The young Murasaki was a quick study and would go on to display her accumulated erudition in Genji. Her father Tametoki was a great scholar of the Chinese classics. As she does not mention her mother in any of her writings, it is thought that she died while the future writer was very young. Perhaps because they were less constrained than their social superiors, the female Heian writers tended to come from this class. It was a large clan, however, and she was born into a minor branch, meaning that she was of the middle ranks of the aristocracy in what was known as the zuryō class. Murasaki’s father, Fujiwara Tametoki, belonged to the influential Fujiwara family that essentially ran Japanese society in the late tenth century, when she was born. But as with many of her contemporaries in the great flowering of literary women of the time, her real name remains a mystery. It has been used since the late Heian period (794–1185). Her sobriquet of convenience is most likely a composite of the Genji character Murasaki and her father’s one-time position in the Ministry of Ceremonial Affairs (the Shikibu-shō). One of her many poems appears in the country’s best-known poetic anthology Hyakunin isshu, a collection of single poems by 100 writers of the classical age. She is also remembered for her diary, which in addition to its literary qualities is a source for what little we know of her life. The Tale of Genji), which has been described as the world’s first novel. The author who has come to be called Murasaki Shikibu is most famous for her monumental work Genji monogatari (trans. We do not know the true name of the woman who is one of Japan’s finest ever writers.
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