The Tale of Genji
紫式部 (Lady Murasaki)c. 1010Written around 1010, this is the world's first novel by any reasonable definition, and a woman at the Japanese imperial court wrote it.
Read this if you…
- want to read about an absolute player with his many ladies
- like court intrigue and romance and drama
- want an amazing 1,000-year-old book written by a woman
Skip this if you…
- want a tight modern plot with 1 throughline
- don't want a book about a womanizer
- don't want a super long book (although, this one doesn't require reading all the way through to get a lot out of it)
The 
Take
So far ahead of its time I’m shocked. Just relationship drama for the whole book. Some great lines, love how they converse via poems. Crazy good realism for a book from 1000. Genji is the man
Depicted in Art
Young Genji peers through a gap in a brushwood fence at the ten-year-old Murasaki playing with sparrows in a country garden.
Tosa Mitsuoki
Multiple Genji chapters distributed across two eight-panel screens on gold leaf, with palaces, processions, and seasonal episodes laid out in clouds.
A garden scene from the New Herbs chapter — courtiers and attendants beneath flowering trees with the Rokujō pavilions in the background.
Tosa Mitsuyoshi (workshop)
Prince Niou and Kaoru pictured against a gold-leaf ground in the opening chapter of the post-Genji generation.
Tosa Mitsuoki
The illicit meeting of Kashiwagi and the Third Princess inside the Rokujō residence, set on gold-leaf clouds with green-roofed pavilions.
Tosa Mitsuoki
Interior of a Heian court chamber seen from above through removed roof (fukinuki yatai); women in layered jūnihitoe robes behind a kichō curtain in the Eastern Cottage scene.
1130
Two Uji princesses glimpsed playing music by moonlight on a verandah, seen by the visiting Kaoru through a gap in the fence.
1130
Yūgiri pictured with the flute (yokobue) bequeathed to him by the dead Kashiwagi, in a quiet interior with sliding fusuma doors.
1130
Recommended Editions
Arthur Waley
Tuttle Publishing · 2010
Waley's 1925 translation invented Genji in English. Edwardian, ornate, with chapters omitted and his own sensibility folded in. Read it as Waley's Genji, not Murasaki's, and it holds up as a major English prose work in its own right.
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Notable Quotes
In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the emperor loved more than any of the others.
Screen & Stage
The Tale of Genji
Film · 1987
Gisaburō Sugii
The Tale of Genji
Film · 1951
Kōzaburō Yoshimura
The Tale of Genji
TV · 2009
Osamu Dezaki
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Virginia Woolf, English modernist novelist (1882–1941): "We are delighted by her hatred of bombast, her humour, her common sense, her passion for the contrasts and curiosities of human nature."
- Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine writer (1899–1986): "Murasaki's work is what one would quite precisely call a psychological novel."
- Okakura Kakuzō, philosopher of art & cultural diplomat, 1862–1913: "Women set the style in literature as in art. The brilliant Murasaki Shikibu, the rich authoress of the Genji romance…"