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“... translation by the American academic, Professor Seidensticker, conveys little of the flavour of Murasaki’s style, this text has none of the omissions and embroideries of the beautiful Arthur Waley version completed in the inter-war years. The various psychological dramas that evolve among these self-indulgent courtiers of Japan a thousand years ago can ...”

“... Siamese twins, I suppose, need not bother to apply. It is harder to divine why this translation of Murasaki’s Diary renders one passage by the words: ‘This is not to say that her women are always so genteel; if they forget themselves they can come out with the most indiscrete verses.’ Perhaps, in becoming conversant with Japanese to a degree he makes ...”

“... of rice and makes miso soup, his mind is filled with images from the diaries of the courtesan Murasaki Shikibu and her famous Tale of Genji. But while in his native language Ito can quote six hundred haiku, he is adrift in English, forced to speak in a sort of baby-talk. In Japan, he was a cultured man whose exact hand movements were ‘likened to ...”

“... must have had something to do with the way its language felt close to people’s actual lives. Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, the other main work of Heian literature still read today, was also written in Japanese.Ivanova gives a detailed account of the way Shonagon was represented in the centuries after her death. In the Kamakura-Muromachi ...”