First let me just apologise, I've not had the chance to come here for a very long time now and probably won't get a chance to come with any kind of regularity till about march. :(

Anyway I was just reading some tidbits in my book on Women's History and it looks like the credit for the first work of fiction belongs to Lady Murasaki Shikibu who was a member of the Fujiwara family, though her true name is long forgotten (well for the most part not too many Lady's names of the Heian era are known as far as I am aware, as they were usually associated with the males of their family).

It's title (meant to be read aloud) is Tales of Genji and has 54 chapters and spans more than 1,000 pages and is the first written work to resemble the literary form of a novel.




Well, that's it for now.