A prince of radiant beauty and no political future moves through the Heian court like light through silk, illuminating every woman he touches and leaving each one in some new shade of sorrow. Written around 1010 by Murasaki Shikibu, a widowed lady-in-waiting who understood power and its consolations, this is the world's first great novel, a thousand pages that invented psychological fiction before the Western world had conceived of it. Its chapters unfold not with plot but with the logic of seasons, each affair a variation on the theme of impermanence. Genji collects lovers the way a calligrapher collects brushes, each suited to a different stroke. Yet the collecting reveals itself at last as loss dressed in perfume and ceremony.