Instead of marrying again, the gifted young widow and mother began work on The Tale of Genji, an intricate saga of romance and intrigue in the life of an imperial prince. In her early twenties she married a man old enough to be her father who died only two years later– but not before they had a daughter. He said “Just my luck! What a pity she was not born a man!” In her diary, Murasaki recorded her father’s reaction when he realized exactly how talented she was. The granddaughter of a famous poet and the daughter of a scholar, Murasaki became conversant in Japanese and Chinese literature so quickly she was considered something of a literary prodigy. Sometimes it was easier to identify an aristocratic woman by the distinctive pattern of a protruding sleeve than by her face.ĭespite the often suffocating limitations on their lives, women like Murasaki were educated and expected to be highly literate. She lived in an intensely cloistered world where women were constantly shielded from public view by screens or curtains.
Instead, well-born women like Murasaki were given nicknames, usually related to the rank or position of a close male relative. Born into an aristocratic Japanese family sometime in the 970s, she lived at a time when the names of women were rarely recorded. Her name was Murasaki Shikibu, or at least that’s the only name we can give her now.
And if we want to understand how it came into being, we have to look more than a thousand years into the past, at the writing desk of one woman. It’s hard to imagine a time before novels as we know them existed, but there was, in fact, a first novel. You’ve been pulled into a world conjured from someone else’s imagination, where the thoughts and feelings of the people on the pages are as real as your own. If you’ve ever fallen in love with a novel, you know the moment: you look at the clock, it’s one in the morning and you still can’t put the book down.
DASHA MURASAKI SERIES
This series is made possible by generous donations to our Seed & Spark crowdfunding campaign for the project. Ordinary Women: Daring to Defy History explores the lives and accomplishments of fascinating women who defied gender stereotypes but often found themselves pushed to the sidelines or erased from history books that weren’t ready to acknowledge them. In 10th century Japan, literary prodigy Murasaki Shikibu wrote the first modern novel at a time when women’s names were rarely even written down.
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