Murasaki (紫) is the Japanese word for "purple" or "lavender" — also the name of the Lithospermum plant used to dye purple. Murasaki Shikibu (c. 973-1014) was the *Heian-era Japanese lady-in-waiting and author of The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari) — widely considered the world's first psychological novel and the first novel by a woman in any language. Her diary, the Murasaki Shikibu Nikki, is one of the most vivid eyewitness accounts of life at the Heian imperial court.*
Featured on the 2,000-yen Japanese banknote.
Murasaki does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Murasaki reduce to 3, The Communicator. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.