The early eleventh-century Japanese prose narrative (Genji monogatari) written by the court lady Murasaki Shikibu, often called the world's first novel or first psychological novel. Running to fifty-four chapters and a cast of hundreds, it follows Hikaru Genji, the "shining prince," through a glittering court life of love, political rise and exile, and accumulating loss, then carries the story past his death into the darker Uji chapters of the next generation. Suffused with mono no aware, the bittersweet awareness of impermanence, it is the supreme classic of Japanese literature, though the "first novel" claim, its dates, and parts of its text and authorship remain debated.
A thousand years ago, a woman of the Japanese court wrote a long story about a prince so beautiful that people called him the shining one. She followed him through love affair after love affair, through a brilliant world of silk and incense and moonlit gardens, and through the slow sorrows of growing older and losing what he loved. Then the story passes beyond Genji’s death and keeps going, into the lives that came after. The book is The Tale of Genji, and it is often called the first novel ever written. The claim is debated, because the idea of the novel was settled much later and far away. The greatness is not. In the eleventh century this court lady achieved a depth of feeling and memory extraordinarily early in world fiction.