Works
Three works are attributed to Murasaki: The Tale of Genji, The Diary of Lady Murasaki and Poetic Memoirs, a collection of 128 poems. Her work is considered important because her writing reflects the creation and development of Japanese writing during a period when Japanese shifted from an unwritten vernacular to a written language. Until the 9th century Japanese language texts were written in Chinese characters using the man'yōgana writing system. A revolutionary achievement was the development of kana, a true Japanese script, in the mid-to late 9th century. Japanese authors began to write prose in their own language, which led to genres such as tales (monogatari) and poetic journals (Nikki Bungaku). Historian Edwin Reischauer writes that genres such as the monogatari were distinctly Japanese and that Genji, written in kana, "was the outstanding work of the period".
Read more about this topic: Murasaki Shikibu
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“The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.”
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