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94 branch of literature. But Murasaki no Shikibu did more than merely write a successful novel. Like Fielding in England, she was the creator in Japan of this kind of fiction—the prose epic of real life, as it has been called. In the quality of her genius, however, she more resembled Fielding's great contemporary Richardson. Before her time we have nothing but stories of no great length, and of a romantic character far removed from the realities of daily life. The Genji Monogatari is realistic in the best sense of the word. Here we see depicted men and women, especially women, as they are, in their everyday lives and surroundings, their sentiments and passions, their faults and weaknesses. The author does not aim at startling or horrifying her readers, and she has a wholesome abhorrence for all that is sensational, unnatural, monstrous, or improbable. Such a hero as the nineteenth-century novelist Bakin's Tametomo, who has two pupils to his eyes and one arm longer than the other, and who, after falling over a cliff many thousand feet high, presently picks himself up and walks home several miles as if nothing had happened, would have seemed to her as ridiculous as he does to ourselves. There are few dramatic situations in the Genji, and what little of miraculous and supernatural it contains is of a kind which might well be believed by a contemporary reader. The story flows on easily from one scene of real life to another giving us a varied and minutely detailed picture of life and society at Kiōto such as we possess for no other country at the same period.

The hero is the son of a Mikado by a favourite concubine, whose colleagues are all jealous of the preference shown her, and are continually annoying her in a petty way. She takes this so much to heart that she falls ill