Scholars and students have spent nearly a decade documenting and digitizing a vast, first-of-its-kind repository for hundreds of medieval Japanese poems. Instead, a single woman penned all the 11th century poems as part of a larger book, widely believed to be the world’s first novel. The Tale of Genji is a significant piece of classic Japanese literature, and not just because of its age. Today, there are four main English translations of the entire novel, as well as another translation work focused on only the poems. Combine those with the original Japanese, and that adds up to nearly 4,000 entries.