Rivals surround the court like ninefold mists
That obscure my view . . . all that I can do
Is imagine the moon above the clouds.
—poem from The Tale of Genji
Last year, he was the most trusted advisor to the world’s most powerful man. His compound is filled with consorts and children. People pore over his aphoristic writings and envy his wealth.
I’m not talking about Elon Musk but rather the eponymous hero of The Tale of Genji, the thousand-year-old novel written by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady of the Japanese court. The book’s hundreds of pages of prose and poetry comprise the cornerstone of the Japanese literary canon. The Tale of Genji is arguably the world’s first novel and depicts what may be the first antihero. Murasaki Shikibu authored it at the height of the Heian era (794–1185 AD) in the vernacular language, part of a lush flowering of great women writers, who outpaced the men still fettered by the use of classical Chinese.