The Tale of Genji has been called the world’s first novel. Remarkably, a Japanese woman, Murasaki Shikibu, authored it in the 11th century. In the introduction to his massive, unabridged translation, Dartmouth Asian studies professor Dennis Washburn frets over Genji’s definition as a novel while acknowledging that it shares many features with novels as we know them. Genji’s author is not unlike Jane Austen, a woman of respectable yet not high status and an astute cataloguer of the peculiar social mores of her place and period. Genji reads like a massive romance novel—ahem, story—whose well-drawn characters include women “at the mercy of events and uncertain prospects.”
