All words connected with Buddhism were taboo. Thus Buddha himself was called ‘The Centre’; Buddhist scriptures were called ‘stained paper’; a pagoda, ‘araragi’ (meaning unknown); a temple, ‘a tile-covered place’; a priest (ironically), ‘hair-long’; a nun, ‘female hair-long’; fasting, ‘partial victuals.’

To both Virgins was attached an important retinue of male officials. These were appointed by the Emperor and no doubt acted as his agents and informers in the districts of Ise and Kamo.

Probably the Ise Virgin was a very ancient institution which later proved useful for political ends. The Virgin of Kamo, who does not appear on the scene till the ninth century, was presumably instituted simply as a means of spreading Court influence.

[1] 92 b.c. according to the usual chronology, which is however purely fictitious.

Transcriber’s Notes.

Text notes:

  1. Footnotes have been renumbered and placed at the end of each chapter.
  2. The bastard-title page prior to the main title page and the half-title page preceding the main text have both been omitted. They contained the words “THE TALE OF GENJI”.
  3. For the HTML version, page numbers of the original printed text are displayed within braces to the side of the text.
  4. The original landscape orientation of the genealogical tables has been changed to a portrait orientation by the transcriber in order to provide a better view for eReaders. The Inkscape program was used to produce a SVG image that was then converted to a PNG image. The image is placed in the public domain.
  5. In order to facilitate word wrapping, ellipses in the middle of a sentence have been replaced with a group of three periods. This group has a leading and, unless a comma is present, trailing blank space added. Ellipses at the end of a sentence do not have a leading blank space, but closing punctuation has been added if needed.
  6. Except as mentioned above and in the Change List that follows, every effort has been made to replicate this first-edition text as faithfully as possible, including non-standard punctuation, inconsistently hyphenated words, and other inconsistencies.

Change List: