Anyone who reads books a lot will be reluctant to play the game of picking one as the very best of all books, because, deep down, books don't compete well with one another. Which is better - ‘Now We Are Six', or ‘War and Peace'? That just doesn't work, does it?

But it doesn't stop people from trying. Every year, at least one well-publicised list of the best is produced.

We've had two this year, or rather we've had one and we're well on our way to another.

A couple of months ago, The Guardian published a list of the 100 greatest novels of all time. ‘Don Quixote' came top of that one, followed by ‘Pilgrim's Progress' and ‘Robinson Crusoe'.

The BBC is still in the middle of working on its best novels, which is now down to a short list of 21 books. Unlike the Guardian, whose list was put together by its arts staff, who can be presumed to know at least moderately well what they're talking about, the BBC's list is one of public favourites. I'd say that makes it more or less meaningless - a democratic system might be able to choose well from a field of two or three, but it cannot winnow from an almost unlimited field.

The BBC's list of 21 is remarkably contemporary - ‘Birdsong'Captain Corelli's Mandolin'‘Catcher in the Rye'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire', ‘The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe'… but I suspect the public will choose one of the group with a little more age and weight. ‘Gone with the Wind'? ‘Jane Eyre'? ‘Little Women'? ‘Wuthering Heights'? ‘War and Peace'? That's the group that contains the winner, I think.

What the public is poor at doing, that experts do much better, is to pick books that have a universal appeal - a quality that allows readers of very varied backgrounds and levels of reading skill to draw from the book material that pleases them particularly. A book that has universal appeal works, in other words, at more than just one level.

Is ‘Don Quixote' a romantic novel? A straight comedy? A black comedy? A psychological novel? It has been interpreted as all those things and more. ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire', on the other hand, may be a heck of a good read, but it is what it is and it is no more than that.

Best Novel lists aren't normally very adventurous. They stick pretty close to accepted opinion about what is a candidate for the classics list, and they don't go very far outside Europe and America to find their candidates.

But I'll bet if there were a poll of literature scholars from around the world, the book they would choose would be from Japan.

It would be ‘The Tale of Genji', written in the very early part of the 11th Century, in mediaeval Japan, by a woman, Murasaki Shikibu.

It is a work that is so extraordinary, in so many ways, that it is hard to know where to start to describe it.

It is the oldest novel known to have come from a literary tradition alive today, and no other book written in any literary tradition since has been such a radical departure from its tradition's norm.

It is a book that may well be the greatest and sexiest soap opera ever written, but it is one that also captivates scholars and experts in a dozen disparate fields.

It centres on the exploits, most of them amatory, of an illegitimate son of the Emperor of Japan. Genji, the Shining Prince, is a man whose physical beauty and whose artistic prowess are so great that even his enemies love him for them.

Genji is no paragon, though. He is a bad boy, the kind of sulky, sentimental rake that women have an irresistible attraction for. Better still, he never forgets a single one of the women… or men… that he has affairs with, and remembers their various virtues all through his life, with great affection.

I remember reading once that Genji is unique among the characters of literature for his ability to make an art of life. But his life's story is played out in this book against the background of court life in Heian Japan, when the object of all educated people was to make an art of life.

Courtiers at that time thought they lived in the world “above the clouds”. They lived in a society in which beauty was the chief currency, and in which aesthetic appreciation had been honed to a very high degree of sophistication.

A female admirer once sent Genji, by messenger, a letter attached to a plum branch from which most of the flowers were gone.

“In an aloes wood box she had placed two glass jars filled with generously large incense balls. The gift knots on the dark blue one represented five-needled pine and those on the white one plum blossoms, and she had made even the cords that tied them both charmingly pretty. ‘What lovely things!' His Excellency said. Then he noticed a poem in faint ink:.”

Certainly knocks “Do you come here often?” into a cocked hat, doesn't it?

Poetry, in Heian Japan, was considered the noblest of the arts, especially because it allowed people to address each other from the heart. An ability to write poetry was, for them, a social and, on a larger stage, a diplomatic necessity.

Theirs is poetry unlike ours, though, because the Japanese language doesn't easily lend itself to metre or rhyme. Their poetry depends, rather, on wordplay - complex associations and affinities that are, most of the time, impossible to translate. But its meaning is translatable, and it is eminently capable of that extraordinary, visceral assault on the intellect and the senses that one expects good poetry to launch.

‘The Tale of Genji' contains nearly 800 poems. Murasaki Shikibu is not the very greatest of the Heian poets, she's merely one of them. But her poems are beautifully integrated into the 54 parts of this very long work, and are good enough to allow the ‘Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature' to proclaim “not only the greatest work of Japanese literature, but also a prose narrative of a degree of greatness that the world would not see elsewhere for centuries, if indeed it has ever seen it.”

Murasaki Shikibu was familiar with the world she was describing. She was a member of the powerful Fujiwara family, the great grand-daughter of a famous Fujiwara poet. She was the chief Maid of Honour for S?shi, chief consort of the Emperor Ichij?.

In her time, Japanese writers wrote in classical Chinese, a language normally studied only by men. Murasaki Shikibu was one of the only women of the time who was known to have written in Chinese, but she wrote in vernacular Japanese - something that had not been done before. In her time, vernacular prose fiction would have been considered a frivolous pastime, perhaps as comics are considered today.

She did not write ‘Genji' as a single product, finished and published as a book would be today. Instead, she wrote and distributed instalments to her friends in the Emperor's court, and those instalments might well have been rewritten, or altered as a result of their comments. It is often said that ‘Genji' resembles a cicada (or as they were called here in the days of the cedar trees, a singer), which sheds its skin as it grows.

It makes for an extraordinary process - each new part might reinforce or confirm the parts already published, but might also question, or deny, or place in a new perspective what she had written before.

It makes the tale today more real than history. ‘Genji''s best-known characters are more vivid than any real Heian historical figure known from documents of the day. The Shining Prince's Rokuj? estate, lovingly reconstructed down the years since the book was ‘published' in drawings and models, is actually the best-known example of the domestic architecture of the time - even though it never existed.

‘Genji' is now available in English in three major translations. Arthur Waley, who was a great Asian scholar and the very best translator of Asian works, published the first over time in the 1920s and early 1930s. It didn't have a lot of context in the West then, however, so he turned it into a kind of Western book, - a beautiful translation, but not a faithful or authentic translation.

Edward Seidensticker's 1976 rendition into English has, until now, been accepted as the definitive translation. It is authentic but not poetically rich, and lacks the glossaries, character lists at the beginning of each chapter, notes, maps, illustrations and chronology are essential tools for the Western reader.

In 2001, however, Royall Tyler published a version that will undoubtedly succeed Seidensticker's. It is beautifully, poetically written and has all the tools its predecessors lacked. It really is a stunning piece of work.

A tip for anyone curious enough to buy a copy of the Tyler version. Amazon's selling it for $42, but Strand Books in New York still has nearly 200 remaindered copies, unmarked, for $19.95 apiece, and they will mail to Bermuda.