The Tale of Genji

The Art of Japanese Life episode 2 – Cities: Dr James Fox explores how the artistic life of three great Japanese cities shaped the country’s attitudes to past and present, east and west, and helped forge the very idea of Japan itself.     Beginning in Kyoto, the country’s capital for almost a thousand years, James reveals how the flowering of classical culture produced many great treasures of Japanese art, including The Tale of Genji, considered to be the first novel ever written. In the city of Edo, where Tokyo now stands, a very different art form emerged, in the […]