Was "The Tale of Genji" really written completely or almost completely in hiragana?


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).




I'm not finding anything at the level one could cite in a paper after a brief
search in Japanese, but three different sources ([Japanese
Wikipedia](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%BA%90%E6%B0%8F%E7%89%A9%E8%AA%9E),
NHK Kids show, and [Japanese version of yahoo
answers](http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q11135030366))
agree that the original was written in a mix of kana and kanji. The "yahoo
answers" answerer points out that there is no copy of the original.

