Reading The Tale of Genji

Thomas Harper is retired from the Centre for Japanese and Korean Studies at Leiden University. He is the translator of In Praise of Shadows and other essays by Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, and the author of a number of scholarly articles on the reception of The Tale of Genji.

Haruo Shirane, Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at Columbia University, is the author and editor of numerous books on Japanese literature, including, most recently, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts; Envisioning The Tale of Genji: Media, Gender, and Cultural Production; Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600; Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900; Classical Japanese: A Grammar; Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho; and A Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of The Tale of Genji.