What Was Murasaki Shikibu's Real Name? The Hidden Author of The Tale of Genji

A scholar's daughter who learned Chinese by listening

She was born around 973 in Heian-kyō, today's Kyoto, into the northern branch of the Fujiwara clan, although scholars give dates between 970 and 978. Her father, Fujiwara no Tametoki, was a scholar of the Chinese classics who was appointed a provincial governor in 996.

Girls of her class were not supposed to learn classical Chinese, the language of government and scholarship. Murasaki learned it anyway by listening to her brother's lessons. Her father is reported to have said, "What a pity she was not born a man!" Men wrote formal texts in Chinese, while kana, a syllabary developed from simplified Chinese characters, became the written language of noblewomen.

A short marriage and a daughter who became a poet

Around 998 she married Fujiwara no Nobutaka, a much older second cousin in his late forties. Their daughter Kenshi was born in 999, and Nobutaka died in 1001 during a cholera epidemic. Her poetry collection includes poems in which she remembers him.

The daughter later served at court herself, became the wet nurse of the future Emperor Go-Reizei in 1025, and is known as a poet under the name Daini no Sanmi. The Tale of Genji was written between about 1000 and 1012, so she was probably already at work on it in the years after her husband died.

In the service of Empress Shōshi

Around 1005 or 1006 Fujiwara no Michinaga brought her to court to serve his daughter, Empress Shōshi, probably because she was already known as a writer. She stayed for about five or six years.

Her learning was both an asset and a danger. She was nicknamed "the Lady of the Chronicles" (Nihongi no tsubone), apparently as an insult, after she was thought to be showing off her knowledge of Chinese. Yet she quietly taught Chinese to the empress, and in her diary she wrote that she had thought it best to say nothing about the matter to anybody.

The diary and the famous rivalry

The Diary of Lady Murasaki covers roughly 1008 to 1010 and gives a rare inside view of court life. It is also where she wrote her sharpest lines about another great writer, Sei Shōnagon, author of The Pillow Book, calling her "dreadfully conceited" and mocking her habit of scattering Chinese characters through her writing.

The two women are often imagined as rivals at court, but they probably never met there: Sei Shōnagon served Empress Teishi, who died in 1001, before Murasaki arrived. Murasaki also had something to say about the poet Izumi Shikibu, whom she called "an amusing letter-writer".

The Tale of Genji in brief

The Tale of Genji, or Genji Monogatari, has 54 chapters and a cast of some four hundred characters. Its hero, Hikaru Genji, is the son of an emperor by a low-ranking consort; for political reasons he is made a commoner and given the surname Minamoto. He finds a young girl, Murasaki, raises her, and she becomes the central woman in his life.

Scholars traditionally divide the book into three parts: Genji's rise and fall (chapters 1–41), a short transition (42–44), and the "Uji chapters" (45–54), which follow two young men, Kaoru and Niou, after Genji's death. It is often called the world's first novel, though that label is debated.

A thousand years of readers

The oldest mention of the tale is in her own diary, in an entry for 1 November 1008. The original manuscript is lost, but more than 300 later copies survive, and the 12th-century Genji Monogatari Emaki is the oldest surviving illustrated scroll of the story.

In English, Arthur Waley published a near-complete translation between 1925 and 1933, Edward Seidensticker the first complete one in 1976, and Royall Tyler another in 2001. Kyoto held a year-long celebration of the tale's 1,000th anniversary in 2008, and the first 2,000-yen note carries a tribute to Murasaki and Genji on its back.

A well-known legend says she was inspired to start writing while gazing at the moon at Ishiyama-dera on an August night. Scholars doubt it, but artists loved to paint the scene. Even the date of her death is uncertain; it is most often placed around 1014.

Learn with Murasaki Shikibu: English expressions

Expression	Meaning	Example
a pen name	a name a writer uses instead of a real one	Murasaki Shikibu is more nickname than pen name.
a lady-in-waiting	a woman who serves a queen or empress	She was a lady-in-waiting to Empress Shōshi.
to show off	to try to impress people	She was accused of showing off her Chinese.
to keep something to yourself	not to tell others	She kept her Chinese lessons to herself.
the name stuck	a nickname became permanent	Kintō joked about "Young Murasaki", and the name stuck.

Try this: Think of a nickname you or a friend once had. In three sentences, explain where it came from, who started it, and whether "the name stuck". Use was called at least once.