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Murasaki Shikibu is the best known writer to emerge from Japan's glorious Heian period. Her novel, The Tale of Genji (Genji-monogatari) is considered to be one of the world's finest and earliest novels. Some argue that Murasaki is the world's first modern novelist.
By the 18th century, letter writing was so commonplace that one of the first prose narratives to be considered a novel, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, was composed entirely of letters of a daughter to her parents, and the epistolary method lent that novel what realism it possessed.