The Ghost of Lady Murasaki

A thousand years ago, she wrote The Tale of Genji, a story of sex and intrigue in Japan's imperial court. I went to Kyoto to find her.

- By Lauren Groff

In mid-April, I flew to Japan because I'd become obsessed with an 11th-century Japanese novel called The Tale of Genji. I also had a frantic longing to escape my country. At its best, literature is a way to loft readers so far above the burning present that we can see a vast landscape of time below us. From the clouds, we watch the cyclical turn of seasons and history, and can take a sort of bitter comfort in the fact that humans have always been a species that simply can't help setting our world on fire.

I was bewildered that The Tale of Genji had such a hold on me at this particular moment: It is a wild, confounding work that many consider to be the first novel ever written, by a mysterious woman whose true name we'll never know, but whom we call Murasaki Shikibu, or Lady Murasaki. The novel is more than 1,000 pages long, more than 1,000 years old, and larded with enigmatic poetry. It's about people whose lives differ so much-in custom, religion, education, wealth, privilege, politics, hierarchy, aesthetics-from the lives of 21st-century Americans that most of their concerns have become nearly illegible to us through the scrim of time and language.