A woman known by a borrowed name
Murasaki Shikibu is not a name but a label. Shikibu refers to the Bureau of Ceremonial, where her father Fujiwara no Tametoki held office; Murasaki is the name of a character in her own novel, and also means the violet-rooted plant associated with her clan. What her family called her was never recorded, because the personal names of Heian women, even celebrated ones, generally were not. She was born around 973 into a minor scholarly branch of the dominant Fujiwara family.
Her father was a provincial governor and a specialist in Chinese poetry, and her diary records that she absorbed his lessons to her brother faster than he did, provoking the complaint that it was a pity she had not been born a boy. She married a much older kinsman, Fujiwara no Nobutaka, around 998 and was widowed within three years, left with a young daughter. She appears to have started The Tale of Genji in that widowhood, and its reputation brought her to court.
What the Tale actually does
Around 1005 she entered the service of Empress Shoshi, daughter of the regent Fujiwara no Michinaga, who supplied paper and brushes, an expensive patronage. The novel runs to fifty-four chapters and some four hundred characters across three generations, following the shining prince Genji through love affairs, political exile, middle age and grief, and continuing after his death into the bleaker Uji chapters, whose tone has led some scholars to question whether she wrote them all. Roughly eight hundred poems are woven into the prose.
She wrote in kana, the flowing vernacular script considered suitable for women, while men of her class composed in Chinese, and that supposed limitation gave Japanese literature a supple instrument for interior life. Her subject is what later readers called mono no aware, the ache produced by the passing of things. Her diary is sharper than the novel: it records court ritual in detail and delivers cool assessments of her contemporaries, including the wit Sei Shonagon, whom she found pleased with herself.
A text with no original
No manuscript in her hand survives, and nothing close to one. The oldest substantial witnesses are twelfth-century, including the illustrated Genji scrolls, and the text used today descends largely from an edition prepared by the poet Fujiwara no Teika two centuries after composition. Scholars work with competing manuscript lineages rather than an original, which means that the most famous work of Japanese literature is, in a precise sense, a reconstruction supported by generations of copyists and commentators.
It has been continuously read for a thousand years, adapted into Noh drama and woodblock prints, and reinterpreted by the eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga as a work of feeling rather than Buddhist moral instruction. In English it exists as several different books: Arthur Waley's free and beautiful version of the 1920s, then translations by Edward Seidensticker, Royall Tyler and Dennis Washburn. Calling it the first novel invites arguments; calling it the earliest sustained study of consciousness in fiction is harder to dispute.
