Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan

Sugawara no Takasue no Musume, 1008-Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.2
Word count
322K words
Chapters
33

Tags

English Originals World HistoryWomen's Biography Tender SentimentClassical ProseDiary FormTraditional AestheticsPalace LifeHeian PeriodFolk CustomsFemale Perspective

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan by Izumi Shikibu et al.Author: Sugawara no Takasue no Musume, 1008-,Language: English, Class: PL: Language and Literatures: Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania, Release Date: Oct 19, 2014

Editor's review

This English translation collects diaries by court women of Japan's Heian period, centered on the core entries by Sugawara no Takasue's daughter and including works by Izumi Shikibu and others. Its value lies first in a firsthand perspective: through these women's pens readers see the daily details, emotional fluctuations, and aesthetic tastes of court life, rather than the dynastic image summarized by later histories. Second, the diary form sits between record and literature, with meticulous descriptions of seasons, ceremonies, and human relations that also retain a colloquial narrative rhythm, making it an important sample for understanding how Heian literature moved from the Chinese-language tradition to kana prose. The English translation lowers the language barrier and suits readers beginning comparative literature and classical Japanese literature. Read it as essays rather than seeking continuous plot, and focus on how it captures scenery and moods. For writers, such diaries are also good material for observing how private writing becomes literature.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the core entries by Sugawara no Takasue's daughter first, then return to the other court women's diaries and compare narrative perspectives.
  2. After each passage, jot down seasonal imagery and emotional threads to build an overall impression.
  3. Read alongside a chronology of the Heian period to help place people and events.
  4. Don't look up every word; grasp tone and scene first, then return to difficult sentences.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33

FAQ

Is this a complete long diary? No. It is an English translation compiled from several court women's diaries, each relatively independent and of varying length. Read it section by section rather than as one continuous novel from start to finish.
Can I read it if my English isn't strong? The translation is generally plain, though court titles, clothing, and ceremonial terms pose some obstacles. Intermediate English is enough to try; skip proper nouns at first and focus on scene and emotion.
Do I need prior knowledge of classical Japanese literature? Not necessarily. The diaries are fragmentary, and direct reading still conveys the atmosphere of court life. To understand their place in literary history, first learn a little about the rise of Heian kana prose.

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About the author

Sugawara no Takasue no Musume, 1008- Author · Japanese · 1008

Sugawara no Takasue no Musume (born 1008, date of death unknown) was a Japanese woman writer of the Heian period, born into a scholarly family; her father, Sugawara no Takasue, was a man of letters of his time. She is best known as the author of The Sarashina Diary, a memoir-like work that recounts her life from girlhood to middle age in delicate, sincere prose, and is regarded as one of the representative works of Heian-period women's diary literature. The library holds her work Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan, which shows that her diary writing has also drawn attention in the English-speaking world. Public information about her life is limited; apart from her family background and this diary, most details are unverifiable, and her literary value lies chiefly in her faithful record of personal inner feelings and the customs of her age.