Motley Kamuka

I started reading The Splendor of Longing in the Tale of Genji  (1987) by Norma Field. It's academic, footnoted. I looked up Norma Field , she was born in Japan to an American father and Japanese mother. At age 10 she went to the American school in Tokyo and after graduating high school, she moved to America. After a series of degrees she ends up teaching at the University of Chicago , from which she is retired from. She is the same age as my mother, who was also born in Japan, during the occupation to 2 Americans. Field won the American Book Award in 1992 for  In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century's End. Links: YouTube  Field talks about America's ignorance about the impact of the atomic remedy.  I'm listening to The Tale of Genji on  The History of Literature . It's a general introduction.

Tales of Genji is seen as an early modern novel in world history. Not much is known about Murasaki Shikibu . The book was written in Japanese between about 1000 and 1012 in the Heian Period of Japanese history. I'm taking a class in translation with Hidenori Jinno on EdX . It's a fairly short course that took me several days. I was expecting to complete a section but I finished the whole things. The EdX course is using the more recent (2001) Tyler text, and I have a copy of the 1976 Seidensticker translation. Yet another translation has come out in 2015. The Librivox one is of course even older.  My book is over a thousand pages, and includes artwork by Yamamoto Shunsho .  The Tale of Genji has 54 chapters. 1-33 are a rise in power of Genji chapters. 34-41 Genji's power is in decline. 42-54 are Genji's descendents Niou and Kaoru. 45-54 make a block, and 42, 43 and 44 are transition chapters. I can't imagine comparing the three versions, or the ones before it. It ...