Books: Genji Finished

THE BRIDGE OF DREAMS—Lady Murasaki—Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

Citizens of the Western world who think of Japanese civilization as dating from Matthew Calbraith Perry (1794-1858) would change their minds after reading Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji. Written some time ago (1001-15) by a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Akiko, it has been a widely-known classic in Japan since 1022. When British Scholar Arthur David Waley brought out the first volume of his translation (1925), critics tumbled over themselves to get within wreath-throwing distance. The Tale of Genji was compared to Proust, Jane Austen. Boccaccio. Shakespeare. Its translator calls it “by far the greatest novel of the East and one which, even if compared with the fiction of Europe, takes its place as one of the dozen masterpieces of the world.” With The Bridge of Dreams, the sixth volume, The Tale of Genji is complete.

What strikes modern readers of Genji most surprisingly is its up-to-date-ness. The psychological novel is apparently no modern invention after all. Formal, slow-moving, ceremoniously polite, Lady Murasaki’s court romance is peopled by very human beings (some 800 in all). Hero is Prince Genji, illegitimate son of an emperor, a Japanese Don Juan without Byronic weaknesses or vulgarities. By the end of the fourth volume his love-affairs and political maneuvers have landed him in exile. In a lapse of eight years between the fourth and fifth volumes Genji dies: the last two volumes tell the story of the rivalry between his grandson, Niou, and his reputed son, Kaoru. Occidental readers may be disappointed in the inconclusive end—”the story fades out like a Chinese landscape-roll. The Bridge of Dreams leads nowhere—breaks off like the tattered edge of a cloud.” But there is no doubt, says Translator Waley. that Lady Murasaki wrote it like that: The Tale of Genji is finished.

Other volumes (in order) : The Tale of Genji, The Sacred Tree, The Wreath of Cloud, Blue Trousers, The Lady of the Boat (TIME, Aug. 1).