Murasaki Shikibu begins her novel with the most famous opening line in Japanese literature, and with a situation that is, once one notices it, a quiet piece of moral engineering. An emperor — the reign is deliberately unspecified — loves a consort. She is a lovely woman of minor aristocratic family. She is not his empress. The empress and the higher consorts of the first rank hate her. They harass her. They leave bad smells and broken objects on the paths she must walk to come to him at night. They work on the emperor's mother to separate him from her. The woman herself is fragile, over-refined, not equipped for political warfare. She bears the emperor a son of astonishing beauty and intelligence. She then dies, worn out, when the boy is three.

The boy is given no rank. His mother's family is too obscure to make him a prince in the usual sense; his father the emperor, knowing that a crown prince of his blood but without backers would be torn apart in a succession fight, declines to name him heir. The boy is given, instead, the surname Genji. That is: he is made a commoner. He will never be emperor. He will live at court, the emperor's beloved son, with permission to wear every silk his half-brothers wear, but without any of the protection of princely rank. He will be brilliant and exposed.

This is the situation from which the longest novel in the world begins. Murasaki is, already in her first chapter, doing something that no European novel of her century was yet capable of. She is showing that a man's personality, and his whole later life — the love affairs, the exiles, the triumph, the quiet terror of old age — can be read back to the four pavilions of a palace and the three or four women who lived in them in the years before he was born. Genji will love women for the rest of his life. He will never quite love any of them the way he misses his mother. He will, with a persistence that the novel never quite forgives him for, try to reconstruct her from other people's faces.

The first chapter of Genji is short. It reads like a preface. But it is the whole book in miniature. A court; a love; a faction; a death; a child who will not recover from any of it. The rest of the novel — a thousand pages, fifty-four chapters, three generations — is the long gentle unfolding of what it cost a small boy to be left, at three, without the one person who had lit his corner of the palace.

Genji is seventeen. He is already, to the court, the most talked-about young man of his generation. He is married, formally and unhappily, to a higher-ranking princess named Aoi, who is four years older than him and cold to him. He has already begun the long string of affairs that will be the surface story of the next thirty chapters. He is on his way, one summer evening, to visit the woman he has been sleeping with — she is of the older generation, a former consort of the emperor — when his carriage pauses in a narrow street of the shitamachi, the commoners' quarter, because his old nurse lives nearby and is dying and he has stopped to pay his respects.

Next to the nurse's house is a smaller house with a high wooden fence. On the fence grows a gourd-vine. A large pale flower is open on it in the early evening. Genji, looking at it, asks idly who lives there. A child is sent with a folded fan, on which a poem has been written in a woman's hand, to give to him. The poem is in this scene's epigraph. The handwriting is elegant, educated. Genji — who can never resist a mystery, and can never leave a well-written poem unanswered — writes a poem back on the same fan and sends the child back with it.

This is how Genji meets the woman called Yūgao, the Evening Face, after the flower. She is a few years older than him. She is not of his class. She lives in this little house with one serving-woman and has no family protection. Genji, who for once in his early life is tired of court, begins to slip out to her by night. She is unlike the court ladies he knows. She is unfrightened. She is warm. She does not make him speak in poems all the time. He adores her, briefly and intensely, in the way only a very young man can adore a woman who has asked nothing of him.

He takes her, one autumn night, to an abandoned house outside the city — a folly of a house, empty in years, which he has wanted to see. They lie down together. In the small hours Genji wakes to see a woman standing at the foot of the bed. The woman is beautiful and furious. She reaches toward the sleeping Yūgao. Genji, half-awake, shouts. Yūgao is cold in his arms. His own serving-people find him in panic at dawn with a dead young woman beside him.

The court will explain it as a possession by the living spirit of Genji's older lover — the consort he had been on his way to visit the first evening, and whom he has been, for weeks, neglecting. The woman's jealousy, the courtiers will say, has left her sleeping body and crossed the city on its own and killed her rival. Whether the modern reader chooses to read this as supernatural or psychological, Murasaki leaves exactly open.

Yūgao is buried in a mountain temple. Genji, still only seventeen, is ill for weeks. The chapter is the novel's first portrait of its central and dreadful lesson. The women who love Genji begin, from here on, to die of loving him.

The most famous scene in the novel, and the most morally complicated. Genji, now eighteen, is ill. He has come to a small mountain temple for a healing retreat. While he is there, he glances through a gap in a hedge at a lower pavilion and sees a child — a ten-year-old girl — crying because her sparrow, which she had caged, has been let out by a careless nurse.

Genji stares. She is a beautiful child, and what makes him unable to stop looking is that her face, at this age, is already unmistakably the face of his stepmother — the lady Fujitsubo, the woman his father the emperor married a few years after Genji's mother died, the woman Genji himself has, for the last three years, been secretly and incestuously in love with. Fujitsubo chose the palace over him. He has not forgiven her and has not forgotten her. And here, in a temple garden, is a ten-year-old girl who looks like her younger self.

He inquires. The child is Fujitsubo's niece. Her mother is dead. Her grandmother, who is raising her, is also frail and will not live much longer. The child's father, a prince, has shown no interest in her. Genji, with the strange certainty he brings to every one of his decisions, asks if he may adopt her. He is refused politely. He is persistent. The grandmother dies. The child is left essentially unprotected. Genji, on an impulse that is also a plan, takes the child by night out of her grandmother's house and brings her to his own. He will call her Murasaki, from the plant that dyes cloth the same purple as her aunt's chosen colour. She is the novel's heroine. The novel's author has taken her own name from her.

He raises Murasaki in his house for the next four years. He does, by every standard available to us, the good version of this. He teaches her calligraphy, painting, the koto. He lets her keep her pet sparrows. He does not sleep with her. He does not rush her. He waits, in the peculiar sense in which the Heian court understood such things, for her to be old enough to be married. When she is fourteen he marries her, in a ceremony that she has not understood is a ceremony until after it has occurred, and that leaves her silent with him for some days. He is distressed by her distress. He courts her, slowly. She comes to love him. She becomes, over the next twenty-five years of the novel, the woman he loves more than any other and the one he is most afraid to lose.

Murasaki the novelist gives no moral lecture on this. She gives us, in very small brushstrokes, exactly what Genji did. She gives us Murasaki's own later silences. She gives us the passage, decades later, when the older Murasaki — ill, tired of him, having watched him marry younger women while swearing she was his only love — asks to take religious vows, and is refused. The novel does not accuse Genji. It does not excuse him. It lets the record stand.

Genji is twenty-two. He has a wife and a lover and a ward and a stepmother he cannot forget. The wife is Aoi, the cold older princess to whom he was married at twelve. The lover is the Rokujō lady, a former crown-princess consort, seven years his senior, intensely proud, intensely literary, and — though she herself does not fully know this — subject to her own living spirit leaving her body at night to kill her rivals.

There is a great festival. The streets of the capital fill with aristocratic carriages competing for the best viewing spot. Aoi, now pregnant with Genji's first child, drives out with a retinue. The Rokujō lady, who has come incognito and in a simpler carriage, arrives first. Aoi's retainers — not knowing whose carriage they are shoving, or knowing but not caring — push Rokujō's carriage aside and damage it and break its wheel-shaft. The Rokujō lady, pretending it has not happened, stays. She watches Genji ride by in the procession without looking at her carriage. He has not recognized her in the lesser vehicle. He is looking instead toward his wife's carriage, which is magnificent. Rokujō goes home.

She cannot sleep. She cannot eat. She is being eaten by a humiliation that her upbringing does not permit her to express. Her servants begin to notice that she is sometimes — in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night — absent from her body. She lies in bed with her eyes open, breathing, but unreachable. A smell of sesame-seed oil, the smell burnt in the shrines to expel spirits, clings to her robes when she wakes.

At the same time, across the city, Aoi goes into the early stages of a difficult labour. She is attacked by some thing, some unseen presence. The priests are called. They chant. The possession is fierce. Aoi, in one of the most frightening scenes in the novel, suddenly speaks with a voice that is not her own — a woman's voice, cultivated and bitter, the voice of Rokujō — saying, through her, that she has been humiliated and will not bear it. Aoi recovers slightly. She bears a son. Two weeks later she is dead.

Genji grieves in the particular way Genji always grieves — belatedly, sincerely, and in prose of unearthly beauty. He has understood that Rokujō, his lover, has in some sense killed his wife. He does not accuse her. He begins, quietly, to avoid her. Rokujō, who knows that he knows, and who cannot live with having done it, will shortly leave the capital for the shrine of Ise, and, eventually, for a religious life from which she will not return.

The novel is training us, chapter by chapter, in the Heian reading of emotion. A feeling not admitted — a resentment smothered by decorum, a rage that cannot be spoken because you are a high-born woman who has been pushed off a sightline — is not thereby gone. It becomes something else. It becomes a wandering spirit. It becomes a death.

Genji has had an affair with Oborozukiyo, a sister of the new empress. The affair has been discovered. The new emperor is his half-brother and no friend. Genji, rather than stay in the capital to be stripped of rank or exiled by decree, does the aristocratically correct thing: he goes into self-imposed exile at the fishing village of Suma on the coast.

Suma is not far — a day's journey. But it might as well be another country. There are no court ladies. There are no palaces. There are fishermen. There are salt-burners. There is the sea. Genji takes a few loyal servants. He leaves Murasaki behind in the capital, nearly alone, charged with running the household. He writes her letters that he suspects are being read. He reads hers. He keeps a garden. He plays the kin. He paints. He receives, at night, the smoke of the salt-fires on the beach.

The Suma chapter is the emotional centre of the novel's first half. It is the longest sustained passage of pure lyric that Murasaki ever wrote. The prose thins. The plot, for forty pages, stops. A man sits by the sea in autumn and writes poems. The sea answers. A storm comes — Murasaki gives us a great coastal storm, lightning, the wooden shutters torn off, the servants terrified — and in the middle of the storm Genji dreams that his dead father the old emperor has come to him and told him it is time to go home.

He is invited, soon after, by the governor of Akashi — a minor provincial lord — to move a short distance along the coast to his house. The governor's daughter, the Akashi lady, is given to him there. She will bear his only daughter, a child who will grow up to become empress, and whose rise will, through a route Genji himself cannot yet see, be the thing that restores him to the capital in triumph.

The suma chapter is loved, by readers who read it in Japanese, for a reason that survives in translation only in the outline. Murasaki writes homesickness with a restraint that no European literature of her century possessed. There is no raging against fate. There is no self-pity in the modern sense. There is a man, three days' ride from his city, watching the light on the water and noting, with exact care, that the moon tonight over this beach is the same moon his wife is now looking at from their house, and that one piece of kindness of this particular kind of night is precisely that. The sea and the court share a moon. The exile is not complete. He is a little less alone than the coastline, at first sight, suggested.

Thirty years have passed. Genji is fifty-two. He is at the peak of his influence. He is father of the empress. He is grandfather of the heir. He has his own enormous residence, the Rokujō mansion, in which he keeps the several great women of his life in four separate quarters. Murasaki — the child he adopted at ten, the woman he has loved more than any other for forty years — is now fifty-one. She is dying.

She has been dying for years, slowly. She was seriously ill some chapters back. She has never really recovered. She has been, for several years, asking Genji to allow her to take holy orders and retire to a religious house. He has refused. He has said he cannot bear it. He has said she must stay. She has complied.

There is a small scene. Genji, the empress, and Murasaki are all together on a terrace in early autumn. The garden is at its most beautiful. Murasaki, who has been doing calligraphy on a folded leaf of paper, writes a thirty-one-syllable poem and passes it to Genji. The poem is the one in this scene's epigraph. It is about dew on a spray of bush-clover. Dew lasts only a moment; the wind is already moving toward it. Any moment now the dew will be gone.

Genji reads the poem. He tries to answer. His answer is weaker than the poem he has been given. He knows it is weaker. The empress, trying to rescue the moment, answers on his behalf. Murasaki accepts both poems. She is very tired. She goes back to her rooms.

The next morning she is dead. Genji — who for forty years has had one woman at the exact centre of his life and who has, for forty years, refused to admit to her how central — is, in the passage that follows, the most broken Heian aristocrat we ever meet on a page. He does not weep in the court way. He cannot write poems. He asks that her letters be burned. He asks that her robes be given to the temple. He cuts off his own hair with his own hands, privately, and lets it fall where he sits. He does not announce that he is taking orders. He does not quite take them. He drifts.

The chapter is the hinge of the whole book. Everything Murasaki Shikibu wants us to understand about her hero is here in compressed form. He has had every woman he wanted. He has loved each of them and ceased to love each of them and loved the next. He has been beautiful and charming and kind on the surface of his life for fifty-two years. And he has, by the novel's careful patient arithmetic, failed his one true wife in the one quiet way that matters most: he did not let her become a nun when she asked. He held her, out of his own loneliness, in a life she was ready to leave. The novel does not say this in a sentence. It lets the dew poem say it.

The year after Murasaki's death Genji spends alone in her rooms, sorting her things. This chapter, Maboroshi — Phantom — is the quietest in the novel. He reads her old letters. He reads his own old letters to her. He writes a few poems. He sees the plum tree come into blossom and gives it a long look and goes inside. He sees the cherry blossoms and gives them a long look and goes inside. A summer comes and goes. An autumn. The empress visits. Genji barely speaks. He takes a great quantity of rice to the local temple. He writes the cyclical Buddhist prayers. At New Year's he goes to his own shrine for the last time.

And then Murasaki Shikibu does the most astonishing thing in the book. The next chapter in every manuscript of the Tale of Genji is called Kumogakure — Vanished in the Clouds. It has no text. There is only a title. A blank piece of paper, with a title on it. The reader turns the page and finds the next chapter, which begins: It has been eight years since the great lord's death. The story has moved on to his son and grandson. Genji is no longer in the world.

Murasaki Shikibu has refused to describe his death. She has given us, for fifty-three chapters, the most completely realized interior life of any man in classical literature, and at the moment of his death she turns away. She will not follow him down the mountain road. She will not tell us what the priest said. She will not tell us whether he took final vows. She gives us a two-word title and a blank page.

The last eleven chapters of the novel — known by Japanese readers as Uji Jūjō, the Uji ten — are concerned with Genji's son Kaoru and his grandson Niou, and with three daughters of a minor prince at the village of Uji. They are darker than the earlier chapters. They are lonelier. There are no great brilliant court parties. There are mists and rivers and temples. A young woman throws herself into a river; another is carried away by a religious man to live out her life in a hermitage without ever telling her family she is alive. The book ends, famously, mid-sentence, with Kaoru trying to bring this last woman back to the world and being refused.

Genji himself, for the last eleven chapters, is a story told by other people. He is remembered. He is not there. Murasaki, a thousand years before the modern novel, had understood that one way to let a reader feel a man's absence fully is to write a final eleven chapters in which he is absent. Kumogakure — Vanished in the Clouds — is the blank page on which the whole weight of the novel comes to rest. It is the oldest example, in world literature, of a writer trusting a reader with silence.