Read it through once

Polygamy in Japan as elsewhere was confined to the upper classes, who alone were able to support the expense of so costly an institution. The actual wife (_kita no kata_, ‘north side’) of a man in Genji’s position had to be of the same social class as the husband, a condition fulfilled by Aoi, but not by Murasaki, who was never strictly speaking a _kita no kata_, but merely a _tai no uye_ (‘lady of the wing’). It will be remembered that Murasaki’s mother was not of noble birth. Falling Flowers, Akashi and the rest were theoretically on the same footing as Murasaki. The number of ladies in an establishment was limited not by law or religion, but by expense and above all (in a case such as that of Genji) by the difficulty of dealing with the emotional situation that arose from large households. Did polygamy create different emotional situations from those to which we are accustomed—if, for example, it were so much taken for granted that jealousy ceased to exist—a novel dealing with a polygamous society would make very little appeal to us. It is because in _Genji_ the re-actions of the characters are precisely the same as ours would be under similar circumstances, that the book holds our attention.