The Tale of Genji, the World's First Novel

📚 Do you know about The Tale of Genji, the World's First Novel?

Written by the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu in the early 11th century, during the Heian period, The Tale of Genji is widely considered by scholars to be the world's first novel, predating similar long-form prose fiction in Europe by centuries. Running to over a thousand pages in most modern translations and following more than four hundred characters across generations, the story centres on Hikaru Genji, a charming and cultured son of the emperor, tracing his romantic entanglements and the shifting fortunes of the imperial court with remarkable psychological depth and subtlety. Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court, wrote the work at a time when women in Japan were generally discouraged from writing in Chinese, the era's prestigious scholarly language, and instead composed prose fiction in Japanese, a choice that helped establish vernacular Japanese as a serious literary medium. The novel remains a cornerstone of Japanese literature and national cultural identity to this day.

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