Murasaki Shikibu
973 – 1014 · Japan
Known for: Heian court lady who wrote The Tale of Genji, often called the first novel
“She wrote in her own language a tale of the human heart that has been read for a thousand years.”
Biography
Murasaki Shikibu was born into a minor branch of the powerful northern Fujiwara clan in Heian-kyō, the imperial capital that is now Kyoto, at some point in the 970s; her personal name is not known. Murasaki Shikibu is a descriptive name: Shikibu refers to the Ministry of Ceremonials, where her father served, and Murasaki was probably given to her at court after a character in her own tale. Her branch of the family had slipped from the top rank of the aristocracy to the level of provincial governors, but kept a literary reputation, her great grandfather and grandfather both being well known poets. Her father, Fujiwara no Tametoki, was a respected scholar of the Chinese classics, and she grew up in his household with her younger brother, an unusual arrangement in an age when children were raised by their mothers. Chinese was the language of government and was not taught to women; listening to her brother's lessons, she learned it anyway, and better than he did.
She married in her twenties, had a daughter, and was widowed after about two years. The Tale of Genji was probably begun in those years, during the marriage or soon after her husband's death, and it was written in Japanese, in the kana syllabary that had become the written language of women and of private life. Around 1005 Fujiwara no Michinaga, the most powerful man at court, brought her in to serve Empress Shōshi as a lady in waiting, most likely because of what she had already written. She kept writing there, working court life into the book, which seems to have taken shape between about 1000 and 1012: a long prose narrative following Genji, the son of an emperor, and the generation after him through love, politics, exile and old age. She also left a diary and a volume of poetry.
After five or six years at court she withdrew with Shōshi to the region of Lake Biwa. When she died is disputed: most scholars settle on about 1014, while others hold that she was still alive in 1025. Within ten years of its completion the tale had reached the provinces, and within a century it was treated as a classic and studied as one. Japanese artists have illustrated it without interruption since the thirteenth century, the masters of the ukiyo-e woodblock among them, and an English translation published between 1925 and 1933 made it a book of the world. The Tale of Genji is widely regarded as one of the first novels ever written, and it remains the fullest picture anyone left of Heian court society at its height.