IF the informed Westerner was asked to enumerate the outstanding features of traditional Japan, his list might well consist of the following: in culture Nō and Kabuki drama, Haiku poems, Ukiyoe colour prints, samisen music, and various activities like the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and the preparation of miniature landscapes that are related to Zen influence; in society the two-sworded samurai and the geisha; in ideas the Zen approach to human experience with its stress on an intuitive understanding of the truth and sudden enlightenment, the samurai ethic sometimes known as Bushidō, a great concern with the conflicting demands of duty and human affection, and an extremely permissive attitude to suicide, especially love suicides; in domestic architecture fitted straw matting (tatami), large communal baths, tokonoma alcoves for hanging kakemono; in food raw fish and soy sauce (tempura and sukiyaki being judiciously excluded as Western importations). The list would of course be entirely correct. Yet not a single one of these items existed in Murasaki’s world, and many of them would have seemed as alien to her as they do to the modern Westerner.
— Tale of Genji: A Reader's Guide by William J. Puette (Page 23 - 24)
This quote is originally from The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan by Ivan Morris, a book about the backdrop of the Tale of Genji. It is quoted in A Reader's Guide.
Genji himself is an irredeemable creep and I don't think the story will deliver any sort of satisfaction, justice, or redemption. Genji's plotting and scheming is interesting because it is a side effect of the serious constraints that prevent men and women of the court from associating directly. And yet people are having all kinds of illicit affairs despite these constraints. So everything is wrapped in indirection and double meanings. Most communication between men and women occurs through poetry, which is highly allusive to personal qualities, style, and other poetry.
There's a lot of necessary background information in A Reader's Guide that enriches the the Tale of Genji, making it less about Genji's sexual conquests, and more about the idiosyncrasies of life in the Heian court, with its deep appreciation of aesthetics as the only form of personal expression.