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podcasts. Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 270, a brief and fleeting dream.

Welcome back, it's 2019, and we're going to start things off with a pair of stories that honestly I probably should have done some time like five years ago.

You see, once, just about five years ago, I wrote a couple of

lines about a classic of Japanese literature, in which I referred to the tale of Genji,

one of the most famous written works in Japanese history, and, depending on whose definition

you subscribe to, possibly the first novel ever written, as the twilight of Japanese history.

And for the record, I do stand by that. I've read bits of Genji, though never the whole

thing, and I don't particularly like it personally. I think it's pretty weird, honestly,

for reasons we'll talk about in a bit. But, regardless of my personal literary

...