If you've ever fallen in love with a novel
you know the moment:
you look at the clock,
it's one in the morning,
and you still can't put the book down.
You've been pulled into a world
conjured from someone else's imagination,
where the thoughts and feelings
of the people on the pages
are as real as your own.
It's hard to imagine a time
before novels as we know them existed --
but there was, in fact, a first novel.
And if we want to understand
how it came into being,
we have to look
more than 1000 years into the past,
at the writing desk of one woman.
Her name was Murasaki Shikibu,
or at least,
that's the only name we can give her now.
Born into an aristocratic Japanese family
sometime in the 970s,
she lived in at time when the name of women
were rarely recorded.
Instead, well-born women like Murasaki
were given nicknames:
usually related to the rank or position
of a close male relative.
She lived in an intensely-cloistered world
where women were constantly shielded
from public view by screens or curtains.
Sometimes, it was easier to identify
an aristocratic woman by the distinctive pattern
of a protruding sleeve than by her face.
Despite the often suffocating limitations
on their lives,
women like Murasaki were educated
and expected to be highly literate.
The granddaughter of a famous poet
and the daughter of a scholar,
Murasaki became conversant in Japanese
and Chinese literature so quickly,
she was considered something of a literary prodigy.
In her diary, Murasaki recorded
her father's reactions when he realized
exactly how talented she was.
He said,
"Just my luck.
What a pity she was not born a man."
In her early twenties, she married a man
old enough to be her father,
who died only two years later,
but not before they had a daughter.
Instead of marrying again,
the gifted young widow and mother
began working on The Tale of Genji,
an intricate saga of romance and intrigue,
in the life of an imperial Prince.
The Tale of Genji is often considered
the first modern novel,
because Murasaki offered readers
not just a chronicle of events,
but deep psychological insight into the characters
and their inner lives.
Her story made history because it was more
than just a story:
it was a complex literary portrait
of what it means to be human.
Although the hero of The Tale of Genji
is a man named "Prince Genji,"
Shikibu filled her novel with multifaceted
female characters who provided a rare glimpse
into how it felt to be a woman in her world.
As Virginia Woolf later wrote,
when Murasaki set out to illuminate
the complicated life of the prince,
she naturally chose the medium
of other women's minds.
The Tale of Genji earned Murasaki
a permanent place in literary history.
It may also have helped her secure a position
at the imperial court,
where she became an attendant and occasional
tutor to the Empress Shoshi.
Murasaki became quite close with the Empress,
and even secretly taught her Chinese:
a language only men were supposed to learn.
Although it was a comfortable life,
Murasaki was often lonely,
and her literary fame made her the target
of court gossips, who called her
pretentious, arrogant, and unfriendly --
complaints often heard about successful women
even today.
No one is sure exactly when Murasaki died,
but the legacy she left behind
changed Japanese literature forever,
and left a mark on the broader world of fiction
that can never be erased.
Throughout history, great novels
have traditionally been considered the domain
of male writers,
while tales of romance,
especially those written by women,
are often dismissed as frivolous or inferior.
But history itself tells a very different story.
Not only was the first novel a romance,
but it was one of the greatest literary masterpieces
in human history --
and it was written by a woman.
Because she dared to imagine the world
in ways that no one had before,
we can still hear her voice echoing through time
more than a thousand years later,
daring us to imagine worlds of our own.