Thanks, Noisette.

My late wife, (who, like many well-educated Japanese), was well versed in Japanese culture. She told me with great pride, shortly after we first met, that the world’s first novel was written by a Japanese person. I’ve thought about it for many years, and it was that statement that compelled me to slog my way through it. Much as I hate to disagree with someone who was probably smarter than I, and no longer able to argue, I think she was wrong.

Rob, Molly, and Pam make fascinating reading, but except for some death-bed conversions meant to placate the priggish readers who no doubt enjoyed their selfishness, concupiscence, or extreme virtue in the face of other people’s delicious wickedness, nobody in those books learned anything that would make them a better or even a different person. If you think that Robinson Crusoe , Moll Flanders , or Pamela are novels, then you might well agree with my late wife, but if you think, as I do, that the exploration of how experience shapes character is at the heart of the form, then perhaps you’ll be inclined to agree with me. For me, Tom Jones is still the first book to cross that line.

Murasaki's book is a little like the pre-Fieldiing books of English fiction, in that all of the characters remain static throughout the narrative. Genji, the Shining Prince, dies about a third of the way through the story. I was surprised, but not too sorry to see him go. I found his endless perfection boring, and I became impatient with his incapacity to exercise even a modicum of control over his sexual appetites, at least until I realized that he was the creation of a woman, and if she thought that this was correct behavior for the perfect gentleman, why should I care. (Someone might make a case that Genji is the world’s first “bodice ripper”.)

Still, I find the book has considerable merit. The latter part of the story is concerned with the rivalry of two of Genji’s descendants, who’s diametrically opposed personalities create psychological and philosophical dimensions that make for gripping reading, causing me to reflect that “half a Genji is better than one.” Perhaps it’s asking too much that characters grow and develop in a world which, so far as I can see, never gave too much thought to the idea that people can grow and become something other than they once were. At any rate, the brilliance of the work is undeniable. Just maintaining consistency in the over 400 characters over what in English amounts to about 1100 pages, in a work released serially, is a real tour de force. And the work must be the clearest window into the small but bright world of the Heian nobility.

As for the locations of the graves, a friend suggested that the two might have been related, that her mother or her husband, for example, might have been of the Ono clan. That’s just a plausible guess, of course, but probably a better one than that a small woods north of town was some kind of Poet’s Corner. I’ll let you know if a better idea comes along.