A woodblock print from 1852 featuring a scene from The Tale of Genji

The Tale of Genji—what is it? It is a super-long, super-detailed proto-novel, written in Japan in the early years of the eleventh century. It was written by a woman whose personal name is lost but who acquired the nickname “Murasaki” on account of its being the name of the most important female character in the book.

Murasaki means lavender. There’s a Japanese ink, purple of course, named after Nippon’s #1 purple girl —$20 a bottle on Amazon, if you’re into purple ink. (Probably a lot of purple things in Japan are named after Lady Murasaki.)

Now, what do I mean by “super-long.” I mean 1,135 pages in the handy one-volume version of the Arthur Waley translation (originally published in six volumes, 1925–1933), 1,090 pages in Edward Seidensticker’s translation (two volumes, 1976), and I don’t know how many pages in Royall Tyler (2001) and in Dennis Washburn (2016). At any rate, it’s like with Proust: one narrative, a half-dozen novel-sized books.

What’s it about? It’s about the life (especially the erotic life) of a very glamorous, heart-crushing, multi-talented dude: Genji. That’s about two thirds of it. Later, it’s about the next generation: Genji’s son, and these other ones, including a guy whom everyone thinks is his son…

Doesn’t sound all that interesting, right? Oh, but it is! Because of the way the material is handled. The narrator, in fact a court lady who all her life dealt with Genjis and sub-Genjis and all their women and all their children, tells the story with a very modern-seeming strategic restraint. Her characters are selfish and generous, foolish and wise, from one minute to the next, and she simply tells you what they said, thought, and did, without overtly judging them. Now, this approach doesn’t amount to squat, when a narrator is describing beings whose moral status is perfectly clear, but the effect becomes exciting and engrossing for readers the second they find themselves longing to be told what to think.

Read More

Photograph of the Navy Street gang in Brooklyn, New York, used as a prosecution exhibit at trial in 1918. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I grew up on gangster stories. While other kids were hearing about the three little pigs and the old woman who lived in a shoe, my father was telling me about the legends of his New York childhood—Pittsburgh Phil Strauss and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, the visionary who put craps up on a table. “The lesson here,” my father said softly as I lay in bed, “is that it was the same game, just played on a different level.”

For a kid in the suburbs, these stories were more than stories—they were redbrick stoops, air shafts crossed by clotheslines, alleys, candy stores and subterranean club rooms, apartment houses that, compared to my atomized world of detached single-family living, seemed like paradise—coastal Brooklyn, where the fog bathes everything in a ghostly light and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge vanishes halfway across, like a ladder with its top in the clouds.

As soon as I was old enough, I moved to New York. I said I was looking for a job, but really I had come in search of the truth behind my father’s stories. This became my career. Parents: be careful what you tell your children at night. I explored the parts of the city where I knew the old-time gangsters had operated. Little Italy and the Lower East Side, East New York and Brownsville, the piers that had been the heart of the old Fourth Ward. I was consumed by New York history—not the story of marble buildings and glad-handing mayors but the alternate story that ran parallel and beneath: the story of the underworld, its heroes and stool pigeons, founders and visionaries. As my father said, “The same game, just played on a different level.” Read More

Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, 1775. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

“We see with other eyes, we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts than those we formerly used,” wrote Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man. One of the most persuasive spokesmen for American independence, he championed the clearing away of British “cobwebs, poison and dust” from American society. American independence, he argued, could never be complete without that.

Many Americans thought the same way: that apart from economic stability and success, what they needed almost more than anything else after political independence was intellectual and cultural independence, free from the stifling influence of British arts, letters, and manners. They resented their cultural subservience, which had not disappeared with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Yet for more than a century after the Revolution, the majority of literate and cultured Americans did not want to turn their backs on British culture, “their ancient heritage”—especially its literature and the historical traditions of its language. About seventy long years after Paine’s statement, the popular English novelist Anthony Trollope elegantly expressed this powerful, persistent, and apparently inescapable linkage: “An American will perhaps consider himself to be as little like an Englishman as he is like a Frenchman. But he reads Shakespeare through the medium of his own vernacular, and has to undergo the penance of a foreign tongue before he can understand Molière. He separates himself from England in politics and perhaps in affection; but he cannot separate himself from England in mental culture.” Janus-like, and often in a less fully conscious way, Americans knew that their “mental culture,” whether they liked it or not, was linked to Britain’s, and they had little taste for parting with it.

*

America’s lingering literary and linguistic attachment to England is nowhere so evident as in the nation’s pervasive ambivalence toward Samuel Johnson and his great dictionary, published in 1755, which many call the first major dictionary of the language. He was the great sage of English literature, and a brilliant essayist, moralist, poet, lexicographer, and biographer, the “Colossus of Literature” and “Literary Dictator” of the second half of eighteenth century England, a figure thoroughly synonymous with Englishness. Throughout his career as an author, Johnson advertised his multilayered and complicated dislike of America and Americans. In 1756, the year after he published his famous dictionary, he coined the term “American dialect” to mean “a tract [trace] of corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be exposed.” He had in mind an undisciplined and barbarous uncouthness of speech. With typical hyperbole on the subject of Americans, he once remarked, “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American … rascals—robbers—pirates.” Read More

The main character of the musical The Light in the Piazza is named Clara. She’s blonde. The show is set in the fifties, and she wears gorgeous fit-and-flare dresses. The waists are belted tight and the wide skirts swirl. She’s beautiful. Her tastes are simple—she likes sunlight, hugs, the thought of having a baby one day. Her story goes like this: she and her mother are visiting Italy from North Carolina when they meet a handsome young man named Fabrizio. He and Clara fall in love at first sight. The initial obstacle to their romance is that they don’t speak the same language; the later, and more serious, is that in Clara’s mother’s eyes, Clara is not ready to enter any relationship, as Clara was kicked in the head by a horse at her twelfth birthday party and has remained childlike ever since. But neither of those things matters in the end. Clara’s beauty reflects her essence—her face reveals, at a glance, her pure heart and innocent spirit. What unites the American girl and Italian boy isn’t a shared culture or IQ, but the quality they sing out in their love duet: “You are good, you are good, you are good …”

I watched them sing to each other in a Manhattan theater when I was seventeen years old. I’d taken the bus in from New Jersey to see the show. Four rows from the stage, I sat alone, dressed in black, my head shaved, and cried. Clara and Fabrizio wrapped their arms around each other. It was so romantic—it felt unattainable. My seat wasn’t farther than twenty feet from Clara’s T-strap shoes, yet we seemed to exist in different worlds.

There, I thought, is the woman I will never be.

Read More