The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (1010)

At the Heian court, a love affair was conducted in poems on scented paper, a single sleeve glimpsed beneath a blind, the precise incense a lover chose for the season. Into this world of screens and ceremony Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting, set the Shining Prince, Genji, who moves through fifty-four chapters and a procession of women as though chasing a brightness that keeps dissolving in his hands. Centuries before the European novel located the inner life, she had already mapped it, and mapped it most fully in the women rank and custom keep from acting, whose confinement makes their consciousness the most legible thing in the book. The Japanese have a name for what Genji feels even at the height of his happiness: mono no aware, the ache of passing things, the blossom loved hardest in the instant before it falls. Near the end he simply vanishes, the chapter that should hold his death left blank, and the story drifts on among his descendants as though the radiance had quietly left the room.