How one book leads to another ...

I admire people who plan their reading, because my own appetite for books so often leads me down random paths.

Last year, for example, I was intrigued by the example of a Unitarian minister who, in an article for the UU World magazine, admitted he handles the proliferation of reading material by saying, "I only read classics." This leaves him out of touch with party conversation, a minor inconvenience.

Concentrating on classics offered some illuminating moments (the astonishing modernity of A Sentimental Education; finding that important scenes in War and Peace happen in places I had recently visited; discovering that Anna Karenina rocks;) and some forgettable ones (I will never make it through Madame Bovary and am not too sure about Moby Dick, either.)

Thank goodness Raymond Chandler counts as a classic, because I love mysteries.

Sometimes this reading plan involves nothing more complicated than finally getting all the way through a book already on hand.

For example, The Tale of Genji, which I bought in a very nice two-volume hardback edition sometime in the 1980s, and read part way (the bookmark is from a small independent bookstore swept away almost 20 years ago.)

A couple of months ago I picked up the first volume and plunged in, finding 11th-century Japan an interesting retreat from the present. Then this article alerted me to a more recent translation, and I abandoned the hardback in favor of a fat, well-annotated paperback. (You must read the footnotes to follow the action.)

Because Heian Japan is so far removed from the modern world (Japanese also read the novel in translation, because their language is about as remote from 11th-century court Japanese as our English is from Beowulf) I departed from the novel for a while in favor of a book about court life in ancient Japan - The World of the Shining Prince, by Ivan Morris. When the library copy turned out to be crumbling, dirty and stained (it was written in 1964) I bought a brand-new paperback edition, with its illuminating introduction by a professor of Japanese literature and culture who was a student of the late Dr. Morris.

So - what IS it about a book that people have been reading for 1,000 years? Morris points out that Genji is about a minute coterie of highly cultured people surrounded by peasants who lived very little better than their animals. Transportation was primitive, and being sent into exile involved going no more than 20 or 30 miles from the seat of government.

The book is often called the first psychological novel, because of its focus on the involved relationships and complicated feelings of a tiny community in which everyone knows everything about everyone else. Murasaki Shikibu, the author, was part of this world, a clever, well-educated observer who wrote about what she knew. And the novel is also about longing, loss, and the impermanence of everything - beauty, love, life itself.

When Arthur Waley's version of the novel appeared in the 1920's, Virginia Woolf was elated to discover a major work by a woman previously unknown in the West. The irony of the novel's long history is that in its own time it was considered an inferior form of literature. Men - emperors and princes - composed imitations of classic Chinese poetry. Women, generally discouraged from studying the dominant Chinese language and culture (although Murasaki, the daughter of a scholar, was allowed to study the language along with her brother) used the developing Japanese script to write "tales" for the amusement of the court.

The poetry faded away. Murasaki's "tale of the shining prince" remains -- along with longing, loss, and the impermanence of everything.