Genji

I will read The Tales fo Genji one day. A beautiful bind addition has been on my bookshelves for years.

I did start, but you are reading two books at once with all the notes next to it. And that takes a lot. The story (stories) is so gorgeous though. I am in love with 11th centry Japanse literature.

Did you know that it were only female writers at that time? The reason is that women were not aloud to use the official language of the high court: Chinese. Thus they wrote in Japanese, their day to day language. These pillow books, as they were called, were very popular. That was the birth of Japanese literature, because before that nobody had used Japanse for literature.