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Around the year 1008 , a lady - in - waiting at the Japanese imperial court in Kyoto set down a story unlike anything written before . Her name was Murasaki Shikibu , and she served Empress Shoshi at the Heian court . We do not know her real name — Murasaki Shikibu is the name history gave her , borrowed partly from her own fictional characters . The book she wrote is called The Tale of Genji . It follows the life of Genji , the son of a Japanese emperor , across more than 50 chapters and roughly 54 years of story time . It is not a collection of tales or a long poem . It has psychological depth , shifting narrators , and characters who grow old and change . These are the qualities that make scholars call it the world 's first novel . Murasaki chose to write in Japanese at a time when educated men wrote almost exclusively in Chinese . That choice shaped the whole texture of her prose — intimate , emotional , and precise about interior life . The Tale of Genji has never stopped being read . Arthur Waley published the first major English translation in the 1920s . A new translation by Royall Tyler appeared in 2001 . Both confirmed what Japanese readers had known for ten centuries . One woman , writing at court around the year 1000 , invented a form that the whole world would later call its own .
