Murasaki Shikibu

Murasaki Shikibu is a posthumous nickname; her real name is unrecorded, a common fate for Heian-era women. Born into a minor branch of the powerful Fujiwara clan, she was unusually well educated in the Chinese classics by her scholar father, who reportedly lamented she hadn't been born a son. Widowed a few years after a late marriage, she entered court service as a lady-in-waiting to the empress Shōshi.

She likely began The Tale of Genji before entering court and continued it there, drawing on the intrigues, rituals, and aesthetics of aristocratic life she observed firsthand; her surviving diary records both court gossip and her own ambivalence about fame. The novel follows the courtier Genji through decades of love affairs and political fortune, then extends past his death into the more melancholic lives of his descendants: a scope and psychological interiority with no precedent in world literature.

She died sometime in the 1010s, but manuscript copies of Genji circulated among the Heian court almost immediately, and the novel has never gone out of print in Japan since.