BA. Conrad Aiken

13. ‘Flower of Old Japan’. Review of Tale of Genji (D26c), by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Arthur Waley. Bookman (New York) 68 (December 1928): 477-79.

Aiken’s praise for Genji is uncharacteristically fulsome. The work ‘takes a place with the great “stories” of the world’ and ‘compels’ the reader to ‘accept the Japan of the year 1000 as . . . one of the high water marks of human civilization’. Genji himself is among ‘the great figures given to the world by the art of letters’. Reprinted in A Reviewer’s ABC: Collected Criticism of Conrad Aiken from 1916 to the Present (New York: Meridian, 1958) and Collected Criticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1968).