The first thing you need to know about the titular character of The Tale of Genji, the world’s first novel, a thousand pages completed in Heian-period Japan around 1021 CE, is that he is hot AF, as they say on the Internet. Prince Genji, a secondary son of the emperor who is made a commoner so he won’t be threatened at court, is possessed of an astonishing beauty from birth. A traveling physiognomist declares him “destined to become the father of his people.” His nickname is The Shining Lord. Genji is so hot that men repeatedly wish he was a woman (Heian beauty standards ran androgynous). He excels at literally everything from playing the stringed koto to collecting paintings and writing poetry, not to mention constantly seducing women with his immaculate taste, only to kind of ignore them after installing them in a mansion somewhere.

In the Heian period, when Buddhism was first becoming the land’s principal religion, beauty was a moral force: The more beauty in this life, the better karma the person must have had in a previous life to deserve it, and vice versa. The best poem, painting, color-coordinated robe—these were all aesthetically as well as spiritually appealing in a kind of religiously validated, feudalist consumerism. And Prince Genji was the epitome of both.

In a dim, sectioned gallery like the chambers of a traditional Japanese house, the Metropolitan Museum has collected a Genji-themed exhibition that’s as glittering and various as the novel itself, featuring illuminated scrolls, engraved book containers, and folding screens all depicting the book’s pivotal scenes. The artwork is the result of centuries of fandom, hand-copying the tale from one generation to the next. Genji’s Heian-ideal face—a round, pallid visage with high, bushy eyebrows and a pouty mouth—shines out from all of them. He was never emperor, but the fictional prince did become the father of his people (as well as some possibly illegitimate children) through art rather than politics. The exhibition presents the novel as a wellspring of culture similar to the Bible and western art, if Jesus had been all about promiscuous sex and choosing which incense to perfume your robes with based on the season.

Rather than life-or-death decisions, the vast majority of the characters’ trials center on quoting an appropriate poem or knowing when to follow up with an absent lover. The Heian conflation of taste, ethics, and identity, not to mention their preoccupation with sending each other poem fragments like so many text messages and then fretting about not getting replies, wasn’t so far off from our own era of late decadence, the 21st century. Of course, as in our own time, the placid aestheticism was also unsustainable.

Genji was written by Murasaki Shikibu, a noblewoman from the powerful Fujiwara family serving in the court of one of the empresses at the time, Empress Shoshi, in Heian-Kyo, now Kyoto. We don’t know her real name. Murasaki is adopted from the name of Genji’s principal love, thought to be a stand-in for the author, and Shikibu is derived from her father’s position. Yet she’s one of the most famous authors, especially female authors, of all time.