I thought Murasaki's exposition of gender roles in the "the Tales of Genji" to be very provocative and enlightening. In Chapter 2, "The Broom Tree" Genji and other men discussed about how hard it was to find a wife and/or husband and they came up with several conclusions that I found to be fair and relate-able. For example, after weighing the merits/defects, good points/bad points in all women, the men finally uttered the perennial truth: "the man who begins his search [of a woman who does not require shaping and training, someone who has most of the qualifications from the start] with all this in mind must be reconciled to searching for a very long time." On the other hand, Murasaki was also critical of the women. The men complained about the women that "it is very stupid, really, to run off and leave a perfectly kind and sympathetic man [for]...some minor dereliction...but to run off with no understanding at all of his true feelings, with no purpose other than to attract attention and hope to upset him--it is an unpleasant sort of memory to have to live with."
I found the irony in this novel to be successful both as a literary device and as a psychological gender metric. Murasaki astutely captured the imagination of young courtiers of the ideal man [Genji] and while at it, painted a vivid description of social and gender expectation of the Heian-era court. I'm amazed how much of the dialogue mentioned above is still the talks of men and women nowadays even though we are hundreds of years apart.
.