The Tale of Genji
$18.00
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| Trade Discount | 5 + | 25% |
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Description
An abridged edition of the world’s first novel, in a translation that is “likely to be the definitive edition . . . for many years to come” (The Wall Street Journal)
A Penguin Classic
Written in the eleventh century, this exquisite portrait of courtly life in medieval Japan is widely celebrated as the world’s first novel—and is certainly one of its finest. Genji, the Shining Prince, is the son of an emperor. He is a passionate character whose tempestuous nature, family circumstances, love affairs, alliances, and shifting political fortunes form the core of this magnificent epic.
Royall Tyler’s superior translation is detailed, poetic, and superbly true to the Japanese original while allowing the modern reader to appreciate it as a contemporary treasure. In this deftly abridged edition, Tyler focuses on the early chapters, which vividly evoke Genji as a young man and leave him at his first moment of triumph. This edition also includes detailed notes, glossaries, character lists, and chronologies.“An enormous achievement.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Both epic and intimate, [Genji] is a gorgeous evocation of a time and place that have long since disappeared. But it’s also an exploration of feelings and relations between men and women, as fresh and beguiling to readers today as when it was first written. A new translation that makes Genji accessible to contemporary readers is a landmark event. [Tyler’s translation] has clearly been a labor of love. In his beautifully written translation he tries to get as close to the original as possible, immersing us in eleventh-century Japan. Mr. Tyler’s translation is richly embellished with footnotes that flag for us everything that Murasaki and her contemporaries would have taken for granted. All in all, Mr. Tyler’s translation is likely to be the definitive edition of The Tale of Genji for years to come.” —The Wall Street Journal
“The Tale of Genji set an insanely high standard for anything that came after it. This latest edition is reader friendly at every turn, with generous footnotes, character lists and lots of illustrations to show what robes looked like, or swords, or houses. You have to reach for comparisons to Tolstoy or Proust to convey just what a captivating experience this story can be.” —Newsweek
“Tyler’s delicate ear for the language of the original helps breathe new life into the story of Genji.” —The New Yorker
“Though [Murasaki’s] setting was the royal Japanese court of one thousand years ago, her characters managed to draw the reader into their passion and terrors in an uncannily modern way. [Tyler’s translation is] beautifully readable . . . it sets a new standard. Not only is this new English edition the most scrupulously true to the original, it also is superbly written and genuinely engaging. . . . We are blessed to have Tyler’s help in reading it.” —The Los Angeles Times Book Review
“The remarkable thing about Genji is . . . that it is a masterpiece, the oldest full-length novel in existence, and still very much alive. It is even livelier in the new translation by Royall Tyler. Tyler skillfully catches the erotic flavor, the vivid characterizations, and the allusive poetry of this classic. . . . Readers will quickly find themselves immersed in a strange and distant culture whose inhabitants’ loves, rivalries, suffering and follies we can identify with our own.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“An astonishingly rich, absorbing drama that has stood, and will doubtless continue to stand, the severest tests of time and changing literary fashions. There is nothing else on earth quite like The Tale of Genji. Utterly irresistible.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“One of the undisputed monuments of world literature. Tyler offers a version that effectively captures the indirection and shades of Murasaki’s court language. A major contribution to our understanding of world literature; highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“Widely recognized as the world’s first novel, as well as one of its best . . . painstakingly and tenderly translated by Tyler. An epic narrative, it is also minutely attentive to particulars of character, setting, emotion—even costume. Tyler clearly intends his [translation] to be the definitive one. It is richer, fuller, and more complicated than the others. Tyler’s formality of tone offers readers a more graceful, convincing rendering of this one thousand-year-old masterpiece. Scholars and novices alike should be pleased.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Tyler has long shown himself to be one of the finest translators of Japanese in our era. In producing this new Genji translation, he has been able not only to draw upon his own skills as a writer, but also to build on the efforts and accomplishments of his predecessors . . . the Tyler version is by far the most helpful to the general reader.” —The Washington Post Book World
“[Tyler] has crafted an elegant translation that remarkably renders this eleventh-century tale in language so lively, vivid and transparent, one could easily believe that the book was written by some gifted postmodernist. Royall Tyler devoted space to explaining, through the introduction and footnotes, nuances of the time, helping help us place them into a modern context. This edition of The Tale of Genji is beautifully realized, both as a translation and as a seamless art object.” —The Cleveland Plain DealerMurasaki Shikibu, born in 978, was a member of Japan’s Fujiwara clan, which ruled behind the scenes during the Heian Period by providing the brides and courtesans of all the emperors. Lady Murasaki’s rare literary talent, particularly her skill as a poet, secured her a place in the court of Empress Akiko. After the death of her husband, she cloistered herself to study Buddhism, raise her daughter, and write the world’s first novel, Genji monogatari, the tale of the shining Prince Genji.
Royall Tyler (translator), an American, is retired from the Australian National University, where he taught Japanese language and literature for many years. He has a B.A. from Harvard University and a Ph.D from Columbia University and has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Wisconsin. He has also translated The Tale of the Heiki and Japanese Noh Dramas for Penguin Classics.
INTRODUCTION
The Tale of Genji, written a thousand years ago in Japan, is a great masterpiece of world literature. Although not the oldest surviving example of prose fiction, it may well be the first novel ever written. In The Progress of Fiction, the British novelist Clara Reeve (1729-1807) distinguished the novel from the romance and wrote, “The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and … gives a familiar relation of such things as pass every day before our eyes…. [It] represent[s] every scene in so easy and natural a manner … as to deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses of the persons in the story as if they were our own.” Her words describe The Tale of Genji. Remarkably, Murasaki Shikibu, the tale’s author, was also a woman.
Murasaki Shikibu (973?-1014?) was born into the middle level of the Japanese aristocracy. In about 1006 she was called to serve the Empress of the time, perhaps because she wrote such good stories. Nobody knows just when she began her Tale or when she finished it, but what remains of her diary alludes to the work as it existed in 1007 or 1008, and she has been recognized ever since as the author of all fifty-four chapters. Unfortunately, no manuscript survives from her time. The earliest known text dates from about 1200.
Murasaki Shikibu wrote above all for the Empress, her patron, and through her for other members of the highest aristocracy. A great lady did not normally read a story silently by herself. Instead, she listened while one of her women read it aloud and she herself looked at the pictures. Murasaki Shikibu may well have read some chapters in person to the Empress, and she certainly wrote her tale in that spirit. The Tale of Genji is ostensibly told by a female narrator (perhaps more than one) whose language often suggests that she is addressing a superior.
The tale features several unforgettable major heroines, such as Fujitsubo, Murasaki (apparently the source of her creator’s name), Akashi, Rokujo, and Ukifune, as well as many striking minor ones. However, the thread that holds things together is the life of Genji, the hero. Genji is an Emperor’s son by a relatively low-ranking lady who dies not long after his birth. Even as a boy, Genji is extraordinarily beautiful and gifted, but his father, who longs to appoint him Heir Apparent, understands that the court would never accept his doing so. He therefore decides to make Genji a commoner, so that Genji can at least serve the realm in due course as a senior official.
The tale often highlights the social boundary that separates a commoner from someone imperial, but for the rest of his life Genji will hover between the two worlds, and this will give him, as a fictional hero, a particularly wide scope. To free him further from the constraints of the commonplace, the author also gives him practically unlimited material means. In the first dozen or so chapters, the young Genji becomes entangled in a dazzling assortment of love affairs that range from broad comedy to disaster. The most agonizing of them is his relationship with his father’s Empress—the princess whom his father married explicitly in order to seek solace after the death of Genji’s mother. Genji was told as a child that this lady closely resembled his mother, and he fell deeply in love with her. In time she bears a son who is really Genji’s, not Genji’s father’s, and this boy eventually accedes to the throne. When, years later, he learns the secret of his birth, he decides to honor his real father by appointing Genji Honorary Retired Emperor, even though Genji has never reigned. This step, which in the author’s time could be taken only in fiction, brings Genji to an unheard-of pinnacle of glory. Meanwhile, he finds his lifelong love and companion (Murasaki) in a beautiful niece of his father’s empress, someone who closely resembles that empress and therefore Genji’s late mother herself. This theme—the hero’s nostalgia for his lost mother—has fascinated many readers.
Genji’s rise to ultimate glory marks a turning point, and soon his world begins slowly to crumble around him. Murasaki comes to feel estranged from him, though he will not let her go. Then her death destroys him. In the last chapter in which he appears, he is only a shell of what he once was, and past the end of that chapter he dies, too. The remaining third of the book picks up the story some eight years later. It now centers on a young man, Kaoru, whom the world accepts as Genji’s son, although in reality he is not. Kaoru has nothing like Genji’s stature. The mood of this last third of the tale is dark with intimations of betrayal and failure, so much so that Kaoru has seemed to many readers a remarkably modern hero. The tale ends at last on an inconclusive note, one that leaves many wondering “what happened next.” Only the reader’s imagination can provide an answer. The genius of The Tale of Genji is all the more impressive because the author had few models to work from. Many things about the lives of the characters—the clothes they wore, the kinds of houses they lived in, their pastimes, their rules of deportment, and so on—are of course unfamiliar now, but their feelings, motives, and experiences are recognizable to anyone. Love, ambition, pride, anguish, bitterness, and disappointment affect us all, and The Tale of Genji presents them with a freshness of insight that has made it famous for its psychological immediacy. It is a rich and astonishing work.
ABOUT MURASAKI SHIKIBU
Murasaki Shikibu, born in 978, was a member of Japan’s Fujiwara clan, which ruled behind the scenes during the Heian Period by providing the brides and courtesans of all the emperors. Lady Murasaki’s rare literary talent, particularly her skill as a poet, secured her a place in the court of Empress Akiko. After the death of her husband, she cloistered herself to study Buddhism, raise her daughter, and write the world’s first novel Genji Monogatari, the tale of the shining Prince Genji.
ABOUT ROYALL TYLER
Royall Tyler was born in London, England, and grew up in Massachusetts, England, Washington D.C., and Paris. He has a B.A. in Far Eastern Languages from Harvard, and an M.A. in Japanese History and Ph. D. in Japanese literature from Columbia University. He has taught Japanese language and culture at, among other places, Ohio State University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Oslo, in Norway. Beginning in 1990, he taught at the Australian National University, in Canberra, from which he retired at the end of 2000. He will spend the American academic year 2001-02 as a Visiting Professor at Harvard.
Royall Tyler and his wife Susan live in a rammed earth house on 100 acres in the bush about seventy miles from Canberra, where they breed alpacas as a hobby.
Royall Tyler’s previous works include Japanese Noh Dramas, a selection and translation of Noh plays published by Penguin;Japanese Tales and French Folktales, anthologies published by Pantheon; and The Miracles of the Kasuga Deity, a study of a medieval Japanese cult published by Columbia University Press.
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Additional information
| Weight | 8.4 oz |
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| Dimensions | 0.6400 × 5.1300 × 7.7100 in |
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| Subjects | penguin classic, fiction books, books fiction, realistic fiction books, book gifts, long story short, book lover gifts, short story collections, fiction psychological, penguin classics, royall tyler, lady murasaki, Murasaki Shikibu, the tale of genji, Genji monogatari, japanese literature, tale of genji, Japan, fiction, FIC019000, FIC025000, novels, book lovers, Japanese, short stories, asian, Literature, metropolitan museum of art, the met, literary fiction, gifts for readers, book lover, short story anthology, book lovers gifts |
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