560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
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What is The Tale of Genji?
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 1,000 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.
Yeah.
and the role that it plays in Spain. I mean, maybe even with the plays of Shakespeare in England. I will quote the novelist who, in 1968, won Japan's first Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata, in his acceptance speech. He described it as the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature.
As a Nobel Prize winner, he would Absolutely no. He's not wrong. It's had a massive influence, right? It's had an influence all through Japanese culture on anime and manga and all kinds of tales.
Right the way up to the present day, but going all the way back through medieval Japan, because this novel is, by the standards of the Western novel, I mean, unbelievably ancient. So it's written in the... early years of the 11th century. And it has profoundly, profoundly shaped the Japanese sense of what it is to be Japanese. So it's kind of a historical artifact in its own right. But I think also it opens an absolutely brilliant window onto what is often described as the classical age of Japan, the first great golden age, 10th and 11th centuries in Japan. And this is A Japan that is emerging for the first time, really, as a distinctive civilization. So it's long existed in the shadow of China, but this kind of cultural cringe that it had long had, it's got rid of.
It is expressing ideals of beauty and grace that will, again, run throughout Japanese history. And to be honest, if you're a historian of, say, ancient or medieval history, To read it is quite a mind-blowing experience because you are being given an insider's vision of an imperial court that is much, much richer, I think, than anything that we have from, I don't know, ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia or Persia or Rome or Baghdad or even China. And I've just been to Japan. I read it while I was in Japan. And I have to say, it was one of the great reading experiences of my life.
well tom i know when you say something like that you genuinely mean it because the only other book that i've heard you say those words about the only other moment i've heard you talk about with the same sort of respect and even dare i say or was the chapter on snooker in my book who dares wins no not just the chapter on snooker dominic the whole vast tome wow and i would say that um
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