11thc is right. Whether or not that's a novel is out for discussion. I'm not sure the Japanese (or Chinese or any other culture) came up with the idea of a novel. The word is Western and it's only been recently (a hundred years or so?) that folks have looked around at other cultures for analogous literary forms. It's a really complicated topic and I ain't no literary historian.
One way of looking at it is, fantasy is a literary genre. You don't have literary genres until you have something more than "poetry" and "literature", which was pretty much the full slate until the 18thc or so. Then we start to see people speak of a new form--a "novel" form--of literature. I'm not sure when Pilgrim's Progress got tagged as the granddaddy of the novel, but my money's on the 19thc. That's the century when we really start seeing genres of literature, and that's when "fantasy" starts popping up as one of them.
IOW, fantasy as a literary construct is 19thc and after. Stories with fantastical elements are very old. Then we can start a discussion of what might be called fantastic in a world where the audience readily believed in the real existence of angels, miracles, demons, and monsters, and where the line between "real" and "unreal" was not nearly so brightly drawn as today. We might call a particular story a fantasy where someone in the 9thc would call it a story about what happened in a village in the next valley.
One way of looking at it is, fantasy is a literary genre. You don't have literary genres until you have something more than "poetry" and "literature", which was pretty much the full slate until the 18thc or so. Then we start to see people speak of a new form--a "novel" form--of literature. I'm not sure when Pilgrim's Progress got tagged as the granddaddy of the novel, but my money's on the 19thc. That's the century when we really start seeing genres of literature, and that's when "fantasy" starts popping up as one of them.
IOW, fantasy as a literary construct is 19thc and after. Stories with fantastical elements are very old. Then we can start a discussion of what might be called fantastic in a world where the audience readily believed in the real existence of angels, miracles, demons, and monsters, and where the line between "real" and "unreal" was not nearly so brightly drawn as today. We might call a particular story a fantasy where someone in the 9thc would call it a story about what happened in a village in the next valley.