The Japanese court lady, known only by a nickname, who in the early eleventh century wrote The Tale of Genji, a vast prose narrative of love, longing, and impermanence that is often called the world's first novel. A member of the lesser Fujiwara aristocracy, unusually learned in an age that reserved Chinese letters for men, she served the empress Shoshi at the Heian court and left, besides her masterwork, a sharp diary and a body of poetry — yet her real name, her exact dates, and most of her life remain uncertain.
A thousand years ago, in the Japanese imperial court, a widowed lady-in-waiting filled sheet after sheet of paper with the story of a prince and the women who loved him. We do not know her real name. The name she is remembered by, Murasaki Shikibu, is a kind of nickname, borrowed partly from a character in her own book. The story she wrote became The Tale of Genji, hundreds of pages following the loves and losses of a shining prince through a world of beauty that is always slipping away. It is the foundational classic of Japanese literature, and it is often called the first novel written anywhere on earth. She wrote it not in the formal Chinese the court's men used for serious work, but in the flowing native script that was thought fit mainly for women.