In the Tale of Genji, the characters write poetry to communicate with each other and to commune with themselves and the non-human world. These poems being poems, they also do much more than relay unambiguous messages. If the characters speak to each other in poems, the poems also speak to each other beyond any given exchange. They open out into an additional dimension, a poetic universe shared by readers that arches across and through the narrative fabric of the Tale. Reading the poems on their own is a little like tapping into the emotional and symbolic circulatory system of the Tale. It can also provide a glimpse into how Murasaki wove the plot of her storytelling around kernels of poetic images and tropes. Studding her prose with poetry, she magnified the expressive power of her writing. In the process, she raised the social status of narrative fiction in Japanese, a genre that until her time was derided as the mere scribbling of women. In fact, she was so successful in doing so that her Tale became the central text of the Japanese canon and a model for the writing of poetry, the most prestigious genre of all. As the great courtier-poet Fujiwara Shunzei would exclaim scarcely two centuries after her Tale was completed, “To compose poetry without knowing The Tale of Genji? It's outrageous!” (源氏見ざる歌詠みは遺恨なり)