I've come back to this huge saga repeatedly over the years, but I never actually have finished it. (I peter out around the time that Genji dies and the story continues with his son.) But it doesn't matter, as this novel is so episodic it can easily be read in installments.
I first read the Arthur Waley translation in the Modern Library edition, and since that time have also read the Seidensticker translation, and more recently I have also read bits of Helen McCullough's combined Tales of the Heike/Tales of Genji volume. I must say that for purely sentimental reasons, I prefer Waley, though it's said his version is the least accurate. To my mind, however, it is the most poetic.


Anyone hoping to gain insight into the Japanese sense of aesthetics would do well to read just a few portions of this book, but I'm willing to bet that many will be drawn in as I was into Murasaki's Heian world and the romance of Genji.