Novelist. One of the earliest novelists, perhaps the earliest, her vast work, The Tale of Genji, describes life in the Heian court of Japan, an extraordinary society in which beauty (whether in nature, architecture, art, poetry, love, dress, or other aspects of ordinary life) was elevated to the highest rung of human values. Was life in this court artificial, cut off from the life and death struggles of ordinary Japanese? Or was it one of the high points of human cultural history? Fortunately Lady Murasaki has preserved it for us and for the ages.