WEBMurasaki Shikibu (紫式部, ' Lady Murasaki '; c. 973 – c. 1014 or 1025) was a Japanese novelist, poet and lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court in the Heian period. She is best known as the author of The Tale of Genji , widely considered to be one of the world's first novels , written in Japanese between about 1000 and 1012.