The Tale of Genji is very old and very new, a novel about love and society that also, along with Proust's masterpiece, is one of the world's great representations of the passage of human time. It immerses us deeply in a strange and distant culture, whose graceful decadence initially seems light years away from the haste and thirst for progress of modern Japan. But 21st-century Japan shares the same sense of fecund decay as Genji's Heian period - in both eras, society has become complex, gaudy but, finally, ennui-inducing. Now, as then, it is more rewarding to scrutinize the smallest signs of every human interaction rather than engage in the tawdry world outside the concubine's boudoir - or love hotel's rumpus room.

We share the most secret thoughts and longings of The Tale of Genji's characters, as if we were reading a modern psychological novel, and yet these same people use a language (and belong to a culture) that is inaccessible to native speakers today. There are at least six translations into modern Japanese, as well as two notable previous renderings (by Arthur Waley and Edward Seidensticker) into English, Royall Tyler's new translation is a genuine labour of love, and makes a special virtue of attending to a certain ceremonial indirectness in the way the characters address one another. The great temptation for a translator is to say the unsaid things, and Tyler never gives in to it.

Genji was written a thousand years ago and the name of its author has not come down to us. (It is attributed to Murasaki Shikibu. Murasaki is the name given to a charming character in the book, later attached to the writer as a joke or compliment that stuck. Shikibu is the name of an office the character's father once held). The English-language equivalent for the general linguistic distance would be something like Beowulf, recently translated by Seamus Heaney, but the very comparison also points up the difference. The Tale of Genji depicts no guttural warriors and marauding dragons, but only the eternity of desire and the fading of youth. When characters wish to express their deepest thoughts, they exchange poems, paying consummate attention to every detail of presentation, calligraphy, colour of paper and ink. Once we understand how someone could fall in or out of love because of another person's handwriting (or singing or dancing), we are all set for the long, slow delights of this wonderful novel.

Our hero for the first 40 chapters is Genji himself, the son of one of the Emperor's intimates. He is handsome and graceful and charming, and irresistible to women. He is also unable to resist his own fancies - appetites would be too crude a word for them, although he does manage to get the Emperor's favourite consort pregnant. This is not good news even in a polygamous world. Early on, the narrator wonders whether she should be telling us all about Genji's naughty doings. "No doubt," she solicits, "I must now beg everyone's indulgence for my effrontery in painting so wicked a portrait of him."

A good example of the method of the novel is the death of a young woman possessed by a spirit. Genji has taken her away to a dismal old house, hoping to be far from the public eye. They sleep, and he dreams of one of his jealous mistresses. Then he wakes and sees the spirit of this other woman at his new partner's pillow. He is terrified, and with good reason, because his new partner is dead. What kind of magic is this? The jealous mistress is still alive, and doesn't at this stage even know of her new rival's existence. The young woman is killed, it seems, by a sort of telepathic transfer - by the guilt in Genji's dream. The sheer glamour of life in this world is constantly shadowed by forces that could take it all away-forces inside and outside the world.

But the huge attraction of the book is the chance to live the lives of these strange and subtle people in such detail and for so long. Do we know them by the end? Thanks in part to this latest translation, we do-as well as we know ourselves.

1.Q. What does the author refer to as 'fecund decay' in the passage?