cise manner of the Ise Monogatari. But, as Motoöri points out, a brief style may be a bad one, and lengthy sentences full of detail may best fit the subject. Murasaki no Shikibu's fulness is not prolixity. On close examination it will be found that there is nothing superfluous in the abundant details of her narrative. That is her method, and is essential to the effect she aims at producing.
The Genji is not intrinsically a very difficult work, and no doubt the author's contemporaries found it quite easy to understand. But since then the language, institutions, and manners and customs of Japan have changed so much as greatly to obscure the meaning, not only to European students, but to the Japanese themselves. Piles of commentary by native editors have been accumulated over it, and their interpretations are often so blundering and inadequate that Motoöri found it necessary to devote to its elucidation a critical work[1] in nine volumes, mostly taken up with correcting the errors of his predecessors.
The enormous bulk of the Genji will always remain another obstacle to its just appreciation by European readers. It is in fifty-four books, which in the standard (but not very satisfactory) Kogetsushō edition run to no less than 4234 pages. The genealogical tree alone of the personages which figure in it, comprising several Mikados, a crowd of Princes, Princesses, and Imperial consorts, with a host of courtiers, occupies eighty pages.
Japanese critics claim for the Genji that it surpasses anything of the kind in Chinese literature, and even deserves to be ranked with the masterpieces of European fiction. None, however, but an extreme Japanophile
- ↑ The Tama no Ogushi. It was left unfinished at his death.
