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Secondary sourceBook1650

Eiri Genji Monogatari

Yamamoto Shunshō · 1650

The first illustrated woodblock-printed edition of The Tale of Genji, which carried Murasaki Shikibu's novel from hand-copied manuscripts into mass commercial print.

This is the first printed, illustrated edition of Murasaki Shikibu's novel, showing its spread into mass print culture.

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Photograph of the front cover of a Japanese book bound in pale green-grey paper. A vertical cream label on the cover bears brush-written Japanese characters and a small seal-like stamp appears at lower left. A color calibration chart and a metric ruler are along the edges of the image.
Yamamoto Shunshō (illustrator), Eiri Genji Monogatari, 1650.

About this source

What it is

This is an illustrated, woodblock-printed edition of The Tale of Genji, produced in 1650 with illustrations by Yamamoto Shunshō. It consists of 51 volumes and was published in Japan.

Why it matters

Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji around six centuries earlier, and for most of that time it circulated as hand-copied manuscripts among a small elite. This printed edition shows how, by the mid-1600s, her novel had become available to a much wider readership through the new technology of commercial woodblock printing, with illustrations shaping how readers imagined her story.

Look closer

  • What does the shift from manuscript to printed book suggest about who could read Genji in 1650 compared with Murasaki's own time?
  • How might illustrations change the way readers understand a story originally told only in words?
  • What has survived on this cover, and what does it not tell us about the contents inside?

This book is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Murasaki Shikibu on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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A long horizontal handscroll of calligraphy on multiple panels of differently colored paper, including grey-blue, pale yellow, pink, and deep red sheets, with brushed columns of Japanese text running across the whole length.Book

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