Jap Lothario II

THE SACRED TREE -- Lady Murasaki -- Translated by Arthur Waley -- Houghton, Mifflin ($3.50). "Being a continuation," continues the title, "of The Tale of Genji," of which multivolumed novel of 11th Century Nippon (TIME, Aug. 3) a third part will shortly appear. Prince Genji, son of an imperial concubine, sustains the family's amative tradition with graceful zest and much discreet slippering through his father's seraglios and the chambers of ladies, married and otherwise, among the plebs. In this volume he survives an exile inflicted upon him by his mother's chief rival, for his courtesies to her younger and fairer sister, coming back to build wings on the palace to shelter his three chief attachments. His ever-delicate actions and long, exceedingly elevated conversations, set down like tracery on rice-paper by Lady Murasaki long, long ago, are anglicized with great felicity by scholarly Translator Waley.

Only three pieces of Japanese fiction earlier than Lady Murasaki's survive. Hers, written about 1000 A. D., is remarkable for the introduction of character interest, real invention and "a beauty of actual diction unsurpassed by any long novel in the world." It is known of the author that she served as a lady in waiting in a family that possessed a copy of the so-called Gossamer Diary, a long, romantic account of private joys and sorrows written by a mistress whose lord preserved it after her death. This diary was doubtless the structural model for Genji. Publication as we know it was unknown in 1000 A. D., even in Japan. The earliest Genji texts are a series of handwritten rolls prepared for great families; the first printed edition dates to 1650, of which the British Museum has a copy. Numerous succeeding editions have appeared, for Genji occupies a place among Japanese classics not unlike Chaucer's place in English.