ABSTRACT
Author of The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari), which is regarded as the world’s first novel and one of the wellsprings of Japanese literature. Murasaki, also known as Lady Murasaki, was a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court during the Heian Period, at the height of Japan’s Classical Era. She depicted the highly refined life of the Heian aristocracy with a psychological and emotional realism that was unprecedented. Murasaki’s innovation and influence on later writers rank her with such Western counterparts as Shakespeare and Dante.
