status instead of based on social standing: mr, mrs, miss).
Modern Japanese doesn't have *that* many levels of politeness. I assume Heian court language was much more elaborate.
Incidentally, English does have more politeness distinctions than you give it credit for. For example, you say that we only have "you", but we also have words like "dear" or "honey" to indicate familiarity, maam/sir for politeness, etc.
> Modern Japanese doesn't have *that* many levels of politeness. I assume Heian court language was much more elaborate.
Sure, but by the time you have, say, 3 levels, it becomes relatively easy to comprehend 10 or 50 or 100 levels. It doesn't seem "totally alien" the way an English speaker (who I'm arguing "doesn't have distinct levels at all" or equivalently "only has 1 level") would perceive modern Japanese to be. That is, going from 1 to 3 is kind of alien. Going from 3 to N is not very alien at all.
> Incidentally, English does have more politeness distinctions than you give it credit for. For example, you say that we only have "you", but we also have words like "dear" or "honey" to indicate familiarity, maam/sir for politeness, etc.
The concept of politeness exists in the mind of the typical English speaker, yes, but the idea that your choice of pronouns reflects your social standing is "alien" to most English speakers. Most English speakers do not conceptualize the word "honey" to be a pronoun used in polite settings, but rather a noun acting as a nickname or term of endearment. They conceptualize it as serving a completely different grammatical function than the word "you", even putting politeness aside. As empirical evidence, notice how fully socialized adult English speakers need to be explained this concept when they consume Japanese media.
I really enjoyed this review. I have Tyler's translation and got about 30 pages in and decided I'd need to get fired to have time to read it. Unfortunately I'm still employed.
I think my favorite thing from Tyler's introduction was that there was a Minister of the Left and a Minister of the Right, who were more or less duplicative. "Many official organs had Left and Right components....The City was also divided administratively into Left and Right. Court music and dance, too, were divided into Left and Right repertoires...." It all seems like a sort of magic box of grace, beauty, and inefficiency, and all for an emperor who had no real power, and yet this magic box was supported by the families who really did have power.
While I enjoyed learning about a book I will probably never read, I found the reviewer extremely judgmental and her bias against men tainted her description of the novel from beginning to end. Completely unable to stop using her XXI century lenses to review a story written by a woman that probably appreciated men more than the reviewer does…. What a waste…
Institutional healthcare burnout is brutal because moral injury compounds silently over years. Thoughtful review of how administrative friction crushes frontline practitioners. We discuss systems constraints and human agency in our English section: https://gzambrano.substack.com/s/english
Thank you for a very interesting essay. Many years since I read the book and though I suspect I won't get round to reading it again it is good to retrospectively understand it a little better.
Humans still aren’t redundant! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
> A woman neglected by her lover sends her living spirit to possess his other lover and make her ill.
Was that a normal thing for women to be doing in Japan circa year 1000 ? As in, "my lover is stepping out with another girl, so for starters I'm going to cast 'Possession' on her, and if that doesn't work, I'll escalate all the way to writing a sad poem to the nearest Imperial official" ?
I was very curious about this now that you ask, so I asked AI. Belief in possession was very common then, apparently, but they didn't cast it on purpose. It was always like the body's unconscious desire coming out.
"Normal" in the sense that these people believed in the supernatural and this is a recognized type of supernatural happening (it's called an ikiryo, a living ghost), but not "normal" in the sense of being a common thing for a spurned lover to do. As normal as any other ghost story, I guess.
Not normal; spirits were supposed to stay in place, and them wandering was generally bad for the original person and anyone they ran into.
Also, it wasn't something you *did*, anymore than the Evil Eye was. You were envious, you looked bitterly at the person better off than you, and your Evil Eye sent misfortune on them without your consciously intending it.
It is, in fact, very like the Evil Eye in its core, though obviously the manifestation is very different.
This may help as background:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiry%C5%8D
Thank you for the fascinating and witty review, anonymous reviewer!
On a meta note, most entries in past contests were nonfiction books on big “how does the world work” topics: the foundations of morality! Land value tax! The transition from hunter-gatherer bands to complex state-level societies! In contrast, this year only two entries can sort of fit in that category (foreign aid and lobotomies). Other than that, we’ve got ancient fiction, a memoir, and two translations of weird texts by equally weird characters. What gives?
Whatever gives, it's working. Every review contest has had its share of entries that induced interest even when the topic held little, but this one has an extraordinary 100% hit rate so far.
With that in mind, I propose to occasionally rate the (non-)book review contests against each other, in a sort of meta review:
Format: (low effort) a poll, (medium effort) a singular (guest) post, or (high effort) a meta-review contest with the only allowable topic being "the past x review contests".
Frequency: every 10 years, the end of the review contest series, or the end of the blog, whichever comes first.
A review of reviews - I like it!
Branding suggestion: MetACX
Perfect
I remember Scott saying that he was going to apply affirmative action for fiction reviews at some point, so either that happened or reviewers got the message.
Thank you for this detailed and entertaining account, which assumes no prior knowledge, and explains cultural and literary aspects - including translation issues - thoroughly. Excellent! As for earliest novels, one reasonable view is that the Hellenistic Romances met the bill; Longus's Daphnis and Chloe certainly qualifies.
Yes, I also find the bit about the characters strange. There are published works that we unquestioningly call novels *today* that don't necessarily meet the criterion of having particular in-depth exploration of their characters (like your bog standard airport paperback mystery or thriller). I haven't read Daphnis and Chloe, but I have read Apuleius' The Golden Ass which I think would definitely qualify as a novel, and before that there's stuff like Lucian's True Story and other Hellenistic works as you mention. It seems hard to justify not calling any of those "novels".
Reading Genji in the Royall Tyler translation I had a slightly different experience, though I agree with some of your points.
1. With one very significant exception (the Empress Mother), everyone, as you say, loves Genji, often immediately; mostly women, but also from time to time men as well as the undead. The guy is just irresistible. Although almost all women love Genji, most of them don’t like him very much (possibly in part because all women love Genji) and some, including those closest to him, loathe him, such as the 10-year-old niece of his stepmother who becomes his wife. In reading Genji, I found it rewarding to pay close attention to the reactions of the women in the story and their psychology rather than their agency (because they didn’t have much). The author takes care to make their thoughts and feelings a big part of the story which makes it much richer and much more than just a tale of Genji’s “conquests.” As the author remarks several times, social convention forbade a woman from writing on topics - like politics - as freely as a man. So her powers of perception were focused perhaps that much more intensely on subjects that were allowed, including the psychology of the many women in Genji.
2. The world of the Heian court is very different but not wholly so. Its distinction between cultivated urban sophisticates and rural rubes and bumpkins and “mountain folk”, the high born vs. the menial and uncouth is a familiar one to us. Perennial one might say. While acknowledging the stereotypes, the author implicitly recognizes their falsity by giving many of those “uncouth” and uncultivated people their own personalities, thoughts, and feelings. She was not just interested in court life, but human psychology. Also, on sexual mores, though a very different world, Genji is not free to do as he pleases, though he does so often enough. There are always consequences and he is concerned to avoid appearing (as opposed to being, I guess) debauched which suggests that a lot of what he does is frowned upon.
3. There is a lot of what we would call voyeurism and voyeurism-adjacent behavior in Genji – there’s lots of lingering to peep and peer through latticework and trellises and such - in part because of the extensive use of screens to separate men from women, which put me in mind of the dual use of screens both to draw attention and to conceal, again, not unlike our own time in which our ubiquitous screens conceal a great deal while inviting us constantly to look at them.
4. On the necessity of footnotes I am in full agreement with you. The Empress Mother at one point in the text makes a disparaging reference to court “flatterers spouting the same nonsense as those who, they say, called a deer a horse.” Obscure by itself, a deft footnote explains that this is a reference to the Shiji – the official history of China from the beginning up to the reign of Emperor Wu of the Early Han dynasty, completed in 91 B.C. – which “tells of an evil official who tested his men’s loyalty by seeing whether they would agree with him in public that a deer was a horse” (Ch. 12 Suma). That, perhaps more than anything else, made Genji feel disturbingly familiar and contemporary.
Anyway, these were just a few quick thoughts. Thanks for writing a great review. I enjoyed reading it.
The deer thing may be obscure to English speakers, but to this day, the most commonly-used word for "idiot" in Japanese is written 馬鹿 "horse-deer". So even to a modern Japanese audience, this is roughly akin to a phrase like "forbidden fruit" in terms of "everyone understands and immediately knows where it comes from".
interesting. studied japanese and knew this writing of baka but not the backstory
I knew it because Wanikani explained the history when introducing the word.
> which “tells of an evil official who tested his men’s loyalty by seeing whether they would agree with him in public that a deer was a horse”
We have a version of that playing out present day with Trump’s cabinet picks. Acknowledging observable reality is a disqualifying lack of loyalty.
I have very mixed feelings about this review.
First, it's too long.
Second, it's extremely judgmental -- throughout -- of the novel's culture. I get it. I'd be judgmental of that culture, too -- maybe more than the writer is. But if you're going to read literature like this, at some point you have to suspend that and use your imagination to try to relate to people in that culture and get inside their motivations, and how you might have been in that culture. The reviewer never really seems willing to forgive any of the characters (especially the men) for not being western liberals or Christians, and it comes close to ruining the review (at least for me). A reviewer needs more sympathy to write a useful review, I think.
However, it certainly did give me a sense of what the novel is like, and of what life in that time was like, and I respect the reviewer for finishing it and telling us this much. In that sense, it was very interesting.
Ultimately, I think I'd probably agree more with Tyler than the reviewer. Many of the things that seemed to puzzle the reviewer do seem very relatable (a man being upset that someone won't marry his daughter?), and even the stranger ones can -- as the reviewer notes themselves -- be understood with a bit more effort and abstraction. I also wouldn't be so shocked if you can read it without footnotes and get a lot from it. We learn language that way as humans, and I've read enough stuff from very different cultures to know that you can get the whiff of life through it, even if you only later learn that curtains = sex. But the reviewer does make a reasonably strong case that you'd miss a lot by not reading the footnotes.
I'll probably never know, because I'm probably not going to read the Tale of Genji. Props to the reviewer for doing so. I still feel, oddly, that if I did read it, I might like the characters more than the reviewer.
Yeah, I had that feeling particularly at the beginning of the review. Being judgmental is always for me a no-no and the place *not* to be at when you read literature, but to each their own. I was going to say that that felt like a very conventionally American thing to do in the current literary-academic framework, but then the anonymous book reviewer is Finnish.
Thirding, I was surprised too. Well written, subtle and very informative, but the pervasive judgmental attitude grates. Also mildly surprised that it would come from a Finn.
North-western Europe is even more dominated by "social justice" sentiments than the "blue" half of the US.
i felt maybe reviewer is female and so was more offended by some stuff than the male audience
also funnily enough if you live in japan and know foreigners there they are also mostly super judgmental even about how japanese live today
I was a little surprised that he was so judgmental of a fictional story. While it obviously has some plotlines that would be horrifying today, it doesn't seem any worse than the thousands of romance-thrillers that we see on shelves today, much less what's published on the internet. People *like* reading about these awful people, not about moral paragons.
Well, to be fair, that judgement comes in the context of responding to a different review claiming that this is all immediately relatable to all of us... which is true, it really isn't. Even though we can see that ultimately people were always people with the same fundamental drives, there's just so much different culture on top of that which makes it hard to parse.
Yeah, fourthing this sentiment. Actually, it made me give up on reading the whole thing,
For me it's actually much more neutral/non-judgmental than I thought it'd be. Though maybe it's because I've been exposed to dumbest comments in reddit unfairly criticizing my beloved shows, but hey.
I think it is useful to highlight where the culture differs from ours. Otherwise people would instinctively round it up to what they are familiar with. Which could be nice, but historically unfaithful.
If the people in other cultures were alien to me, I want to know. I prefer that to e.g. the Hollywood movies where people in ancient Greece behave like modern Americans.
I'm surprised by the "judgemental" comments as well. I thought it was just an interesting and informative view of an alien culture.
Taiwanese art house film, Three Times, does something similar. Film is in three segments, each taking place in different era: Japanese occupation, 1960’s, and Present (2005). It is same actors and they also chronicle mini stories on what it is like to have a romantic encounter in each era. How the structure of society determines romance
I liked this one, because it specifically focused on "here are the ways that Tale of Genji is surprising, or interesting, or just really different from other things you may have encountered."
There was almost no recounting of the actual plot. And that's fine! I've learned some things about the world; good review, would read more by this author.
Yeah it's refreshing sering a review emphasizing whether or not the reader should read the book or not. But I guess it's rare for a review here to even talk about the book reviewed.
If this review made you interested in Heian culture and kind of vaguely made you want to read, or to have read The Tale of Genji, but not so interested you're actually going to go through the whole giant edifice, try reading the other great work of Heian literature, The Pillow Book instead. Here's a review of it, which I recommend on its own: https://acxreviews.robennals.org/reviews/the-pillow-book
Why try Pillow Book? Same strange aristocratic sensibilities, but more accessible and dare I say, fun. Reads like a social media feed - no (or very little) overarching narrative, lots of fun or relatable self-contained entries, you can read 5 pages and get something out of it, the way you probably can't with Genji.
I can also recommend the board game called Genji, for more world flavor without a literary commitment. You get to combine poetry fragments, which are scored according to whether they are appropriate for the current season and fashion plus a "cuckoldry bonus."
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/33196/genji
I really enjoyed that review! Thanks for recommending it.
And it's also from this year?? Damn, I guess ACX reader don't really consider it highly, but it's a very nice palate cleanser to contrast with this review. Thank you for the recommendation.
I don't know how to think about the idea that the world's oldest (and thus first?) novel is also an extraordinary masterpiece.
I can write convincing arguments to myself that its not possible, it's not likely, one doesn't have any bearing on the other, that the post author doesn't know what they're talking about, that I don't know what I'm talking about, etc...
Maybe non extraordinary ones didn’t survive.
That strikes me as the most probable.
Though it's quite possible that other extraordinary ones did not survive.
Arguably a couple of Roman works are earlier novels, The Satyricon by Petronius, and "The Golden Ass" by Apuleius.
It's a damned shame the majority of the Satyricon hasn't survived, and one can only hope that the owner of the Philosopher's House in Herculaneum was a fan of Petronius so that one day more currently lost parts of the Satyricon can be read from the burnt scrolls. But from the scraps of boring philosophical works uncovered so far I'm not holding my breath!
Also, I think it is quite possible that Petronius pretended it was part of a larger work, to drive Emperor Nero crazy trying to find the non-existent rest!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculaneum_papyri
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyricon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Ass
The Golden Ass definitely counts for me. It's the story of one guy going through a bunch of adventures after a supernatural mishap incurred because he was too horny (funny how that goes). I think the weakest element from a modern perspective is the ending, where (SPOILERS!) the entire situation is resolved just by a deus ex machina which seems to double as religious proselytism. But then, modern writers sometimes do that too (looking at you C.S. Lewis).
Ivan Morris's *The World of the Shining Prince* is useful for understanding things.
> In general, the hypocrisy of men was a constant
Wouldn't a better term be "double standards", since these men aren't claiming to be chaste, monogamous etc?
Is it not still hypocritical to ask someone to come speak to you personally, and then criticize them for agreeing to do so? I don't know if hypocrisy is the exact right word, but that's definitely not just a double standard - that's having two different standards/stances towards a single subject (literally an individual in this case, not even women as a class).
Fair enough.
Merriam-Webster (which leans more descriptivist than prescriptivist, for those of you who knows what that means and cares) defines hypocrisy as "a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not: behavior that contradicts what one claims to believe or feel".
In this case, I don't think asking someone to do X and then criticizing them for doing so feigns that they are something they are not, nor is it them feigning that they believe something that they do not.
As for an appropriate term, best I can come up with is "double bind" which Merriam defines as "a psychological predicament in which a person receives from a single source conflicting messages that allow no appropriate response to be made".
I think the hypocrisy exists there but is very implicit. When you ask someone to come speak to you personally, you strongly imply "I am the sort of person who approves of you coming to speak to me personally." I feel it's inherent in making a seemingly good-faith request that you'd approve of it being acted out. So then turning out to make statements based on the contrary does feel like the initial request feigned approval of a behavior that you in fact consider unacceptable.
Obviously it's far more complicated than that in courtship, ESPECIALLY very complex ritualized courtship in a traditional upper-class. Women being "meant" to resist wooing to display virtue is a trope extending to antiquity. But I'd still argue it's inherently a sort of hypocrisy - if very indirect and implicit - to ask someone to do something and then disapprove of them for agreeing "too easily."
It isn't even double standards. It is just a cultural echo of the reality that sex is low cost for men, but potentially high cost for women.
In addition to being a pretty good entry, this was the most actual "review of a piece of literature" I've read in probably any of the review contests. We should recognize the achievement.
I read this in the preliminaries, and as I said back then, this is a fascinating analysis of a book it sounds like I would definitely not enjoy reading, so thank you for explaining it to us.
Sometimes I do wonder if all of this absurd social complexity was serving as an artificial selection mechanism for intelligence. Regardless of how "normal" all of this was for the people living during the time, it does take a bare minimum amount of intelligence to understand and participate in these systems to begin with, and failing to do so would have lethal consequences. Even the lowborn wouldn't be spared from observing the proper rituals and respecting their betters. All of this esoteric doublespeak would only increase the minimum threshold for survival.
Intelligence, surely, but also *social* intelligence, specifically. It does not sound like a fun society in which to be on the spectrum.
I was under the impression that intelligence is a general thing. It's not as if these people were relying on subtle facial tells for communication. There was just a very complex and arbitrary set of rules that everyone was expected to learn over time. In fact, their culture was so unnatural that it should arguably level the playing field between neurotypicals and those on the spectrum.
I didn't get the impression that these were the kind of rules that are all able to be written down and studied.
If Genji is in favour with the emperor, can you send him a note given your current social standing? This seems like it is an extremely open-ended question! How in favour? Who are your relatives? Are they in favour? Are you in favour? How do you know who is in favour and out of it and to what degree? You must maintain a network of friendships to keep track of this stuff, right? So what do all your friends need, what can you give them, are they a net benefit to you, what are the consequences of remaining friends with the wrong person vs kicking them to the curb, who is fashionable vs unfashionable and do you still have to put up with the latter given the relative social standing, etc. And remember, people are segregated by gender, but they still have to interact face to face within their gender and deal with body language and nuance.
Thinking about this complicated social system for a few seconds makes it seem like absolute hell on earth for someone who is autistic. It sounds exhausting to me, and at least I'm outgoing and interested in gossip to some degree.
> There was just a very complex and arbitrary set of rules that everyone was expected to learn over time.
If the rules were never explained explicitly, and you just had to learn them from observing other people's behavior and correctly interpreting some hints, or if the explained rules were contradictory (e.g. accusing a women of being cold if she does not respond, and of improper behavior if she does) and you had to figure out the true rules behind the rules... then people on the autistic spectrum didn't have a chance.
There is a general factor of intelligence (typically called "g"), but that does not mean that all measures of intelligence have a correlation of 1.
As an analogy, there is a general factor of "AI stock prices": the stock prices of almost all AI companies have been shooting up rapidly in the last couple of years and when a company announces it's "pivoting to AI", its stock price also tends to shoot up. But each individual company's stock has some non-correlation, i.e. one of them can go up while another one can go down.
Yes. As an autist, I would have an extremely hard time in that.
I think social complexity in societies (and this applies to the West as well) arises amongst wealthy, important, high-status people as a means of occupying their time, putting energies to work that are not harnessed elsewhere, and demonstrating that they deserve their status and position by being naturally superior ("high value human capital").
Being raised so you automatically know how to navigate these situations cements your position and differentiates you from the arrivistes and nouveaux riches who have to look up books of etiquette about "fish knives - yay or nay?"
Everything from Elizabethan court gallants to 17th century French, Italian and Spanish to 20th century snobbery (Nancy Mitford's U and Non-U):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%A9cieuses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Restoration#Culture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
Clearly these systems were not intentionally created to serve as a makeshift eugenics program, but there must be a reason they survive despite the obvious costs they inflict on themselves and society at large. Just like all those ridiculous mating rituals various animals perform never arose intentionally, yet they still serve a purpose.
The ability to extract the value of labour from others, and maintain the system that makes it possible, could definitely be cast as a eugenics programme.
It also provided an in-group identifying mechanism. Their scorn for provincials was very high, and this helped reinforce it -- they didn't know how to act!
Awesome. Learned more reading this that I have in virtually anything else this year on any topic in any domain.
Best line, “But I wouldn’t recommend learning Finnish just for this purpose [reading the new translation].”
that line made me think "hey that's a GREAT reason to learn a language tho"
Yeah it's a funny quip since some people here would absolutely do that.
To each their own! By my reckoning, the opportunity cost for really learning Finnish, for purely academic reasons to understand millennia old Japanese tales…. Is a very very steep cost. Major respect to the Finns, but even just within the realm of “hey I think I’ll learn a notPIE-derived language for fun and games,” there are at least a few other serious contenders. Sumerian or Akkadian, for Gilgamesh? Ancient Egyptian., for… all kinds of stuff? Or you know, just modern Japanese :-)
Nice review! I've read Genji (Spanish translation in two volumes, by Xavier Roca Ferrer; got Tyler's version in my bookshelves) and like it a lot (I do prefer Heike Monogatari though). I fit the 'Interest in (Japanese) history, literature, poetry, philosophy, or aesthetics. Willingness to suspend moral judgement. Stamina', as I've been a history nerd since my teens, an avid reader and a person with strong anti-realist moral intuitions, meaning I feel completely unattracted to judging the customs and mores of other cultures, fictional or otherwise. I found no difficulty empathizing with characters, including Genji and some others (I particularly have a soft spot for Suetsumuhana and the 6th Avenue Princess).
As for the universality of the text, this is a common Humanistic trope for justifying the value of reading classics. Personally, I find it holds *some* small kernel of truth, which you exemplify at the end: if you distance yourself enough, the characters *are* humans and have human emotions, reactions, behaviors, etc... that bar massive future transformation, are pretty understandable and easy even empathize with. Personally, though, I think the strangeness of the past is one of its more appealing characteristics, and Aristocratic Heian Japan somewhat asymptotically approximates what I imagine a successful post-AGI world might look like (particularly in the aesthetic cultivation and centrality of romance and art).
The Golden Ass is a novel 800 years older than the Tale of Genji. It is a lengthy prose work in which the main character is going through an overarching narrative and a literal and figurative transformation. That makes it a novel even if it's often broken by nested stories and is written in the style of menippean satire.
On the other hand, it turns the main character into a donkey.
When the novel (the "new") was being recognized as a genre distinct from the chivalric romance, turning a character into a donkey would put your work squarely into the romance category.
The "living woman's envious ghost" is -- well, it would seem more like the Gothic novels that Jane Austen parodied.
I've read Robert Graves' translation. It's not very long
Review qua review: good enough, I got a decent understanding of this historic work I've heard about for ages but never actually looked into. Interesting bookend with The Epic of Gilgamesh review. The past is a different country, even if it's thousands of years later...
...but different does not mean incomprehensible. I kept running into, uh, I guess like "reverse typical mind" contra the author? It's not hard at all to comprehend a segment of society totally walled off from the concerns of ordinary men, absorbed entirely with beautymaxxing. In fact this is a common trope in fiction, frequently associated with elves! Similarly it's weird to remark on the odd and outre dictates of Imperial fashion while also admitting that such mores are socially constructed and ever-changing. Admittedly rationalists tend not to care about The Fashions, but basic observational skills can easily pick up on fads as they come and go. The trendy chunky dad shoe of today becomes the passe bargain bin embarrassment of tomorrow; muted naturalistic neutrals are in one day, loud bold colours are so back the next; many untrendy people have yet to get the memo that athleisure spandex now makes you look old instead of young. None of it necessarily "makes sense", but then trying to cram an evopsych explanation into such foibles is frankly a category error. Better to think of it as a costly signal of conformity and social awareness. (And so on for hierarchy, The Patriarchy, etc...I just find the surprise surprising.) (Later on the author mentions reading a Finnish translation, which at least hints at the large inferential divide between cultures, time notwithstanding. Like...I find the Tyler passages much more poetic? And not-incomprehensible? Whereas the other translations are over-explainy and flat, if unambiguous. Something is lost.)
One question that remains unanswered: what is so important about Genji's glove that makes it an enduring staple item in Final Fantasy games?
Genji was the Michael Jackson of ancient times.
"One question that remains unanswered: what is so important about Genji's glove that makes it an enduring staple item in Final Fantasy games?"
Hikaru Genji, protagonist of the Tale of Genji, is so called because his father the Emperor makes him a Genji, a person belong to the clan of "noble civilians", those who are of royal blood but do not actually count as part of the imperial bloodline and thus cannot succeed to the imperial throne. This might seem like a dick move, but he does it due to his particular affection for Genji and his mother, in order to protect Genji from imperial political intrigue, particularly that of the Fujiwara clan of non-royal manipulative douchebags (who are deeply opposed to Genji because his mother was not a Fujiwara and their own power depends entirely on having each dowager empress force her son to marry a Fujiwara woman, so Genji acceding to the throne would break this chain and basically potentially kill their power totally). Genji's own actual personal name is never once mentioned in the novel; "hikaru" just means "shining, radiant" and is a reference to how rad and hot he is, so his conventional name is essentially an elliptical descriptor: "Cool Guy of the Genji clan".
This Genji clan is the same clan as the Minamoto clan which shows up in the Tale of the Heike – hence the name Gempei War for the conflict between the Minamoto and Taira clans ("Gempei" being a portmanteau word; the "Gem" part comes from "Genji" and the "Pei" part is from "Heike", both with a mutation of sound characteristic of the Japanese language). Simplifying very heavily for brevity, at the end of the Heian period the Heike seized power over the imperial court, marginalizing the Fujiwara; the Genji decided they didn't like this and (correctly) that they could fix it by killing a lot of people, which ultimately resulted in the first bakufu, the Ashikaga shogunate.
This brings us to the armor. The "Genji equipment" set (which is normally not just the gloves but also a body armor and helmet at minimum) refers to the type of armor worn by the Minamoto in this conflict, which is understood by convention to be the most ornate and high-quality type of o-yoroi, the early, heavy samurai armor. Thus, the Genji Set represents the sweetest and best samurai-style equipment you can obtain in the game (typically). You can compare this to the Chirijiraden, a common late-game sword which is typically one of the top three katanas in a Final Fantasy game and which is often described as having been "buried for a hundred years" or similar: chiriji and raden are two forms of extremely expensive decoration (gold-flake urushi and nacre respectively, IIRC), implying along with the description that the sword is a super-fancy tachi from this same era.
Fascinating, I kinda wish this had been a footnote in the actual review. It's easy to recognize various Japanese history things from their nerd culture equivalents, but knowing they actually do relate to true IRL history instead of just being conveniently referenced names is pretty cool. The friend who got me into the game once explained Sengoku Rance is a similarly loving homage to a ton of real history beneath the VN absurdity, although that's of course firmly not in the family-friendly category...
I seem to remember the Chirijiraden in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance being a mere regular "Sword", usable by Solders but not Ninjas or Assassins, the two katana-wielding classes. Although it was far and away BiS for that weapon subcategory, yes.
Yeah, the reason I keep saying "typically" is because there are about fourteen million Final Fantasy games so expecting full consistency in the details is a fool's notion. In FFTA specifically, the katana-using classes are all skulduggery-based as you note, so presumably the decision was that the honoraburu samurai stuff would be offloaded to the Soldier and Warrior; in "regular" Final Fantasy Tactics, though, there's a Samurai job, so there Chirijiraden is a katana. (And, come to think of it, in FFXII it's some sort of weird clunky-looking Indian sword and not remotely katanalike at all.)
I was very interested in the reviewer's discussion of footnotes, and the whole question of whether a work of fiction set in a different society or different time period requires the use of footnotes (or any other kind of interpolated explanation) in order to be as intelligible as possible. The question becomes even more urgent when the fiction in question was written in the past, in other words at a time when the temporal distance between author and reader was less than it would be today. A skillful author writing historical fiction in our day can avoid footnotes as long as they have the all too rare ability of shading in background information without force-feeding the reader with a barrage of mini-lectures. Case in point, Hilary Mantel's astonishing Cromwell trilogy, which does a masterful job of bringing Tudor England to life without resorting to a single footnote - and does so irrespective of whether her attempted rehabilitation of Cromwell's reputation ultimately proves convincing or not. The reviewer essentially convinced me that a reading of Genji undertaken for pleasure (or indeed intended to achieve even a minimum of understanding) requires the interpolation of a lot of explanatory material, and my preference would very definitely to have this explanation provided by means of footnotes, rather than force-fed to the main text.
"Case in point, Hilary Mantel's astonishing Cromwell trilogy, which does a masterful job of bringing Tudor England to life without resorting to a single footnote"
But Tudor England is near enough to us in time, from a culture we are familiar with, and which is often represented in popular media, so that there isn't this huge gulf of understanding between us. You might not know exactly what position a court official holds, but you can gather from the context that it's important. Whereas, in the example quoted, there are three translations giving us three different titles for the same official:
- the Dazaifu Deputy
- the Assistant Governor General of Kyūshū
- the Deputy Governor of Tsukushi
No way we as modern Westerners (and I'd have a bet maybe even modern Japanese) will understand if this is one guy, three guys, or three different places without footnotes. And which is higher rank: a deputy, an assistant governor general, or a deputy governor?
Oh, there is no question that Tudor England is closer and more familiar to some of us than medieval Japan. But my point was that a skilful writer can slip what I called interpolated information into a narrative without resorting to footnotes; as I concluded, footnotes are in my view inevitably necessary to even a partial understanding of Genji.
BTW, looking at your three variant examples of translation, there may be no contradiction between them. Tsukushi was one of the nine provinces of Kyūshū Island, and a Dazaifu was the name given to regional government offices in medieval Japan.
The thing is that you are then not *translating* the tale but reworking it into a new story. A legitimate thing to do, but different.
If you want to do a translation, you need to keep the glosses separate from the text.
How many people are aware of "Groom of the Stool" or it's significance?
Even *Alice in Wonderland* needs copious footnotes today, and that's *much* more recent.
I think the important distinction is between author's culture and reader's culture, not between the setting and the reader's culture.
A writer of historical fictional today can still rely on shared cultural background with the reader to convey many things. If they're explaining things about the setting, they know which things need to be explained, which things don't, and how to explain them in a way familiar to the reader. Someone reading the same book 100 or 200 years later would be lost.
> It would be hard for most people to relate to thoughts and feelings such as
> “My lover has forcefully assaulted another woman; now she must die” or
How did you come to this conclusion? This feeling is widely recognized. 𝗩𝗲𝗿𝘆 widely recognized.
Here's a fantasy novel published in the alien past of March 2026: https://www.amazon.com/This-Kingdom-Will-Maggie-Undying/dp/1250377269
In that book we learn about a lady's maid who is close friends with her mistress. On the day of the lady's betrothal to a suitable lord, the lord celebrates by raping the maid. The lady reacts by beating the maid, ordering her other servants to beat the maid harder than she can, and then selling the maid into slavery.
Moving to something set in the present day, the first season of Friends sees Rachel dating a man named Paolo. Paolo makes an appointment for a massage with Phoebe, during which he propositions her for sex. Phoebe turns him down but obviously sees this as a crisis, and she consults the rest of the friend group, but not Rachel, for advice.
From the script:
---
Chandler: So what are you gonna do?
Ross: You have to tell her! You have to tell her! It's your moral obligation, as a friend, as a woman, I think it's a feminist issue! Guys? Guys?
Chandler: Oh, yeah, you have to tell her.
Joey: Feminist issue. That's where I went!
Phoebe: She is gonna hate me.
You read this line as woman A finds out that her lover (man X) has forcefully assaulted woman B, and I think you further assumed the assault was sexual in nature. I agree, this is a common trope.
I think this isn't what the writer meant to convey though. The fact that Genjii was male, that would make his lovers female. The inclusion of the word "another" led me to read this sentence as: I (man A) find out that my lover woman X assaulted (non-sexually) woman Y. Now she (unclear use of the pronoun, so I'm not positive who specifically) must die." This implies that someone assaulting (or being assaulted) is so shameful to their associates that death is the only response.
No clue if my interpretation is correct, but if so, this is sufficient different to our modern conventions that I'd need some footnotes.
Compare this anecdote that the author chose from the story:
> A woman neglected by her lover sends her living spirit to possess his other lover and make her ill.
Yes, I read the later commentary as a reference back to this. I will stand by my interpretation that the author [of The Tale of Genji] wrote about an extremely common sentiment, and the author [of this review] chose to claim, for reasons of stupidity or willful blindness, that modern people no longer experience that sentiment.
> The inclusion of the word "another" led me to read this sentence as
...why? What's happening if a woman, addressing a man, asks him "is there another woman?"?
The one thing I wondered when I read (part of) the book: is all this appreciation for Genji sincere? Most of it seemed to come from people who were in position to flatter him. And I'm certain there would have been an entire art of Officially Sincerely Complimenting someone.
I wonder how this would have contrasted to the state of actual Japan at the time. Since in this same period the Shogunate was gaining power from head general to taikun. wonder what similarities there might have been between the Imperial Court and the Tent Government.
"when Genji falls in love with and subsequently kidnaps the 10-year-old niece of his stepmother. Instead, he takes her to his own palace and gives her the western wing as living quarters. He brings most of her original caregivers along and provides for them as well. He spends a lot of time with her as a father would, entertaining her with pictures and stories and teaching her how to play musical instruments and compose poems, essentially providing her with a great education. He forcefully has sex with—and subsequently marries—her four years later, when she looks more mature and is “of marriageable age.” Interestingly, he properly marries her, observing the traditional rituals, before he even tells her father that he’s been hiding her. So while it surely doesn’t hurt that she comes from a powerful family, Genji is determined to marry her regardless of whether her father approves or not, which is not typically how marriages happen in the rest of the story. He subsequently considers her his principal wife, and he loves and cherishes her above all the other women he marries or has relationships with, until old age."
'Older man raising young girl to be what he considers the perfect wife' was a wildly popular plot for 18th century plays.
The more sober version of wardship from the 16th century onwards was young heiresses (and sometimes heirs) being legally bought (their guardianship) precisely so that the 'guardians' could marry them off to their own sons and scoop up their inheritance. A blatant example of this was Charles Brandon, who got himself betrothed to his eight year old ward (yes, eight not eighteen) and thus got the presumptive rights to her title and property ("On 15 May, he was created Viscount Lisle, having entered into a marriage contract with his eight-year-old ward, Elizabeth Grey, suo jure Viscountess Lisle") but later married Mary Tudor, a sister of King Henry VIII, in what was a genuine love match (and which incurred penalties for both of them). Since he no longer needed his ward, aged ten by now, he sold off her guardianship and another marriage was arranged for her, but she died aged fourteen.
In a modern media example, "raising your ward into the perfect wife and then marrying her" is a possible ending in several of the Japanese "Princess Maker" games.
The descriptions of Genji's origin and attributes, combined with the meta-element of the serialized production of the work being popular in the royal court are very reminiscent of elements in _The Apothecary Diaries_!
Probably effect and cause in there. Ivan Morris (*World of the Shining Prince*) talks a lot about the Chinese influence. It was, in fact, particularly high at this point.
I always took the classic Star Trek episode “Darmok” to be a philosophically interesting, if highly improbable, premise. It seems I was wrong. There are actual case studies of human societies in which communication actually works like that
South Korea has a law which requires all air crews aboard any South Korean aircraft to talk to each other only in English. This law was passed after several crashes where postmortem had revealed that a co-pilot (or some other subordinate crew member) was aware of the danger, but was unable to communicate it to the captain, because in Korean language it is impossible for an inferior to speak forcefully with a superior. The tenses do not permit it.
Likewise, Fukushima happened because of indirect communication. The tsunami did not flood the reactors, but it did flood the emergency generators. (Why *emergency* generators were located at lower elevation than the main nuclear plant, is a separate issue.) The plant could have been saved if new generators were delivered fast enough, but the engineers who reported it, were unable to put into writing the urgency of the situation.
That was not a Japanese-to-gaijin miscommunication. It was a Japanese-to-Japanese miscommunication, forced by the obliqueness of Japanese language.
Re: Fukushima, surely the language allows one to matter-of-factly state "The reactor has lost cooling, we estimate it will explode in X hours if the generators are not replaced."
My understanding (and I may be wrong) is that people on the ground at Fukushima were more worried about being blamed than about the reactor melting down, and phrased their messages accordingly.
You may be conflating this with Chernobyl, where self-interested officials concerned about their culpability definitely did impede the effectiveness of the response. But to my knowledge this did not happen at Fukushima. Nor would it make sense to have happened; the cause of the meltdown was an extremely powerful natural disaster outside of any one person’s control.
The Japanese spent centuries in bitter military conflict, in all that time didn't they come up with expressions of urgency?
Now that you put it that way, it does sound implausible.
I asked Claude. It said:
Korea
• It was an airline policy, not a law. After a run of crashes (Guam 1997, Stansted 1999), Korean Air hired David Greenberg from Delta in 2000 to run flight operations. He demanded that cockpit operations be conducted in English, mainly because English is essential for radio communication with air traffic control. I know of no South Korean statute requiring crews to speak English to each other, and it didn't apply to "all South Korean aircraft". 
• The cockpit deference problem was real. Of the Stansted crash, British investigators found the captain rebuked his first officer, who had been giving the tower correct information. At Guam, the captain didn't respond to his junior pilot's warnings that they were too low.
• The linguistic claim is nonsense. Korean has honorific speech levels (verb endings), not "tenses" that prevent forceful speech. A junior can say "we're too low, pull up" perfectly politely. The difficulty was social hierarchy, not grammar.
• Where the story comes from. It is Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers (2008), ch. 7 (summary), which popularised the "ethnic theory of plane crashes". The Korean government has rejected that framing. In 2013, a ministry official called it outrageous to suggest Confucian culture contributed to the Asiana crash, while accepting that authoritarianism existed in cockpits until the late 1990s (Fox/AFP).
Fukushima
• "The tsunami didn't flood the reactors" is wrong. According to the IAEA, water flooded all the reactor and turbine buildings, the spent fuel storage building and the diesel generator building (IAEA). 
• Generator siting. The emergency generators were in the seaward side of the turbine hall basements, with switchgear next to them (Wikipedia timeline). The inundation reached 14–15m against a design tsunami level of 5.7m, on a site at about 10m.  
• Why new generators didn't save it. Speed of delivery was not the main problem, and nor was the wording of a memo. TEPCO's own account says the power supply vehicles couldn't reach the site quickly because of road damage and traffic jams, and were too heavy for Self Defense Force helicopters (TEPCO). Even once vehicles arrived, the switchgear used to connect them was in flooded basements. 
• The "engineers couldn't convey urgency in writing" anecdote. I have found no source for this and don't know where it comes from. I would treat it as invented unless someone produces a reference.
• Where the culture angle comes from. The Diet commission (NAIIC) chairman's foreword blamed "reflexive obedience" and "reluctance to question authority". But that appeared only in the English version, not the Japanese one, and it was widely criticised for that reason (AP). The Japanese text instead blamed collusion between regulators and TEPCO and the collapse of regulatory oversight (SSJ). That is regulatory capture, not language.  
In short: there is a real point about hierarchy and crew resource management, dressed up with a fake law, fake grammar, a wrong account of the flooding and an unsourced anecdote.
I'm inclined to give Lucian of Samosata's "A True Story" the "first novel" title out of the stuff I've looked into. One detail I love is, despite its absurdly, it seems to make an effort to keep an accurate count of his crew despite everything else being utterly nonsense. It's not very long and genuinely a fun read - my girlfriend and I blazed through it in a couple hours reading aloud and it'd probably be an hour-odd read normally.
As for this review, I think it's in kind of an interesting place where it's less "comprehensive overview" and more "consumer advice" - trying to go into subjective details that'd go into a "should I actually read this for myself?" decision, where many other reviews are quite good at making me feel enlightened in regard to the core subject matter and feeling like I've at least gotten the gist, and would consider reading more for the prose or completeness than for simple context. I think it does a pretty good job in telling me that, unlike some other old stories (like the aforementioned A True Story I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone reading if you wanna kill an hour lying in bed on your tablet or such) it'd be more of an endeavor into the alien to read and should only really be done as an academic exercise. The Pillow Book came across as far more inviting in comparison.
So you could say it did its job quite well in telling me that I probably wouldn't be interested in reading it, but I also don't know if I've really walked away with a deeper appreciate of the Tale of Genji in and of itself, rather than just "Heian culture is very peculiar in so-and-so ways." Still educational in a sense, of course, but I'd be lying if I said I found the review as captivating as its sister review of The Pillow Book.
I read genji about 15 years ago and really loved it, partly from the sense of being in a very different world with its own complex rules which you do not know, and partly from enjoying the sense of discovery involved in decoding and deducing what was actually going on. One thing in the translation I read (which maybe wasn’t the case with the reviewed translations) was that many characters weren’t referred to by name but only poetically (“lady of the orange blossoms”,”lady of the evening faces”) and that these changed as the story went on. I’m a fan of sci-fi world building, especially social (left hand of darkness, embassytown, babel 17 etc) so if you like that kind of thing you might like genji too.
A very informative review.
I'd like to know a little more about where Lady Murasaki fits into Japanese literature. Did she have predecessors in writing something like a novel, or did she make a great leap forward herself?
this description of this particular old Japanese culture really makes it clear how Cetagandan haut culture in the Vorkosigan books is derived from that!
"now and again / O let your compassion touch this little pink with fresh dew!" - are the translators sure "little pink" refers to the couple's daughter? To me it sounds much more sexual - a woman writing to her absent lover that her "little pink" misses his "fresh dew"...
I'd say either one of the Hellenistic novels or, if you have stricter demands, The Golden Ass, takes the "first novel" prize.
Very nice review. I did not find it extremely judgmental, unlike other commenters; I found it very informative about a 1,000-year-old (alien) culture. I was totally unaware about that until now.
Anyway you unlocked me another use for Claude! Just for fun, as I had some spare Fable 5.1 credits, here is the translation Claude gave me:
This is a waka (5-7-5-7-7) from The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (early 11th century), chapter 16, "Sekiya" (The Gatehouse). A small clarification first: Genji is not a historical poet but the novel's protagonist; the poem is his within the story. At the end of the ninth month he is travelling to Ishiyama temple and, near the Ōsaka barrier, crosses paths with the procession of the governor of Hitachi, who is returning to the capital with his wife Utsusemi, the woman who had rejected Genji years before. Some time later Genji summons her younger brother and sends her a letter containing this poem.
わくらばに 行き逢ふ道を 頼みしも なほかひなしや 潮ならぬ海
By rare chance
our roads crossed on the way,
and in that I had placed my hope;
yet it all comes to nothing,
a sea that holds no salt.
Three layers of wordplay (kakekotoba) are at work.
行き逢ふ, "to meet on the road", points to 逢坂 (Ōsaka, literally "Meeting Slope"), the barrier where the two parties crossed. Standing at the entrance to Ōmi province, it was the traditional site of partings and reunions, and classical poets used the place name as a pun on "to meet" (au), so the word carries a whole tradition of love poetry with it.
潮ならぬ海, "a sea that is not salt", is Lake Biwa, the freshwater "sea" (淡海) that gives Ōmi province its name (近江), which in turn echoes 逢ふ身, "one who meets". Commentators also note that fresh water grows no mirume seaweed, and mirume is homophonous with "eyes that see", i.e. the meeting that never takes place.
かひなし means "in vain" (甲斐無し) but also "no shells" (貝無し): a freshwater lake has no seashells, so the image itself explains why the encounter bears no fruit.
Utsusemi replies: 逢坂の関やいかなる関なれば繁き嘆きの中を分くらん, roughly "What kind of barrier is Ōsaka, that I must push my way through such dense laments?", where nageki puns on "lament" and "thrown branches", matched by shigeki, "dense", as of trees.
So it immediately knows that it's from Genji? I also asked the same about author's prompt, because the last time I tried something like this they'll know that it's not "just a classic japanese poem". So the AI will already know the "answer" of the interpretation.
(Though the author mentions that without deep thinking the AI doesn't get it so I don't know.)
I suppose that it beats "You don't sweat much for a fat lass" as a pick-up line.
Long-form culture writing is fine. Cross-asset, capital still concentrates in the few ideas that survive after the brochure fades.
Claude's training corpus almost certainly included a) Genji, b) a dozen-odd translations of Genji in many languages, c) hundreds of academic papers about Genji, and d) hundreds of thousands of Japanese student "In this essay I will write about laurel symbolism in Genji"-type essays. So I don't know how useful it is to look to an LLM's ability to translate poetry in this case.
> A Fujiwara man could not become an emperor, but he could become the father or grandfather of one
Eh I don't think he could be a father of one, unless we count unofficial means. But with that method, everyone is also able to do that.
About the hypocrisy of men, I think it sounds like a "normal"/modern courting dance where he expects his partner to simultaneously not be "too easy" or "too hard". I guess it's where all the "playing hard to get" thing comes from.
I read most of Waley's translation, and I found it a big inspiration to try to imagine how a court of elves, or Melnibonians, or fae folk, would work.
All I can say is that with all the complex hierarchy, subtle social cues, and formalised passive-aggressive behaviour, this place and time sound like they would have been my personal hell.
I haven't read Genji directly, but based on this review of Genji, it doesn't sound very alien or hard to understand at all, so I'm inclined to agree with Royall Tyler.
I do agree that without the footnotes, I probably would not have known that "What is it they call the leaf we all sport today?" was a reference to the Kamo festival, but I also think that you can probably enjoy the book just fine even if you didn't know that that was a reference to the Kamo festival (and hence knowing that is "optional", and hence the footnotes are "optional").
In general, lots of works of fictions (books, movies, tv shows, songs, video games, etc.) contain references that some portion of their audience will miss. Usually when you miss a reference, you don't even know you're missing a reference, and you just enjoy the work of fiction anyway.
I also feel like a lot of the things the review spends time explaining is like weeb info 101, like if you've watched more than 3 animes, you probably already know that Japanese has "a complex grammatical system that allowed for the precise communication of the relative statuses of everyone involved, which is largely lost in translation. Often it’s not obvious why something was offensive or that someone is trying to overstate their status, and sometimes the translator has to figure out who is talking to whom and about whom based on the politeness forms they are using in their speech. A lot of the time, characters behave in ways that can be difficult to understand without knowing their precise social standing." Etc.
Like maybe you can watch 1 or 2 anime without encountering this, but very quickly, you'll encounter a translator's note where they'll explain why it's significant a character chose to use "watashi" vs "boku" vs "ore" etc. as their first singular person pronoun (in English, we only have "I"), why they chose "kimi" vs "anata" vs "teme" etc. for the second person singular pronoun (in modern English we have only "you"; in older English we also had "thou"), or why they chose to use the honorific "san" vs "chan" vs "sama" etc. (in English, we have three, but we choose based on gender + marital status instead of based on social standing: mr, mrs, miss).
Modern Japanese doesn't have *that* many levels of politeness. I assume Heian court language was much more elaborate.
Incidentally, English does have more politeness distinctions than you give it credit for. For example, you say that we only have "you", but we also have words like "dear" or "honey" to indicate familiarity, maam/sir for politeness, etc.
> Modern Japanese doesn't have *that* many levels of politeness. I assume Heian court language was much more elaborate.
Sure, but by the time you have, say, 3 levels, it becomes relatively easy to comprehend 10 or 50 or 100 levels. It doesn't seem "totally alien" the way an English speaker (who I'm arguing "doesn't have distinct levels at all" or equivalently "only has 1 level") would perceive modern Japanese to be. That is, going from 1 to 3 is kind of alien. Going from 3 to N is not very alien at all.
> Incidentally, English does have more politeness distinctions than you give it credit for. For example, you say that we only have "you", but we also have words like "dear" or "honey" to indicate familiarity, maam/sir for politeness, etc.
The concept of politeness exists in the mind of the typical English speaker, yes, but the idea that your choice of pronouns reflects your social standing is "alien" to most English speakers. Most English speakers do not conceptualize the word "honey" to be a pronoun used in polite settings, but rather a noun acting as a nickname or term of endearment. They conceptualize it as serving a completely different grammatical function than the word "you", even putting politeness aside. As empirical evidence, notice how fully socialized adult English speakers need to be explained this concept when they consume Japanese media.
I really enjoyed this review. I have Tyler's translation and got about 30 pages in and decided I'd need to get fired to have time to read it. Unfortunately I'm still employed.
I think my favorite thing from Tyler's introduction was that there was a Minister of the Left and a Minister of the Right, who were more or less duplicative. "Many official organs had Left and Right components....The City was also divided administratively into Left and Right. Court music and dance, too, were divided into Left and Right repertoires...." It all seems like a sort of magic box of grace, beauty, and inefficiency, and all for an emperor who had no real power, and yet this magic box was supported by the families who really did have power.
I loved this.
While I enjoyed learning about a book I will probably never read, I found the reviewer extremely judgmental and her bias against men tainted her description of the novel from beginning to end. Completely unable to stop using her XXI century lenses to review a story written by a woman that probably appreciated men more than the reviewer does…. What a waste…
true banger
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