SUMMARY OF VOLUME ONE
GENJI is an illegitimate son of the Emperor; his mother dies soon after his birth. At the age of twelve he is affianced to Lady Aoi, the daughter of the Minister of the Left; but she is older than he is, and looks down upon him as a mere schoolboy. Years go by and they are still upon indifferent terms. Meanwhile Genji falls in love with Lady Rokujō, a widow eight years older than himself. She is passionately jealous of his wife (whom, however, Genji hardly ever sees) and relations with her become very difficult. Genji turns for consolation to Utsusemi, wife of a provincial governor: to Yūgao, a discarded mistress of his great friend Tō no Chūjō: to the fantastic Lady Suyetsumuhana, the ‘lady with the red nose.’ Utsusemi is carried away to the provinces by her husband; Yūgao dies, withered by the virulence of Rokujō’s jealousy. Meanwhile Genji manages to establish better terms with his wife, Aoi, only to lose her through the operation of the same baleful force that had destroyed Yūgao. Since his childhood Genji has had a passionate admiration for Lady Fujitsubo, his father’s second wife and therefore his own stepmother. He has a son by her which is believed by the world to be the Emperor’s child. Had this misdemeanour became known, Genji’s enemies, led by Lady Kōkiden who had been his mother’s rival, would have had an ample pretext for driving him away from Court. As it is, the actual cause of Genji’s banishment (recounted in Vol. II) is his intrigue with Oborozukiyo, a much younger sister of his enemy, Lady Kōkiden.
At the end of Vol. I, Genji marries, en secondes noces, Lady Murasaki, a niece of Fujitsubo, whom he had some years before taken into his house and adopted.