read the Tale of Genji

1st chapter in.

What an amazing book. I couldn’t imagine just reading it alone, though, with no guidebook or anything. I took a whole university course on it. That really helped me to understand the symbolism of all the character’s names, the meaning of all the poems, the structure of Heian society and so on. You just need so much background information to figure out what’s happening!

i didn’t expect a search for ‘Genji’ to bring this up.
I’ve donwnloaded the first 17 chapters of it, but will have to buy the actual book now that i’m getting to the end.
I’d love to be able to read it in the original language (another one of my goals is to learn Japanese).