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Around the year 1000 , a woman sat in a Japanese palace . She wrote a very long story there . Her name was Murasaki Shikibu . She worked for Empress Shoshi at the imperial court in Kyoto . Her book is called The Tale of Genji . It follows a prince named Genji through his whole life . It has love , loss , and politics . It has more than 50 chapters . The story covers about 54 years of Genji 's life . Murasaki wrote in Japanese , not Chinese . At that time , men in Japan wrote in Chinese . This made her writing feel personal and close to the reader . Scholars today call The Tale of Genji the world 's first novel . It is not a short story or a poem . It is a long work of fiction with real human feelings . The characters grow older and change over time . The book is over 1,000 years old . People still read it today . Arthur Waley made the first big English translation in the 1920s . There are now translations in more than 20 languages . Great literature can come from anywhere .
