Not every enduring literary masterpiece inspires a thousand years of often great art. “The Tale of Genji,” written in early-11th-century Japan and possibly the world’s first novel, is an exception. A n arratively rich saga of life and love at the Japanese imperial court, it spurred innovation and was in many ways foundational to Japanese art itself.

Similarly, only a few museums can do justice to such a long span of creativity. Prominent among them is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose “‘The Tale of Genji’: A Japanese Classic Illuminated,” is glorious, as sumptuous and sprawling as the book itself, full of rare loans from Japanese institutions.

“Genji,” the book, is one of the monuments of Japan’s Heian period (794-1185), widely considered its golden age. It was then that the kingdom decisively freed itself from Chinese influence, developing, for example, its own syllabic writing, called kana, in which “Genji” was executed, and which shortly became the basis for a new Japanese calligraphy. At the same time, the Japanese emperors were becoming largely ceremonial, if not decadent; in reality, Japan was ruled by a succession of aristocratic clans, headed by a shogun, starting with the Fujiwara family.