Murasaki Shikibu was a Japanese writer and lady-in-waiting who lived at the turn of the 11th century. She entered history as the author of The Tale of Genji, a work often described as the world's first novel. Across 54 chapters, Murasaki followed several decades in the life of a fictional imperial court, writing about love, jealousy, marriage, political intrigue, aging, and death.
Murasaki Shikibu, however, was not actually the writer's name but a court nickname. "Murasaki" probably became associated with her through Lady Murasaki, one of the central characters in the novel, while "Shikibu" referred to an official post held by her father. History never preserved the real name of the woman whose book was copied by hand, passed from reader to reader, and even read aloud to the emperor during her own lifetime.
The Language of Learned Men
Murasaki was born sometime in the 970s, during the Heian period, when the imperial court was based in Heian-kyō, present-day Kyoto. Aristocratic life centered on the court, where powerful families competed for influence around the emperor, arranged advantageous marriages, staged elaborate ceremonies, and composed poetry.
Murasaki belonged to the Fujiwara, one of the most powerful aristocratic clans of the period, although her family came from a less influential branch. Her father, Fujiwara no Tametoki, was a government official, poet, and scholar of Chinese literature.
Classical Chinese was used in Japan for official documents, historical chronicles, and scholarly writing, and mastery of it formed an important part of the education of aristocratic men preparing for government service. Women more often wrote in Japanese using kana, the phonetic script used for letters, diaries, poetry, and prose, which is why Murasaki was not formally taught Chinese. When her father tutored her brother, however, she listened to the lessons and, by her own account, often learned the material faster than he did. Her father reportedly lamented that someone so gifted had been born a daughter, since, had Murasaki been a boy, her intelligence might have made her exceptionally useful to the state.
She soon learned something else as well: for a woman, displaying too much learning openly could be dangerous. Murasaki later recalled in her diary that around other people she tried to pretend she knew almost no Chinese and avoided writing even simple Chinese characters, since an educated woman could easily be regarded as arrogant or immodest.
Murasaki wrote anyway.
The central character of her novel was Genji, the son of an emperor who, for political reasons, is stripped of princely status and any claim to the throne. Through his love affairs, marriages, successes at court, and eventual losses, Murasaki created an intricate portrait of Japanese aristocratic life in which characters grow older, relationships fall apart, and one generation gives way to the next. The story was fiction rather than a disguised autobiography, but Murasaki unmistakably drew on the world she knew firsthand: court ceremonies, marriage politics, rivalries between powerful families, and the position of women within imperial society.
Books at the time were copied by hand. Murasaki's friends would read new chapters, make copies, and pass them on, allowing the story of Genji to circulate gradually through the imperial court. By around 1005 or 1006, Murasaki was invited to join the household of Empress Shōshi, consort of Emperor Ichijō, and the growing reputation of The Tale of Genji likely played a part in bringing her there.
"The Lady of the Chronicles"
Murasaki continued writing at court, but she was now surrounded every day by the world she had previously been able to observe only from a distance: powerful families competing for status, court romances, ceremonies, the births of imperial heirs, and rivalries among the women around the empress.
By 1008, The Tale of Genji was already familiar enough at court for aristocrats to joke about its characters. On one occasion, a courtier approached the women in the empress's household and asked whether a "young Murasaki," the heroine of the novel, was among them. The episode may help explain how the character's name eventually became attached to the author herself.
When The Tale of Genji was read aloud to Emperor Ichijō, he remarked that its author must know the old Japanese chronicles written in classical Chinese remarkably well. The knowledge Murasaki had spent years trying not to display had effectively been revealed by her own book. Afterward, one of the court ladies began mockingly calling her "The Lady of the Chronicles," a reference to a kind of scholarship still considered almost improper for a woman. Despite that reputation, Murasaki secretly taught Chinese literature to Empress Shōshi herself.
No one knows exactly when Murasaki finished The Tale of Genji. During her lifetime, however, the work was already being read at the imperial court, and over the centuries that followed it would be copied, illustrated, and endlessly commented upon. Murasaki spent much of her life trying not to stand out and even hiding her command of the language associated with learned men, yet the book she wrote became beloved by the very imperial court whose conventions had taught her to conceal that knowledge-and outlived that world by a thousand years.
