Murasaki

Murasaki refers to both the heroine of the Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji), and the book's author, Murasaki Shikibu. In both cases the name is a pseudonym, and the real names are unknown.

In the court manners of the time (the Heian Period), it was considered unacceptably familiar and vulgar, to freely address people by their personal name, or even by their clan's name. As a result, the real name of the author is lost, and she was called Murasaki Shikibu: Murasaki after the heroine she invented; Shikibu after her father's official rank. The author Murasaki was an aristocrat, the daughter of a provincial governor who probably belonged to a minor branch of the mighty Fujiwara clan. She served as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Shoshi (a daughter of the powerful Fujiwara Michinaga), and was a literary contemporary and rival of Sei Shōnagon.

When Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, she followed the customs of her class and time, so that most of the characters in the novel are never identified by name, but rather by either their rank and title (in the case of male persons), rank and title of their male relatives (in the case of female persons), or after the name of their habitation (in the case of the great court ladies). Thus in the case of Murasaki, the lady in the novel, the author often calls her "The Lady of the West Wing". This "Lady of the West Wing" is commonly named Murasaki in commentaries and translations. Today, this serves to make the novel more easily comprehensible to those unfamiliar with Heian era court manners and titles, but we know that the author's contemporaries already referred to this character by this name - and nicknamed the author after her.

Murasaki (disambiguation)

Murasaki is the main character in The Tale of Genji.

Murasaki may also refer to:

People

Fictional

Others

Murasaki (novel)

Murasaki is a 1992 "shared universe" hard science fiction novel in six parts to which Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin, Nancy Kress and Frederik Pohl each contributed one chapter; it was edited by Robert Silverberg. It is the first anthology of this type to be entirely conceived and written by winners of the Nebula Award.

The scenery is set in a fictional double planet system in orbit around an actually existing red dwarf star (HD36395; also known as Gliese 205 and Wolf 1453), about 20 light years from our solar system. Because the system had been first explored by a Japanese robot interstellar probe the star has been given the proper name Murasaki (after the famous Japanese writer, Murasaki Shikibu). The larger of the two planets is Genji, named after Hikaru Genji, the hero of her novel Genji Monogatari; the smaller one is named Chujo, after Genji's close friend Tō no Chūjō.

Fictional physical characteristics of the Murasaki system

Poul Anderson, who had a degree in physics, worked out the physical framework for the anthology based on the characteristics of HD36395 as they were known in the early 1990s: one third of Earth Sun's mass, 82% of its diameter, spectral type M1 with a photosphere temperature of 3,400 K and a maximum emission in the near infrared. (The star is in fact very similar to Gliese 581, now known to have a planetary system.)