The
important thing to understand about the Tale of Genji text is that
it was written in pure Japanese. This was made possible by the development,
sometime in the tenth century, of the phonetic writing system known as
kana.
This analysis shows that kana were actually highly abbreviated forms
of Chinese characters, which were used for their sound rather than their
meaning. Here they are written in such an elegant and cursive way that
it is almost impossible to recognize the original. In this way the Japanese
writing system was liberated from its Chinese origins.