The Tale of Genji

by Murasaki Shikibu

accom.

accomplishments (?)

He peered past the curtain at Her Highness and saw an unusually small, pretty figure who seemed to be all clothes. She still lacked any womanly appeal, but she offered instead the charming grace of new willow fronds halfway through the second month, frail enough to tangle in the breeze from a warbler's wing.

It was that other one who had always been far away, beyond his reach; and he sighed with yearning to make her at least understand the strength of his perfectly respectable feeling for her. He controlled himself very well, though, and he did nothing rash or ill considered.

Women are trifling creatures on the whole, good only for passing pleasures, but they arouse strong feelings. I suppose that that is why their sin is so profound. Parents feel deep concern for all their children, but a son is much less trouble. A daughter is a daughter, 10 and she is likely to be a great worry even when one must acknowledge how little she is worth.”

to done,

But no, she did not trust these ancient nuns with their distressingly youthful airs and their fashionable pretensions to broken-backed verse.

Bai Juyi (772–846) told the story in a long poem, “The Song of Unending Sorrow”

Ukishima

Naha

Tale of the Hollow Tree,

Genii,

karmic impediments gōshō—The Buddhist term for all karmic factors that impede progress toward enlightenment; chief among them are greed, anger, and stupidity.

G.O.P.

Urashima, Master Urashima no Ko—A fisherman who wandered in his boat to the island of the Immortals and married a beautiful maiden there. Three years later he returned, homesick, to his village, carrying a box that his wife had given him with the warning never to open it. Three hundred years had passed, and everything had changed. In despair he opened the box. His wife's wraith floated out of it and into the sky, and in that instant he aged three hundred years. The earliest occurrence of the story is among the surviving fragments of an early-eighth-century work (Tango fudoki).