The year 2008 is one of celebration in Japan and particularly in Kyoto, for an unlikely reason. The reason for all the hoopla can be traced back to a remark recorded casually, but purposively, in a journal entry dated the first day of the eleventh month, 1008. The writer had this to say on that day a thousand years ago:
Peering in [Kintô] said, “Excuse me, but would our Young Murasaki [Waka-Murasaki] be serving somewhere around here?” I thought that since I saw no one who could possibly resemble Genji it would be all the more the case that the Mistress [ka no Ue, i.e., Murasaki no Ue] would not be present, and I thus apprised him. (Wallace, p, 151)
And so we have from Murasaki Shikibu's own journal the most reliable contemporary evidence that she was the author of The Tale of Genji,...
