Just a couple of minor details, stemming from chat.
        First, I have twice given the date for Tale of Genji as 1200.
Slipped a digit, correct date is 1020.  Let's see, the two early warning
signs of old age...the second one is memory loss, the first...darn it, I
just can't remember.
        Someone asked me if Genji was written in Kanji or Kana.  It, and all
the other great literature of the period was written in vernacular Japanese,
in Hiragana, by women; western scholarly opinion being that the men were too
busy trying to write in the T'ang period Chinese in which Japan was
introduced to literacy, and which, by the beginning of the Heian period, was
a dead language.
        Hiragana and Katakana were developed in the early Heian period,
probably by a Buddhist monk.
                
                        Greg M.<matteson@ccnet.com>