The Tale of Genji
The first novel ever written: a court lady's account of the shining prince Genji, his loves, his exiles, and the generation that inherits his absences. Written at the Heian court around 1010, it invented psychological fiction from nothing, with no model to follow. A thousand years of novels descend from this book, and its melancholy sense that beauty and loss arrive together has never been improved on.
Nobody has a name. Characters go by court titles that change as they are promoted, several people hold the same title across the book, and readers with 400-plus figures to track find them “frustratingly impossible to keep track of them” without the glossary and the family tree. Set the book down for a few days and you are “totally and utterly at sea in all this.” Genji takes a young girl into his household to raise as his future wife, and readers call that arc “unbearably creepy” whatever the period allowed. In Tyler’s translation “the scholarship gets in the way of the story telling.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
