Author of The Tale of Genji, one of the world’s first novelists
A woman writer of Japan’s Heian period, a lady of the court, who wrote The Tale of Genji — a long work turning on the loves and life of the noble Prince Genji, widely held to be one of the earliest full-length novels in the history of world literature, centuries ahead of the European novel tradition. With the finest of touches she wrote out the feelings, the impermanence, and the beauty of "mono no aware" of the court’s men and women. An Eastern woman of a thousand years ago thus produced a work fit to stand beside the classics of any age.
In an age when Europe had no such genre as "the novel," Murasaki Shikibu had already written, in the kana script, the long Tale of Genji — hundreds of characters, spanning decades, grand in structure and fine in psychology. The "mono no aware" that runs through her pages — the faint sorrow that all beautiful things must pass — became the core of Japanese aesthetics, and moves readers still, a thousand years on.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.