I stopped reading after he kidnaps and grooms the girl

>>24761355
Sounds kino. I'll read to that part and I'm sure it'll get better.

>can’t get with a girl
>have sex with her younger brother instead
Um, based

>>24761407
They just slept in the same bed? He didn't fuck him.

>>24761337

I haven't read it BUT a few years ago the local art museum had a really cool exhibit of artworks based on it, containing many scenes from the novel. So, I set myself a homework task: learn the basics of the plot outline and particularly famous scenes, in order to better understand the artworks. So I read a few sources and punched up my own little chapter-by-chapter synopsis based on the summaries I checked. I returned to the museum with my own self-generated checklist in hand.

Much of this has faded from memory but here's what I remember: There's 54 chapters, and the object I spent the most time studying was a 12-panel screen, with every (wooden) panel being decorated with either four or five (comic strip, serial image) "panels", depicting one scene from each chapter. I was able to pick out the scene where Genji's ghost dad urges him to get back in the game, things are looking up for you kid, and a famous late scene where a character steals away with a woman on a boat across a lake in the moonlight. There's also an early chapter where Genji has a sort of frenemy, a Goku/Vegeta sort of thing, and they challenge each other to a sort of fresh dance-off in front of the rest of the court during some sort of celebration. Several of the artworks focused on this early, lively scene.

IIRC several of the later chapters are believed to have been accretions, later additions by persons other than Murasaki herself, kind of like spurious works traditionally attributed to/associated with major classical authors but really done by one pseudo-Plato or another.

Watch Kwaidan. It's an anthology movie where the main chapter which takes up about half of its run time is about a blind man reciting The Tale of Genji while playing the biwa. It has ghosts and some of the most unique sound design I've ever heard in a movie.

>>24761518
Oh fuck dude, I'm retarded. The story from Kwaidan deals with the Tale of Heiki, not the Tale of Genji. Still, Kwaidan is kino and I highly recommend it as well as the Lafcadio Hearn collection it's based on and Japanese ghost stories in general.

>>24761337
If you didn't enjoy the first chapter you're likely never going to get into it. I think you're probably wasting your time sticking with it.

I was reading this book when suddenly I had the urge to study Classical Chinese and after 2 months I stopped studying it for Japanese

>>24761539

Genji is one of those things where you can legitimately just read selected chapters or an abridged version and get the general idea if you're curious about it. There's an abriged version on market. This was one of the other things that I came to understand when I did my own cliffs notes thing above. It's romance so it's not as if any deep or difficult ideas are being discussed.

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80 KB JPG

>>24761337
I read the first section so far and enjoyed it quite a bit. If you're interested in history and what life at the Japanese court was like, cultural mores and such, you'll enjoy it but if you're just reading it as a plotfag you probably won't. Switching to the Arthur Waley translation might help you enjoy it more because he takes liberties with the text in order to make it flow better and seem more like a modern novel (if you're going to read the whole thing just know that he omitted a book in section 2). The Tyler translation is always held up as the most faithful to the source material but it's almost always noted that its readability is rough and frequently confusing for the reader.

Anyway, the book is very influential when it comes to Japanese literature as a whole so if you're going to read more of it reading Genji is important background (like reading the Bible for Western literature).

>>24761559
Classical Chinese is like the easiest language to learn

It pretty much is slice-of-life though

Is it like anime? It’s a novel written a thousand years ago

>>24762170
Reading it, sure. Speaking it, whether in modern tongue, or reconstructed, takes a fair amount of practice

>>24762236
Why would you even speak a dead language? lol
>>24761337
>thought it would be the literary equivalent of slice-of-life anime
That's a (You) problem.

>>24761602
>he omitted a book in section 2
do you know why? i've tried to search out an explanation for this, but it seems like a complete mystery.

>>24762264
A lot more of the poetic qualities of Classical Chinese come out if you do. For example most of the Taotecheng rhymes

>>24763633
>most of the Taotecheng rhymes
Sauce?????

One of the best books I have ever read. I will say that if you don't enjoy it from the start you probably never will.

>>24761489
Are you retarded

>>24762264
>Why would you even speak a dead language? lol
To enjoy and recite the poems correctly

>>24764344
What do you mean sauce bro open google translate and press speak or google a recitation.

>>24761337
Dunno what to tell you anon, I found it thrilling the whole way through. If you're miserable then stop reading and maybe try again some time down the line.
To those who have read it, who is best girl? I'm going with Tamakazura.

>>24764942
I've read the Tao Te Ching in the original and it doesn't rhyme

>>24761355
>>24761407
>woman writer

>>24765221
You’ve read it with restored pronunciation?

>>24761355
Yeah it takes a nosedive after he is exiled for being a coomer.

>>24765233
Yes, and it doesn't rhyme

>>24763612
I have no idea why he did it and even Genji reading guides that mention it don't have an answer (I think one of them even says "for unknown reasons").

>>24765903
I believe it was just something like the Catalogue of the Ships in the Iliad. Just a long list of useless information.

>>24765968
It's not that. It's a section where Genji goes to meet a wife who had become a nun and they talk about Buddist philosophy. ToG is episodic, you could easily drop entire chunks of it without the reader noticing, and the narrative is wonky to the point where you'll have a reference to a relationship that doesn't make sense until 100 or so pages later. It's not that the particular book/episode isn't important, there's a lot of stuff like that Waley left in or even fleshed out more, so it's an odd omission.

The translation itself is known for the liberties it took to make the story more accessable to the West and that's probably why his omission of a book, seemingly for no reason, is a focal point of discussion. That's my guess anyway.