I grew up on the outskirts of London with a Dad who sat in a deckchair and read books in oriental languages while other dads mowed their lawns or fixed their houses. Our house was certainly in dire need of fixing, but it did have a lot of books in it. The rooms were lined with shelves of Chinese and Japanese volumes printed on rice paper, bound with silk and fitted into boxes, along with some translations. Among them was The Tale of Genji, ‘the world’s first novel’, as my Dad told me. The translator was Arthur Waley, a shy awkward man who never actually visited the East but who translated magnificently from many Asian languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Ainu and Mongol.