The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)

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  That is therestishistory.com.

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  In a certain reign, whose can it have been?

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  Someone of no great rank,

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  among all his majesty's consorts and intimates, enjoyed exceptional favour.

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  Those others who had always assumed that pride of place was properly theirs,

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  despised her as a dreadful woman, while the lesser intimates were unhappier still.

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  The way she waited on him day after day only stirred up feeling against her,

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  and perhaps This growing burden of resentment was what affected her health and obliged her often to withdraw in misery to her home.

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  But His Majesty, who could less and less do without her,

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  ignored his critics until his behaviour seemed bound to be the talk of all.

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  So that is the opening paragraph of the supreme,

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  unchallenged, canonical classic of Japanese literature.

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  It's a novel called The Tale of Genji.

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  And to give you a sense of the sheer weight of it, in the translation by Royal Tyler,

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  which we'll be quoting from a fair bit today, that book is more than 1,000 pages long.

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  Now, Tom, we're not the rest is literature.

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  So what is a Japanese novel doing on a history podcast?

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