Review: The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

 This big ass classic took up most of my reading in the month of September and I am mad about it. I originally got this book from the library for my daughter because she was doing a history project on Ancient Japan and one of her facts was that this book is the first fiction novel written by a woman. 

Sadly my library only had the unabridged version which is over 1000 pages. The unabridged version that I read was by translator Edward Seidensticker and it had no audiobook. Other translated works of the abridged version does and that hurt. When I read really big books, I read along with the audiobook. 

This story is about a guy named Genji who had affairs with lots of women and was the son of the Japanese emperor and one of his concubines who died because the other concubines hated her because she was liked the best. This book is just one big repetitive story about the men having multiple women in their homes and raping them and the women staying behind screens and the changing of the seasons.

There are also alot of children born to others and keeping it quiet and stealing children and when the men die, basically the women becoming nuns. 

I hated every minute of this. There were times when I generally got interested in some chapters and then it just went back to it's same bullshit.