Do we like Murasaki Shikibu?
Our score: 8 out of 10. No harm on the record and a real legacy for women writers, but a thousand-year-old paper trail is thin, so we stop short of the top.
Murasaki Shikibu isn't her real name. Nobody knows what she was called: Shikibu points to a post her father held, and Murasaki comes from the heroine of her own tale. She was born into a lesser branch of the powerful Fujiwara family in Heian-era Japan, around the year 1000.
Her father was a scholar and provincial governor. She taught herself Chinese by listening outside the door while he taught her brother. Court ladies were meant to write only in Japanese, and tales like hers were considered frivolous, so this was a quiet act of rebellion for the time.
She married around 998 or 999 and was widowed in 1001, left with a daughter. Out of that came The Tale of Genji, all 54 chapters, which many call the world's first novel. Around 1006 she was called to serve the empress, and she later taught the empress to read Chinese poetry.
On the harm test, there's no controversy to chase, no slide into grievance and no dodgy company. Nothing we read shows her pushing harm against anyone. Fair warning: little survives about her private life, because records were lost in the Onin War of 1467, so this is a pass on what we can see.
On the good-person side, a modern writer describes her as a woman who, in a male-dominated society, “was able to make her dreams come true.” She reportedly turned down repeated marriage proposals from the powerful Fujiwara no Michinaga, feeling they would distract her from her mission. That is a rare piece of standing her ground at a cost.
Her diary, from the early 1000s, is a rare window into palace life, recording the day-to-day happenings that official records left out. Her work shaped Japanese as a literary language, and a 2024 NHK drama about her life still found a big audience a millennium on. Nothing new on her lately beyond that.