The Tale of Genji Reading Order

The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari, c. 1000–1012) by Murasaki Shikibu is the first novel in world literature — a work of such psychological depth, formal sophistication, and literary consciousness that it defies the European categories of 'romance' or 'court tale' that scholars have used to diminish it. Written by a noblewoman at the Heian court in Kyoto, it follows the life of Hikaru Genji, 'the shining prince,' the gifted and beautiful son of the Emperor who is demoted to commoner status; his love affairs with dozens of women across four decades; and, in the novel's final third, the careers of the two young men who may or may not be his descendants. The novel's central subject is mono no aware — 'the pathos of things,' the Japanese aesthetic of beauty perceived in its transience — and Genji's career is a sustained meditation on the nature of love, loss, and the passage of time. Murasaki Shikibu's achievement is extraordinary by any measure: she created psychological depth in fictional characters a millennium before European writers developed the techniques associated with psychological realism; she developed a narrative irony (the narrating voice's gentle comedy toward Genji's vanities) that is fully modern in its self-awareness; and she produced in the Uji chapters (the final quarter of the novel) a darker, more melancholy work that anticipates the Buddhist aesthetics of Japanese literature for the next five centuries. The novel has fifty-four chapters; different readers stop at different points, but the whole rewards reading.