Hello and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish this week coming to you from the hay festival in hey My name is Dan Schreiber.
I'm sitting here with three other QILs.
It's Anna Chazinski James Harkin and Andy Murray and once again We have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here We go starting with you Chazinski Yes,
did you mention that these are specifically literary fans?
Absolutely Yeah, because it's a literary festival.
Yeah,
that's why I said it So my literary fact is
that the first ever novel ended mid-sentence And this is a Japanese novel called the tale of Genji.
It was written in the early 11th century So probably 1008 they think and yeah ended in the middle of a sentence.
Was it like a cliffhanger ending?
Kind of I mean not as melodramatic but she's into the characters introducing another character to someone and the end saying Karu introduces him to the You never find out who and people don't know
if that was intentional or if she just died in the middle of gay I think most most critic think
that it was intentional I heard another version which is
like they just she just carried on she was gonna carry on a carry on until she couldn't do it anymore
Because it isn't quite one book isn't it?
Yeah, I think it's about 1100 pages Yeah, 100 pages.
Yeah, apparently there's like 400 characters in there.
Yeah, and none of them have names No, none of them have names and I read in one Yeah,
it must have been so confusing so there are 400 characters and apparently at the time it was rude in Japanese It's all about Japanese aristocratic society in the 12th century and it was rude to refer to someone by name
because It was thought as being like unnecessarily familiar So for 400 characters,