At this point the reader is only two-thirds of the way through the book, which runs to 1,200 pages in its most recent English translation and boasts a cast of more than 400. The story resumes with new heroes. Two young men (the purported son and grandson of Genji) are wooing a trio of sisters. One of them succumbs to marriage, but of the other two sisters, one starves herself to death and the other chooses to become a nun rather than fall into male hands. Love, it turns out, is not innocent hanky-panky, but something noxious, corrosive-even deadly.

Sheer scale is not all that is forbidding about the book. Japanese prose was still in its infancy in Murasaki's day, so her syntax can be opaque. Sentences lack subjects, direct speech is often unattributed and, most alarmingly, the characters change names according to their rank or circumstances. Genji, for instance, is variously referred to as the captain, the consultant, the commander, the grand counsellor, the palace minister, the chancellor and the honorary retired emperor.

The subject matter is also challenging. There is polygamy, bisexuality (when one young woman rebuffs his advances, Genji consoles himself with her younger brother who turns out to be "no bad substitute for his ungracious sister") and something very close to incest. Genji is attracted to Fujitsubo, one of his father's consorts, because of her resemblance to his dead mother. Even though she is, in effect, his stepmother, he fathers a child with her.

Murasaki's language was already archaic and impenetrable a century after it was written, so the Japanese have been reading annotated, abridged, simplified and illustrated versions of the book since as early as the 12th century. The same holds true today. In the last century, four Japanese writers produced a total of seven updated versions of the book. The most recent of these was by Jakucho Setouchi, a female novelist whose own work deals with issues of women's independence. Setouchi's "Genji" has sold more than 3m copies since it was published in December 1996, a success that Kodansha, the publisher, attributes to the author's empathy with the women in the tale and her colloquial writing. Canny marketing also played a part, with Kodansha organising lectures and discussion groups all over the country at the time of the launch.

... contd.