Late in the 990s, Murasaki became one of the several wives of her second cousin Fujiwara no Nobutaka, an official of the Ministry of Ceremonials and man about the Court. This 'masculine' learning was (of course) perfectly useless to Murasaki and a source of embarrassment, as it labelled her an unfeminine bluestocking. As a child, she was permitted to study Chinese literature along with her brother, with such success that her father openly mourned she had not been born a boy. She was the daughter of a lower level official, Fujiwara no Tametoki, who had literary pretensions instead of rank or connections. The woman known to us as Murasaki Shikibu was probably born in the early to mid 970s AD. It is difficult to write a biography of a woman whose birth and death are unrecorded and whose very name is unknown - not that people have let this stop them!
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