One of the pleasures of living in Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto is that you don’t have to go far to find something beautiful or intriguing or mysterious. For example, I live in a neighbourhood called Murasakino (Purple Moor), which was the emperor’s hunting ground more than a millennium ago. Today it’s more famous for having one of Kyoto’s largest Zen temples, Daitokuji. What makes Murasakino really special to me, though, is its association with Murasaki Shikibu (c. 978 ~ c. 1014), the author of the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji. She’s also featured in the current NHK taiga drama, Hikaru kimi e.

Just minutes up Horikawa Avenue from where I live is Lady Murasaki’s grave, down a narrow alley on the grounds of the Shimadzu Murasakino Works, an industrial machinery and technology firm. A stone on the main street marks her grave; in the fall, it’s festooned with the brilliant purple berries of a flowering tree named after her in Japanese, and which is known in English as the Japanese beauty berry, or calicarpa in Latin.

What’s even more curious is that Lady Murasaki is not alone there—she shares her plot with the tomb of Heian Period poet and magistrate Ono no Takamura (802–853). One fatuous legend says he and Murasaki were lovers, which is impossible because he lived almost two centuries before her. (Takamura was, however, grandfather to Ono no Komachi, one of Japan’s greatest poets and beauties.)

So then why are the two buried side by side? Well, another legend has it that Takamura interceded for Murasaki in the afterlife. Although The Tale of Genji is considered one of the monumental works of world literature, later generations of Japanese considered it a salacious tome. They also viewed its author—who wove a fabric of lies about the adulterous goings-on of the aristocracy—as a deeply sinful woman who was punished in hell for what she wrote. In fact, she is the subject of a noh play, Genji kuyō (To Hallow Genji), in which both the author and her hero beg a priest to pray for their souls. In a coup de théâtre, Murasaki reveals herself to be Kannon, the bodhisattva of mercy.

Takamura’s talent for interceding on behalf of lost souls is well known. On the other side of town, in the grounds of the temple Chinnōji in Rokuhara, are two wells. One is known as Meido no I (Hell’s Well), and the other Yomigaeri no I (Well of Rebirth). The busy Takamura, after a day hearing lawsuits for Emperor Saga, reportedly descended to the underworld every night to defend souls before Enma, the king of hell. Even so, no one knows how he ended up in Murasakino alongside Genji’s author.

Murasaki is famous in Uji, a city not far from Kyoto, for the last ten chapters of her epic tale, and Ishiyamadera over in Shiga Prefecture is touted as where she began writing it. However, it’s mostly in my neighbourhood where she was born, lived and died. Just east of the palace gardens on Teramachi, the temple Rozanji is the site where Murasaki and her father lived and where she wrote most of her novel. In the grounds of Shinjūan, one of Daitokuji’s subtemples, only a ten-minute walk from her grave, is a stone font in which baby Murasaki is said to have had her first bath. Is it a coincidence that she is the namesake of her neighbourhood?

To top all this off, we don’t even know her real name, only that she was from a minor branch of the Fujiwara family. Murasaki was a nickname the regent Fujiwara Michinaga gave her after her great work’s heroine. Intriguing and mysterious at the very least.