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

In a certain reign, whose can it have been? Someone of no great rank, among all his majesty's consorts and intimates, enjoyed exceptional favour. Those others who had always assumed that pride of place was properly theirs, despised her as a dreadful woman, while the lesser intimates were unhappier still. The way she waited on him day after day only stirred up feeling against her, and perhaps this growing burden of resentment was what affected her health, and obliged her often to withdraw in misery to her home.

But his Majesty, who could less and less do without her, ignored his critics until his behaviour seemed bound to be the talk of all. So that is the opening paragraph of the supreme, unchallenged, canonical classic of Japanese literature. It's a novel called The Tale of Genji, and to give you a sense of the sheer weight of it, in the translation by Royal Tyler, which we'll be quoting from a fair bit today, that book is more than one thousand pages long. Now, Tom, we're not the rest is literature, so what is a Japanese novel? doing on a history podcast.

Please explain. Two answers. So as you said, this is the great classic of Japanese literature. I guess the obvious parallel might be with Don Quixote and the role that it plays in Spain. I mean maybe even with the plays of Shakespeare in England.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (53 minutes, 9,614 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.