Students Digitize Poems From World’s First Novel
- Editor OGN Daily
- Jul 22
- 2 min read
One woman penned 795 poems in the 11th century as part of a larger book - The Tale of Genji - widely believed to be the world’s first novel.
The Tale of Genji is a significant piece of classic Japanese literature, and not just because of its age. At over 500,000 words, it’s also one of history’s longest novels.
Written by Murasaki Shikibu, a court assistant or “lady-in-waiting” during the Heian period (794 to 1185 AD), Genji is a tale of love, adventure, and intrigue that spans the title prince’s life. But the novel also interweaves a repository of 795 poems throughout its roughly 1,300 pages - each written from the one of 118 separate characters’ perspectives, including mothers, servants, emperors, lovers, and Genji himself.
Scholars and students have spent nearly a decade documenting and digitizing a vast, first-of-its-kind repository for hundreds of medieval Japanese poems. After 1,000 years, reports Popular Science, the remarkable poetry has now joined the digital age - after a professor conceived of it as a way to get his students "to slow down and pay more attention to the poems.”
Poetry was a popular form of communication in both written and spoken form during the Heian period. In this sense, Murasaki was simply reflecting the era in which she lived. But to do so at such a scale required a remarkable level of talent.
“It’s a really extraordinary feat to be able to ventriloquize all of these highly distinct characters and come up with the kind of poems that they would write,” J. Keith Vincent, a Boston University College of Arts and Sciences associate professor of Japanese and comparative literature, explained in the project’s accompanying announcement. “Within 200 years of finishing her book, the greatest poets in Japan were saying, ‘It’s basically impossible to become a poet without having memorized The Tale of Genji.’”
In total, Vincent estimated the database took around 150 students “hundreds and hundreds of hours” and “I thought of the project as a way to get students to slow down and pay more attention to the poems,” he said. And now everyone can enjoy the Genji Poem database.
