The hardcover edition is two volumes, chapters 1-33 and 34-54. This seems like a natural point to pause. I finished the first volume and am taking a break to read some other books.
Thoughts so far:
- It starts off as a soap opera and basically continues as one, though the subject matter matures as Genji does.
- It took about ten chapters to finally internalize the titles-in-lieu-of-names logic. I still stop to look people up occasionally.
- The mix of titles and a heavy use of pronouns can sometimes be confusing, especially if I pause in the middle of a chapter rather than at a chapter break.
- A novel usually has scene transitions either explicitly mentioned in the text or annotated with a separator. The Tale of Genji doesn’t do this all and will flit between scenes and people.
- This is the first novel where I actually notice and remember the chapter titles and find them useful as a reference, perhaps because they provide structure and context for the reader-derived names of its characters.
- A couple of these chapters are hilarious. After hundreds of pages of subtle nuance which sometimes requires the use of footnotes to pick apart, when we see characters barge in without grace it’s as surprising to me as it surely is to the other characters in the story.
- Genji is a privileged man behaving badly, albeit in a society that no longer exists. In that sense it’s a familiar story.