and dies. Her death is related with much pathos. Genji grows up to be a handsome and accomplished youth of a very susceptible disposition, and his history is mainly an account of his numerous love affairs, and of his ultimate union with Murasaki, a heroine in all respects worthy of him. It continues the story up to his death at the age of fifty-one. The last ten books, which relate chiefly to one of Genji's sons, are by some considered a separate work.
The style of the Genji has been called ornate. The writer who applied this epithet to it was probably thinking of the courtly honorifics with which it is in many places burdened. But there is much excuse for this. The Genji is a novel of aristocratic life. Most of the characters are personages of rank, in describing whose sayings and actions a courtly style of speech is indispensable. To a Japanese it would be simply shocking to say that a Mikado has breakfast—he augustly deigns to partake of the morning meal, and so on. The European reader finds this irritating and tiresome at first, but he soon gets accustomed to it. In truth, such language is in entire consonance with the elaborate ceremonial, the imposing but cumbrous costumes, and much else of the rather artificial life of the Japanese court of the time. Apart from this the style of the Genji is not more ornate than that, let us say, of Robinson Crusoe, and incomparably less so than that of many Japanese books of later date. It is free from any redundance of descriptive adjectives or profusion of metaphors such as we are accustomed to associate with the word ornate.
Others have objected to the style of the Genji as wanting in brevity. It must be admitted that its long, involved sentences contrast strongly with the direct, con-
