My role here was much more Dino DeLaurentiis than Max Perkins," Wendy Wolf says with a laugh. The Viking executive editor laughs a lot, which has come in handy during the seven years it has taken this particular project to come off the press. How often does an editor find herself working on a novel that was written in another world, in another language, 1,000 years ago? A novel, of 1,200 pages, heavy enough to function admirably as a doorstop, but elegant enough to fill two volumes of a coffee-table-worthy $60 boxed set?

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (aka Lady Murasaki) is the Japanese classic generally considered to be the oldest novel from any literary tradition that remains fully alive today. In Japan Genji is an icon in culture high and low; in the West, as with many old masterpieces, Genji has a certain cultural resonance despite being so rarely read. Viking hopes to open its pages to more readers when it publishes a new translation by Royall Tyler in October, only the third time Genji has been rendered into English, and the first new translation in 25 years.

Everything about this project is large: the $60 price tag; the "medieval workshop," as Wolf puts it, of designers, copy editors and eight proofreaders who labored to put it together; and not least the gamble the house is taking that it can sell a 20,000-copy printing of a work the editor herself characterizes as "sometimes opaque and difficult." To justify the gamble, she cites Viking's experience with Robert Fagles's translations of The Iliad (1990) and The Odyssey (1996) that together sold just over 100,000 copies in hardcover, and nods to Farrar, Straus's success with Seamus Heaney's version of Beowulf.

"What's so important is you can take an ancient work and get people excited by it. Everybody was talking about The Iliad and The Odyssey the years they were published," Wolf enthuses. "Obviously, the Greek and Roman traditions are taught in our schools; the Japanese isn't. But people are remarkably excited about publishing Genji. This is a special moment. This book confers a kind of glory on everybody involved."

She says she "never felt alone in this." The team includes production editor Bruce Giffords and art directors Paul Buckley and Jaye Zimet. Giffords, whose wife is Japanese, "was marvelous. He oversaw the retinue of copy editors, proofers and collators." But the DeLaurentiis-like skills Wolf depended on to direct the whole epic were honed in an entirely different arena. "The strength I drew on," she laughs again, "was the organizational ability developed during my years at Harper running a whole program of cartoon books by Matt Groening." Ample pictorial evidence of those years, from assorted Simpsons to selections from Life Is Hell, adorns her office walls.

"In a way," the 48-year-old editor continues, "Genji draws on all the skills I've acquired since the day I started as a secretary in the children's department at Knopf, dealing with text, illustrations and captions, learning to keep an eye on the large and the small at the same time." The 14 years at Pantheon, the five at Harper and the last seven at Viking editing writers like Nathaniel Philbrick, John Cornwell, Wei Jingsheng and Nelson George have all gone into the mix.

"I'm not a fiction editor," Wolf says, "and that's probably a good thing here." The book contains so much else besides the story. Almost 200 black-and-white line drawings are scattered throughout, crucially supporting the words and clarifying terms that might otherwise be hopelessly obscure. Design elements like the Japanese fabric patterns on the chapter openings help to lighten the massive text.

The illustrations, maps and other embellishments also work with the binding and box to turn Genji into a gift package. Wolf says she drew on sister imprint Viking Studio's experience with "big-ticket art books" for help in developing the project. She originally envisaged bringing the book out next spring, "but our publisher, Susan Petersen [Kennedy] and marketing director, Nancy Sheppard, felt it presented a real opportunity for the holiday season." The schedule grew tighter, and for the last year, Wolf says, "Genji took up about 20% of my time."

In one sense, it is astonishing that Genji exists at all. In the late 10th- and early 11th-century world of the Japanese imperial court in the city we now call Kyoto, it was the men who wrote anything that mattered, and they wrote it in Chinese, the cultivated language. Royall Tyler notes in his introduction that anything written in the vernacular Japanese, and by a woman, was classified as "worthless fantasy" suitable only for women.

Yet Murasaki, born into the ranks of the provincial nobility and summoned to serve at the empress's court, clearly took what was a real risk for a woman and learned Chinese. What she read influenced what she wrote, which perhaps helps to explain why her story, written in the vernacular, was quickly taken up by men and women alike, and achieved a fame that transcends gender and time and place.

Genji the Shining Prince is an emperor's son whose life is consumed with amorous and political adventures. Wolf predicts the novel "will shock readers by how sexually explicit it is and by the fact it was written by a woman."

Genji is portrayed as devastatingly attractive, and his bed partners represent a variety of ages and both sexes. Wolf admits, "Genji the character has been bashed for being promiscuous and self-centered, but I think he's a character of great feeling and depth." Much of the book is indirect, written in allusions—"dream," for example, is used frequently to mean sexual intercourse—but some is surprisingly candid. On one occasion a lady refuses to consort with a gentleman friend, citing that her breath, courtesy of a medicinal use of garlic, "is too noxious to allow me to entertain you in my normal fashion."

The book's foreignness to the Western tradition can be gauged in any number of ways. Originally it was written without proper names for most characters; through the years, readers assigned them names to help thread their way through the tale. Then there is the timing of its climax, the death of the main heroine, Murasaki, who shares the same name as the author. (The author's given name is unknown, and she has come to be known by the name of her heroine.) When Murasaki dies two-thirds of the way through the story, her death is followed shortly thereafter by that of Genji himself, offstage. The narrative, however, continues, following the adventures of mostly new characters in mostly new settings.

The previous translations were by Arthur Waley in 1933 and by Edward Seidensticker in 1976. Currently, the Waley is available in a Dover paperback edition; Seidensticker's version is can be had in an unabridged Everyman's Library hardcover, and in abridged and unabridged Vintage paperbacks.

"Waley's solution to Genji was to turn it into a Western book," Wolf says. "It is a wondrous and beautiful translation, but not in any way faithful or authentic. Seidensticker is terribly authentic but not poetically rich, and it lacks what I call 'apparatus': the glossaries, character lists at the beginning of each chapter, notes, maps, illustrations and chronology that we see as essential navigational tools for the Western reader.

"For me, reading Genji is like listening to music from another culture, atonal music where the cadences are different, but after you listen for 20 minutes, you begin to hear patterns. You could spend a year reading this book, reading it as though you're learning a new language. Or people can read it as a historical novel."

The project's conception dates back to 1992, when Penguin Classics commissioned Tyler to translate the first eight chapters of Genji for a new abridged edition. It was Wolf, some years before, who had introduced Tyler—an American with a Columbia doctorate in Japanese literature—to Penguin in the first place.

"When I published the Fairytale and Folklore Library at Pantheon, Royall was working at the University of Wisconsin, and he agreed to do a Japanese volume for us. We published Japanese Tales in 1987. Then he moved to Norway to teach and he wanted to do a volume of Noh plays. I helped him locate the Penguin Classics editor in London who eventually did it.

"I stayed in touch—he had moved on from Norway to the Australian National University. At around the time I joined Viking in 1994, Royall proposed to Penguin that he translate the complete novel instead of abridging it. Because we had a good working relationship and I was intrigued by the project, I agreed to stand as principal editor."

Wolf says, "It was e-mail that made this book possible. Royall had a very clear idea of what he was doing. He is a very confident man, and got enormous grant and fellowship support from Japan. He is so within Genji, he needed somebody to engage in a dialogue about reading it from without. He needed somebody who could say in an e-mail, 'I need a note here about this, but I don't need a note there about that.'

"It would not have been possible had he not been so sure of himself. Because I can't read the original I wasn't able to say a character should be this or that. I had to trust him to provide authenticity and accuracy. If something sounds too modern or jarring I can hear that and I worked on that with him. The big challenge was to allow him to preserve a non-Western rhythm.

"It was terrifying when the chapters started to arrive in these giant boxes. There were moments when I thought maybe it should come out as a Penguin Classic after all.... In the end, I had to strike a balance to satisfy the author that this would be the book he envisioned with its integrity intact, and that it would also work as a commercial product. At one point, I exploded at him because he had such an uncompromising vision. But Royall's been a model of cooperation despite our fights. We're going to fight sometimes, we're all human."

Looking back over the years to her relationships with many very different authors, Wolf says she learned that "what goes on between the editor and the author is private. Who does what in any project is subject to attorney-client privilege." Such lessons she learned early on at Pantheon, which she describes as "a wonderful place to come of age as an editor. Andre Schiffrin told me you can pick up the phone and call anyone who intrigues you and ask what they do. I was encouraged to think actively and not wait to see what came in from an agent.

"We existed in the greater world. It's all too easy to think of yourself as an editor inside the publishing world, to ask what's your status vis-à-vis agents, editors, your own company. Of course that's important, but it's also important to remember to ask where you are in the world of interesting historians and how you can be part of that world."

Wolf prefers not to talk about Schiffrin's very public departure from Random House Inc. and how she and her three senior editorial colleagues walked away from Pantheon as a matter of protest and principle. "I went from Pantheon to Harper under Bill Shinker, which couldn't have been a greater contrast. I learned, watching Bill, to be part of a corporation, and that that, too, can be creative. Then [former Viking publisher] Barbara Grossman brought me here.

"I've always been lucky in working for energetic, enthusiastic people. My very first boss, Pat Ross, taught me about treating authors as human beings. They are not simply people put on earth to annoy you, especially when a book is failing. That's when they need you, when there is an awesome silence after publication. The author needs you to say that the book is still there, that people are reading it. It's difficult to support them in conventional ways, but you can still support them.

"I don't think publishing has become any easier. Everything now is tracked, the accounts, inventory, costs. There's also so much more noise than there used to be in every way. And we're dealing in an accelerated world, how fast we ask authors to produce books and how fast we ask ourselves to turn them around. The average time a book's in production has dropped from one year to six months since my Pantheon days. Everyone needs to look further ahead, everything is earlier.

"We're constantly struggling between working in the office on a product and remembering that each book individually belongs to another human being, the author. You have to remind yourself all the time that you have to be efficient and humane, which are sometimes conflicting tasks. I've learned from Susan Petersen, who's immensely dedicated to the cause of the book, never to lose sight of the book itself. And I try to remember what Hugh [Van Dusen, the Harper editor whom Wolf married four years ago] always tells me. Books are like children. You can never do enough for them."