Review: The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

 The Tale of Genji isn’t my first Heian rodeo. I’d already experienced the shock of finding something so old but feeling so new when I read The Lady Ochikubo and I’d already thrilled at the weird tension between a completely alien culture but utterly relatable emotions when reading The Pillow Book. The thing about Genji is that it’s very long and that you can see the book developing in complexity and confidence as it progresses.

Most write-ups of Genji say that it’s in two parts; the first, charting Genji’s life until his death and then the second, the Ujii chapters about Genji’s (not actual) son and (actual) grandson. I’d argue that it’s in three, and that each is vastly more developed than the one before.

The first part (chapters 1-28) are focussed on telling the story of Genji. He’s born into the imperial family as the son of a low-ranking consort. The consort is scandalously the Emperor’s favourite and actually dies as a result of all the negative attention and backbiting from the senior wives. Because of this Genji is given a surname (Minamoto or Genji) and so is made a commoner, where his life chances are better because he can enter the imperial service and work his way up the ranks. 

As a young man, he overhears a conversation about different women and the pros and cons of different ranks and personality types. This conversation them structures the bulk of the first section as Genji falls into various love scrapes and twists, trying out examples of all these different women. Despite being clever, accomplished and impossibly handsome, he makes mistakes in many of these relationships because he’s young and naive. In many ways, this first section plays out a lot like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones - a thoroughly decent young man needs to learn emotional (and sexual) responsibility to become the whole good man he has the potential to be.

It’s also nothing like Tom Jones as the tone is not at all funny or ironic but very earnest and wistful.  If anything, the tone of the book veers closer to the later eighteenth century’s cult of sensibility as all the characters in the book have a deep pull towards the beautiful, especially anything that is beautiful in a fragile or wistful way. Genji encounters women who reject him, women who accept him but probably shouldn’t, women who lead him on, and one who is killed by the disembodied spirit of a jealous ex. However, like Tom Jones, his amorous encounters get him in trouble and he finds himself banished from his previous paradise. 

In theory, it’s on this exile that he cleans himself up, but he actually just goes with another woman. It’s actually on his return and reinstatement in the city that he sets out to do right by all the women  in his life and behave responsibly. The great love of his life is probably the one a modern reader would have most difficulty with. Early in the book he comes across a ten-year old girl who reminds him of a lady he loves who reminds him of his mother. He bullies the girl’s family into letting him have her and then trains her up to be the perfect wife. (This is actually similar to what Thomas Day did in eighteenth century Britain, but Genji was more successful, his wife liked him). This woman is called Murasaki, and she’s held up as a paragon of female virtue throughout (and to be fair, she is eternally patient and even enjoys raising his children by other women). The ideal set-up he creates is one that wouldn’t be possible in society today, essentially a campus with different women in different sections with special gardens dedicated to them. It works for them though.

This leads to, what I would define as the second section of the book (chapters 29-30). Where the first section stuck with Genji, this one gains in complexity by following Genji, his growing family and the family of his friend and rival, To No Chujo. If the first is an early eighteenth century novel like Tom Jones or Roderick Random, this is like a nineteenth century social novel like Middlemarch. Where the characters all previously existed in their relationship to Genji, they now have their own stories which play out and interweave with his.

The cast list expands exponentially at this point, which can be a difficulty, especially with the Heian custom of not using anyone’s actual name. None of the characters so far have used their names and the monickers used are actually their position (meaning the ‘name’ changes as they get promoted) or a called after a significant motif in one of their chapters. Genji’s top wife, Murasaki is named after a wisteria plant that occurs in a poem in one of her chapters, even the author’s name of Murasaki probably comes from her identification as the author of this book. It’s been a struggle to maintain all the family/relationship dynamics so far, but it becomes a real challenge in this section.

Despite having settled down in this portion of the book, it is here that Genji does (what I think) is his most despicable thing. He finds one of To No Chujo’s scattered daughters, one that To No Chujo is not aware of, and sets himself up as her guardian and her protector. However, she’s so beautiful that he cant’ help also trying to force himself on the young woman, even as he’s the only protection she has. What’s interesting, is that even Genji knows this is unconscionable but can’t help himself. Given the author’s general support of Genji and his actions, there’s the implication that this strength of feeling is somewhat sexy.

The whole sexual relationship aspect of the book is really interesting, particularly in light of the book’s female author. It would seem that there is a whole ‘game’ of seduction that both parties generally accept, and Genji is praised for being a role-model at this game. Women were to keep themselves unseen, there are instances in the book of brothers never having seen their sister’s face, so any glimpse of a woman is instantly erotic. It might be the shadow in a screen, a sleeve poking from a curtain, or (most explosively) a glimpse of the hair. Even (and especially) a woman’s handwriting is erotic - and hearing her voice, rather than a go-between is a definite come-on.

Then the man edges closer and closer to the curtains, aiming to talk with her without intermediary. Then he begs to be let inside to sleep with her, teasing he with poems which she responds to. Her responses need to ideally be rejections with hints of acceptance. The woman has to say no but no definitely doesn’t mean no. (Some of the greater tragedies in this book occur when the woman’s no does mean no but there’s no cultural acceptance of this and the man takes it as a no-yes). The man then needs to make himself pathetic, crying that he can’t live without her and generally makes himself pitiable. Then the woman takes pity and he leaps forward, grabs her, takes her somewhere and has sex even as she protests. Before dawn he sneaks off, sending a flirty poem. She, dazzled by the night before then sends a flirty poem back - but not too flirty. It’s a game with lots of nuance, more than I could decipher, and lots of room for misunderstanding, which drives most of the conflict in the book.

Between the second section and the third, there is a chapter title but no chapter. This is presumably where Genji dies and it’s reminiscent of the black page of Tristram Shandy.

This third section (31-42) deals with two children of the generation after Genji’s (the next generation were dealt with in section two). It’s mostly about two men, Kaoru and Niou, and their dealing with three sisters connected with a village called Ujii, and so are often called the Ujii chapters. This section is vastly more complex than the previous two, following a number of characters as they negotiate the social intricacies of their situation, use of time jumps and flashbacks to twist the reader’s perspective and even the use of a fake-out death (followed by feigned amnesia).

It’s amazing how the first part was a straight-forward linear narrative following one character, the second a linear narrative following multiple characters but the third is like Pulp Fiction, controlling the reader’s perspective with clarity and control. It’s such a shame the book ends before this third section was completed because I want to know how it ends and how the characters escape their impossible situation. 

There are so many other fascinating elements to the book, the importance poetry plays in every aspect of the character’s lives, the completely different expectations of masculinity for the men in the Heian court to a contemporary Anglo-Saxon or Viking one, the fact that the book is about important figures in government and no actual governing is ever done - one main character is head of the army, yet spends his whole time stalking women and developing his own particular incenses. It’s a fascinating book and a fascinating world. 

The Tale of Genji is a very long book that charts the growth, development and ageing of, first, one particular character and then a whole society of them. It pays particular focus on change, the fragility of the world and the impossibility of holding onto past times. In many ways it is reminiscent of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, except I don’t frequently want to choke-slam the narrator. Forget how Proust can change your life, Murasaki can do it better. 

Review: Old London Cries by Andrew Tuer (and bonus, Why Not Eat Insects? by Vincent M Holt)

 My copy of Old London Cries is a facsimile of a book that was published in 1885 by Andrew Tuer. He was a publisher with an interest in the antiquarian and the fading. He produced books in a chapbook style, mine is small, wrapped in marbled paper and ties together with strings. He also filled it with many old prints and a few newer woodblock prints produced at the time but in a retro-style.

Cries themselves have not completely died out in London, visit a street market and the people there will still be reeling out their “five pounds a pound” or extolling the virtues of their fish or meat. The most memorable one I heard was when I was eight and a man was selling toy spiders by yelling, “biiiig ‘airy Sp-I-ders” in a very distinctive way. When I was little, Evening Standard hawkers still had a very distinctive cry (that sounded nothing like the words ‘Evening Standard’). There’s a man in Camden Market who calls his “bhang bhang chicken” in a way that once heard can never be forgotten. It’s not a dead art, but it’s a much diminished one.

Old London Cries reads rather like my paragraph above, it’s not an academic work, it’s a collection on remembrances, anecdotes, notes & queries. The cries are not organised thematically, chronologically, geographically or at all - it’s a jumble of these memories (as well as written and drawn accounts) spanning the fifteenth century to the time the book was produced.

There’s the ‘jovial fellow’ in Fleet Street who proudly cries how stinking his fish are, the jack-in-the-box seller who makes a noise as the clown pops up that buyers are disappointed to find do not come with the product.  One famous seller was the ‘Tiddy-Dol-man’ who features in Hogarth’s picture of the hanging of the idle apprentice. He was a gingerbread seller dressed in second-hand finery who made up little nonsense rhymes ending “tiddy-dol-dol-dol” to advertise his food. He also rather undersold the gingerbread, saying it would “melt in the mouth like a red hot brickbat”.

I was rather charmed by the man selling ‘young lambs’, a children’s toy made of lambskin with a pink bow on them. His cry was reported as;

“Young lambs to sell, young lambs to sell

Two for a penny, young lambs to sell

If I’d have as much money as I can tell

I wouldn’t cry young lambs to sell

Dolly and Molly, Richard and Nell

Buy my young lambs and I’ll use you well.”

The accompanying print shows the lamb seller as having a hook for a hand, possibly an old sailor or soldier on hard times.

The eighteenth century was a boom time in recording London Cries and many of them are culled from this popular e genre. Paul Sandby did one, Cruickshank has a few, some entered children’s books, chap books and nursery rhymes. Many of them are pretty plain, a simple call to buy whatever the person was selling. However, like the cries in the market today, it was often how they said it. Some products had recognisable rhythms and tunes to the cry, an idea that was incorporated in the ‘Who Will Buy?’ scene in Oliver!

Some of the cries represent old fads, fashions and jobs that no longer exist. Nobody walks about the street with bundles of canes calling to fix your chairs, nor does anybody wheel a knife-grinder around to fix up your old knives and scissors. (Though there is still a scrap metal man up my way who has a slow horse pulling a carriage, calling out “scrap metal” and people come out to put it on the cart - I was amazed to see that in 2025).

The cries also reflect food and drink no longer as popular. There was a man crying “Saloop”, which was a sassafras drink that men drank to gain energy for a night on the town - I imagine a sort of Dr Pepper. Then there’s Hokey Pokey - a cheap form of ice cream sold in blocks in different coloured and flavoured layers, I imagine like a Neapolitan. However, it was firmer than ice cream and slower to melt and, it was suspected made from mashed up turnip rather than cream. Ice creams themselves were served in penny-licks, a special bowl a customer would buy to lick the ice cream out of before giving it back to the vendor to use for a new customer. I suppose the tune of a modern day ice cream van is rather like an old street cry.

This is a charming book, pleasingly told by Andrew Tuer, though it can get a little repetitive with some of the cries. I’m not sure how many times in this small book I read the words ‘sweet lavender’ or ‘ripe strawberries’.

The back of the book included other works published by Tuer, and one in particular caught my attention.

Why Not Eat Insects? was published in 1885 by Field and Tuer and written by Vincent M Holt. As far as some cursory googling tells me, it was his only work.

It’s not a joke, but a genuine little polemical pamphlet encouraging more people to eat our creepy crawly friends. He was a few reasons for this, which he repeats a number of times:

1 - many insects are very clean animals, especially the vegetarian ones and are much cleaner than  pigs or lobsters, which are very popular food items.

2 - They are plentiful, nutritious and free, which should endear them to the poor.

3 - Eating insects will stop them eating and ruining our plants.

4 - People of the past ate insects with relish.

5 - People in other countries eat them with relish.

6 - Many highly prized foodstuffs, like oysters, aren’t much different to insects anyway.

7 - They taste good and it’s only cultural prejudice keeping them off the table.

He talks about Romans and Greeks enjoying them, natives of West Africa and Australia, even the French and their snails. He talks about Erasmus Darwin trying some and enjoying them, and of his own culinary experiments. He talks about a very fashionable event where people tried a Chinese meal, which didn’t have insects but did have Bird’s Nest soup - and insects have to be nicer than twigs and bird spit (not to mention the Chinese do have insect and chrysalis meals).

He says woodlice taste like prawns, some caterpillars taste delicious and it’s a mistake that only some snails are edible, they all are and so are slugs.

The best part of the book is where he creates two insectivorous menus. One starts with slug soup, braised beef and caterpillars and ending in gooseberry cream - with sawflies. The second includes curried cockchafers, wireworm sauce, caterpillars as garnish and ends in moths on toast - though whether spread or laid, I don’t know. To make these dishes seem more classy, he gives the same two menus with French names. I can’t say he swayed me (though I have had crickets and they were fine).

This book is one of those joyously bizarre things you come across sometimes and I am putting it in the bedside table of my spare room alongside How to Speak Wookie and Knitting with Dog Hair. 

On Short Books

 Last week I talked about my mixed feelings towards big books. For some reason blogspot gave it a content warning. I’m not sure why this would be, I didn’t say very much shocking. I talked about big books and how I often find them too big for their own good. I used a fair amount of eating imagery I suppose, about nibbling some books and guzzling others.. but that can’t be the problem.

This is especially perplexing because I have tackled some generally taboo subjects on this blog. I’ve reviewed Fanny Hill, books about eighteenth century sexuality and any number of peculiar gothic novels and amatory tales with all sorts of odd stuff. In my review for The Manuscript Found in Saragossa I talk about a “incestuous, diabolic, necrophiliac, gay threesome” and recieved nothing. I’ve even re-uploaded the big books host and things seem fine. All very perplexing.

I thought that I’d talk about shorter books this week, if I can get away with it.

Some of my utter favourite books of the last few years have been on the short side. The Colour Purple was a particular highlight. I think it’s amazing that something so short can be so epic in scope, taking place over many years and featuring a whole community whose many characters change radically throughout. At the beginning of the story, Celie is a nobody among nobodies, her opinions are unwanted and her desires unrecognised. By the end, she is the centre of a rambunctious group of people who have been built up, knocked down and rebuilt again. If Proust’s In Search of Lost Time takes over a million words to create a society and show it change, The Colour Purple does it in sixty-six thousand - and more vividly too.

One of my utter favourite books is only eighty-thousand words. It’s Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and it’s my go-to recommendation for anyone who hasn’t read it. It doesn’t have the epic sweep of The Colour Purple, it technically takes place during the time one sentence is read out. The story itself barely leaves the confines of one hall, where people dance for hours and hours with barely a break. I read it in one huge gulp, utterly addicted. It’s not a cheerful read but the desperation and tension of it are close to unbearable.

Patrick Hamilton is one of my favourite writers, who mainly wrote mid-length to long-ish novels. My favourite is The Slaves of Solitude but coming close second is Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, which is actually a trilogy of short novels. The best of those is the shortest, The Siege of Pleasure. It takes place over twenty-four hours, most of them increasingly drunken. One of the fascinating elements is how it takes the character of the first book, Ella, puts her as the central character, charts her every move and shows her to be even more empty than she seemed in the first book.

If you asked me my favourite author during university, I’d have easily answered Kurt Vonnegut. There’s an author who can slide in, lob a load of interesting stuff at a reader and get out before he wears out his welcome. I re-read those books so many times, but I don’t think I’d have appreciated a blockbuster length Vonnegut novel, it would have become tiresome.

Even my beloved eighteenth century isn’t all big bulky beasts. A lot of the Grub Street stuff was very short, some barely longer than pamphlets but even the heavyweights of the time produced pocketable works. Johnson’s Rambler essays have been packaged into three very carryable volumes - and if that’s cheating, his novel Rasselas is a tiddler. Yet, within that short novel you find a distinct summation of many of Johnson’s themes, an understanding into how he saw the world and a few pretty decent little jokes. I always recommend Rasselas to Johnson neophytes. Goldsmith’s novel The Vicar of Wakefield is also a fairly short work, eminently readable and rammed with charm. 

My favourite short eighteenth century work is Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, a wickedly funny parody of self-improvement literature designed to help the reader become more unpleasant. And the best thing about a short book, you can read it many times over.

Dear reader, do not worry, I won’t be talking about medium sized books next week, I’ll be looking at London Street cries.

On Big Books

 Did you know, I’m into books? I like them a lot. I like collecting them, I like organising them, I like reading them, I like thinking about them after I’ve read them - I write about them, sometimes I even write them. This often leads to the assumption that I find the bigger a book is, the better. This is not necessarily true.

I have read big books and there are definitely larger books I’ve enjoyed, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne is a reading experience I found difficult but also very rewarding which grows the more I think about it and leads me to want to read it again. The same is true of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. My favourite novel, Tom Jones is rather long, but it never feels it. At least, not till Tom gets to London. 

Often I’ve found big books do not always have the full bang for their buck. I’m glad I read all of Clarissa and I can now appreciate the positive impact it had on literature and the interesting realistic and psychological things it attempted but I shall probably never return to it.

Nor do I expect to return to Ducks Newburyport, despite how fascinating it was to try and tease out an organisational and thematic principle. Les Miserables was a book that seems to be diminished by its size, the sheer onslaught of everything leading to no set-piece or character standing out. I know others would disagree, citing the chase in the sewers or the manning of the barricade, but imagine a smaller book where one of those big moments was the central moment and I think it would be a stronger book.

That’s not to say all big books are bad. Dickens is at his best when he has the space to stretch out and be truly Dickens, Hard Times being easily the weakest of his works I’ve read. Anna Karenina also has this wonderful quality of exactly as long as it needs to be, I wonder if War and Peace feels the same. Ulysses is reportedly a book that improves on reread and, having enjoyed it the first time, I can see how having a clearer expectation of the journey ahead, it would be more enjoyable. I’ve certainly found that every time I’ve reread the equally idiosyncratic Tristram Shandy. I’d like to read Middlemarch again, I wonder if I’d find it as alienating as I did the first time.

One book I can’t ever imagine reading again is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. While there were certainly moments and characters I enjoyed, and the peculiarly meditative style had a way of separating Proust time from normal time, I did find it something of a wet fart. Maybe it was the translation. I couldn’t read Don Quixote till I found a translation that slipped down easily enough. 

I tend to tackle two big beasts a year, one in the summer and one near Christmas. This summer’s book is The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. While there are books I’ve split up over a year (Pamela, Montaigne and Lost Time) I tend to tackle the big book in the August holiday. This holiday I was finishing the settlement of my new house and learning/rehearsing the main part in a play and I simply didn’t get much of anything read. This means that after two months, I am yet to break halfway through Genji.

It’s one of those books which make it hard to carry around everywhere and pull out whenever. The book itself is physically large, fat and floppy, heavy if propped up on a chest or belly. It’s simply too cumbersome to sit in the park with and to throw it in a bag to grab at moments at school would be to leave no room for my raincoat or lunch. What’s more, the long chapters, detailed intricacies of courtly life and multiple characters (all without names) mean that it can’t be understood in small chunks either. Yet neither can it be read in big chunks, as too much Genji is a cosh and you find yourself asleep and dribbling before you know it. 

This is not to say Genji is unenjoyable, and it’s not boring, but it has a dreamy meditative quality, not unlike Proust, that means it’s simply not a book to be gobbled in large chunks. It’s one of those occasions where there is no solution but patience, read thirty or forty pages and night and watch it slowly be nibbled away. Now the play is over, the house settled and a nice routine has been established I am enjoying my time with Genji, entering this expansive world and life so different to mine and watch the scroll of his life gently unwind. I am looking forward to necking a few short, intense novels when I get done though.

Rest

I've been very busy with plays and school, so I'm having a rest from the blog this week.

4. Quiet; peace; cessation from disturbance.Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
Mat. xi. 29. He giveth you rest from all your enemies.
Deut. xii. 10. Though the righteous be prevented with death; yet shall he be in rest.
Wisd. iv. 7. ’Scap’d from such storms of pow’r, holding it best
To be below herself to be at rest.
Daniel’s Civil War. The root cut off, from whence these tumults rose,
He should have rest, the commonwealth repose.
Daniel.Thus fenc’d, but not at rest or ease of mind.
Milton. With what a load of vengeance am I prest,
Yet never, never, can I hope for rest;
For when my heavy burden I remove,
The weight falls down, and crushes her I love.
Dryden. Like the sun, it had light and agility; it knew no rest but in motion, no quiet but in activity.
South’s Sermons. Where can a frail man hide him? in what arms
Shall a short life enjoy a little rest.
Fanshaw. Thither, where sinners may have rest, I go.
Pope. The grave, where ev’n the great find rest.
Pope. The midnight murderer
Invades the sacred hour of silent rest.
Anonym. 
5. Cessation from bodily labour.There the weary be at rest.
Job iii. 17.