Most of the people in this group were curiously nonspecific about titles and authors for these earlier works. The problem is it’s not the first thing to fit that broader definition. They count The Tale of Genji as a novel because it’s a long piece of fictional prose. The second group of naysayers agrees with me. Probably not pronounced that way but you get the idea. The Lord of the Rings is Yubiwa Monogatari and my personal favorite transliteration: The 1984 translation of To Kill a Mockingbird is called Arabama Monogatari. So for example, A Tale of Two Cities in Japanese is Nito Monogatari. In my view, if it looks like a novel, prints like a novel, reads like a novel: it’s a novel.Īnd if we needed more convincing, there is the fact that foreign novels translated into Japanese often get the word monogatari attached to them. I think you can tell what I think about this argument by the fact that I am still including Murasaki Shikibu in my list of novelists.
By this definition, the first novel isn’t until much later and naturally in the West, with Don Quixote being a major contender for the prize winner. Murasaki Shikibu’s genre was monogatari, a Japanese concept. First there is the group that says the novel is a Western concept. And then if you scroll down you’ll get a bunch of highly indignant sites saying, “No, no, it’s not!”Īs far as I can tell, the naysayers fall into two completely contradictory groups. If you run a Google search on what is the world’s oldest novel, the first hit you will get will say The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. My major sources were The Diary of Lady Murasaki, including the introduction in the Penguin Classic edition, and also Ivan Morris’s The World of the Shining Prince. This episode is part of Series 6: Ground-Breaking Novelists. Is it a novel? Is it the first? That’s highly contentious, but whatever you decide, Lady Murasaki Shikibu wrote this classic a very long time ago.
The Tale of Genji is often listed as the world’s first novel.
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