My disappointment is still immeasurable at the fact thereās apparently no fart battles, as depicted in the ancient wall art.
I finished The Tale of Genji and then reread the introduction for closure and summary.
Do the men of this society get any sort of training on how to approach women? Or do they just fail until they get good, like Genji, or give up?
- First third: Introduction to Genji and his wants.
- Second third: Genji in control, doing as he pleases.
- Last third: Genjiās scions mostly failing at the lessons Genji learned but didnāt impart, and one family of sistersā quest to be left the fuck alone.
The last third was quick and enjoyable, because it has an arc, not too many characters, and all the work from the front of the novelāthe society, relationships, courting, acceptable and unacceptable behaviorsāare reapplied to new characters.
Thereās a 19th Century parody.
That is fantastic!
I wonder if, since this is the first novel, gokan works are the first āfan fictionā?
When I went to the Genji exhibit at the Met, they had many fan-works on display.
JUST FUCKING READ NINEFOX GAMBIT BY YOON HA LEE.
ā¦
(Yes this is a fucking complete sentence)
Itās been recommended a few times in different places. Might have to search it out.
15 characters of agreement
If someone does a super cut of every mention of Tale of Genji in meta moments, will it last longer than:
A: the episode about the Tale of Genji?
B: the length of time it takes to read the Tale of Genji?
YOUāRE ONLY 19% OF THE WAY THROUGH THE BOOK??!?!?!
How can you say youāre storming through the book and still not even be a quarter of the way into it? OMG just bail on it already and admit youāre not going to ever finish it. Itās fine! Move on! Itās getting embarrassing saying that everyone should read the first ever novel and then not ever actually read it yourselves. Many more enjoyable books await!
Tale of Genji completion:
We should put bets on when they finish it/bail.
At their current rate my guess is sometime in 2029.
This thread was started 770 days ago. That puts them at .02% completion per day. To finish 81% more of the book, it will take 3,282 more days, finishing on August 13, 2030.
Thatās a Tuesday, so we can expect the episode that Thursday. Adding it to my Google calendar.
Iām amused that someone else also did this calculation.
>>> datetime(2019, 7, 10) + (datetime(2021, 8, 18) - datetime(2019, 7, 10)) / 0.19
datetime.datetime(2030, 8, 13, 15, 9, 28, 421053)
Iām rocketing through it and expect to do the show in September.
Ghosts kill more people than I expected.
Reread my old unabridged copy that I kept from Japanese Lit in undergrad. Itās been so long since I completed it that Iām anticipating this show to jog my memory (which is surprisingly bad for someone who is only 35).
Itās funny hearing you talk about the malaria business, because that was one of the marginalia i had in different sections (we used the translation from I think the 70s so idk what major differences there are between that and what you guys are using).
Thereās also notes I have around mono no aware which iirc probably explains why @SkeleRym said that thereās a feeling of genji sleepwalking his way through life. Itās a very āexperiences for experiencesā sakeā take on the ephemeral.
Anyway, getting through this book last year was a killer so no shade on it taking yāall so long to complete it. I read Castle of Otranto last year as well, which was written mid-18c, before they developed conventions of novels like, yknow, quotation marks and delineation between internal and external statements haha. Not nearly as difficult as some of the stuff in Genji, like the time jumps being unclear, but older unconventional works take a lot longer to process so the time itās taken is understandable.
Canāt wait to see your thoughts on Genji, tho!
It is taking Rym more time to read the Tale of Genji than the entire 15 books in The Wheel of Time.