My question is about the script of Genji Monogatari. It is easy to find many anecdotal claims that it was written in hiragana, and that this is explained by Chinese characters considered unsuitable for women to study and use at the time.
However, I ran into difficulty trying to establish if there's an actual scholarly consensus about this. The statements in English-language books - I can't read Japanese - about the history of Japanese seem more cautious; as a typical example, Bjarke Frellesvig in "A History of the Japanese Language" says that 10-11th centuries begat a large body of monogatari literature, "much of which was written in hiragana". At the same time, he mentions other genres, such as setsuwa tales, that employed the mixed kanji/kana style in the same period.
If I understand correctly, the earliest surviving manuscripts of Genji monogatari date from the 13th century, and are in mixed kanji/kana style, which might of course be due to the fact that it became standard by that time. I imagine that the question of how the original manuscript had been written has been intensely studied. Is there a consensus about whether it did or did not employ a nontrivial number of Chinese characters? If there is one, what is it based on? (e.g. maybe there are surviving period manuscripts of other monogatari writings all in hiragana, or unambiguous references to the script of Genji monogatari in some other writing from the period).