Written just after the year 1000 A.D. by an aristocratic lady known today as Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji was immensely popular among the author's contemporaries in Heian Japan. With the sound of flute and koto music over the pond and dragon boats under the harvest moon, this yearly festival at Daikaku-ji is as close as it gets to the courtly pastimes of Genji's day.
Murasaki wrote the Tale in 54 separate books which were avidly read by well-bred ladies of the time, as we know from the memoir As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams (Sarashina Nikki), written by Lady Sarashina. There had never been anything like it.

Up to that point, Japanese literature had consisted mostly of collections of poetry written in the borrowed Kanji script of China. Prose was limited to fairy tales and a couple of memoirs written in the new phonetic syllabary known as kana. No one had ever written a novel, let alone a novel with character development and a complex plot.

The Heian period lasted from A.D. 794-1185. The emperor had moved the capital to Nagaoka from its previous location at Nara (then known as Heijo-kyo), to escape the overbearing influence of the Kegon sect of Buddhism. Ten years later, in 794, it was shifted again to Kyoto (Heian-kyo). It was a peaceful era with the emperor acting largely as a figurehead and centre of ceremonial activities while the real political power lay in the hands of the Fujiwara clan, the power behind the throne for 500 years.

Heian Society

The society depicted in the Tale is one of an elite group of aristocrats - perhaps 5,000 in all - uninterested in anything but their own leisure and with the emperor at the centre of their world. Obsessed with rank and breeding, they were acutely sensitive to the beauty of nature and the pleasures of music, poetry, calligraphy and fine clothing. Heian courtiers knew little of the world outside the