Return to the index of "Other Women's Voices."
Updated 03-09-08
Michitsuna no haha
/Udaisho Michitsuna no haha (c.935-995)
========================================================================
"SHE HAD OCCASION TO LOOK AT THE OLD ROMANCES, AND FOUND
THEM MASSES OF THE RANKEST FABRICATION."
========================================================================
Michitsuna no haha is Japanese for "Michitsuna's mother"; sometimes her son's title, "Udaisho" (Commander), is also used. We don't know the author's personal name. We do know that, before her marriage, she was considered an accomplished poet and a beauty. During her marriage, she continued to write; she participated in poetry contests and composed screen poems on commission. Thirty-six of her poems were collected in imperial anthologies. After her husband's death in 990, she may have become a Buddhist nun.
Fujiwara no Kaneie, the husband whose attention the young
poet seems to have needed rather desperately, was from an already
influential family, and he would become a very influential man:
regent in 986, chancellor in 989. For the next hundred years,
his descendants by his principal wife (not Michitsuna's mother)
would be de facto rulers of Japan, more powerful than
the emperors. During the time covered by much of this book, Kaneie
was a young man on the rise, with a reputation for romantic adventures.
The title of Michitsuna no haha's book is Kagero nikki;
Edward Seidensticker translates "kagero" as "gossamer";
literally it means "summer haze," from a line at the
end of Book 1: "Call it, this journal of mine, a shimmering
of the summer sky" (Seidensticker, p. 69). Nikki
literally means "daily record," but the word was used
in this period to describe any kind of memoir or personal reminiscence.
This doesn't mean that the stories told in the various nikki
are to be taken as literal truth. They are not diaries; most
are carefully organized into an artistic whole, with order of
events and details of those events subordinated to that artistic
goal.
Kagero nikki covers 20 years in its three books: the first
two books were apparently written well after the events they
describe; the last seems to describe the recent past. Book 1
treats the first 15 years of the marriage; Book 2 describes the
narrator looking for peace in nature and religion during the
next few years; in Book 3, she has learned to view Kaneie objectively
and to turn her affection to her grown son. This son, Michitsuna
(955-1020), achieved a reasonably high position, but never rose
as high as his half-brothers.
On this page you'll find:
Links to helpful sites online.
Excerpts from translations in print.
Information about secondary sources.
========================================================================
1. From Edward Seidensticker's translation of Kagero nikki, called The Gossamer Years (for more from Seidensticker, see below, under "In print"):
(a) The first third of Book 1; Seidensticker's notes are also given.
(b) A bit down from top, a brief passage from the opening of Book II: on a 969 illness that occurred while her husband was away on a retreat at a mountain temple.
(c) In this course outline, go to "Week Eight" for links to three later passages from Book II; they describe the narrator separated from her husband and under pressure from her son and from others to return to him. You can also link to the excerpts in Japanese script.
2. From other translators:
(a) About half way down the page and then further down, two verse passages from Kagero nikki, both translated by Sonja Arntzen: "For so many years," and "From beyond the clouds." And at another site, also by Arntzen, "The fisherman's fires."
(b) After the original is given in script and romanization, a poem from the opening of Kagero nikki, the narrator's first reply to the repeated appeals of Fujiwara no Kaneie, "Let no bird waste its song," translated and commented on by Rikky Kersten.
4. Poems from imperial anthologies, translated by Thomas McAuley and accompanied by the Japanese script and romanization:
(a) "She who's died," on her mother's death, from the 1086 Goshuishu.
(b) "Is it all so hopeless?" from the c.1220 Shinkokinshu.
(c) "On the gusting wind," also from Shinkokinshu.
5. Translations of Michitsuna no haha's poem in an important 1200s anthology, Hyakunin Isshu:
(a) Clay MacCauley's version, "modernized," "Lying all alone"; the original is also given, in script and in romanization.
(b) "All through the long and dreary night," by William N. Porter, with a 1700s woodcut.
(c) Kenneth Rexroth's version, "Have you any idea?"
(d) In an essay on translation by Robin D. Gill, six versions of the poem by various translators and three "creative rewritings" by Gill.
6. Essays, etc:
(a) Michael Hoffman's 2007 "Paean to Heian," which describes Heian culture and discusses Kagero nikki as well as Genji monogatori. (Hoffman quotes from Paul Gordon Schalow's 2007 study; for more on that, see "Secondary sources.")
(b) In "Translating Woman: Reading the Female Through the Male" (1999), Valerie Henitiuk discusses in detail the different translations of Kagero nikki, comparing those of Seidensticker, Arntzen, and Helen Craig McCullough (for information on a 2000 essay by Henitiuk, see "Secondary sources").
(c) An abstract of a 2001 conference presentation by Henitiuk, "The Authentic Self in Rousseau and Michitsuna's Mother."
(d) A 1996 essay by by Caitlin Howell, "Motivations of the Author of the Kagero Nikki."
(e) The first of a group of 1995 conference abstracts gives Arntzen's thoughts on the relationship between prose and poetry, "Life's Text on the Warp of waka: The Kagero Diary."
7. Reviews (for excerpts from the translation, see "In print": for information on the other books' treatment of Kagero nikki, see "Secondary sources") :
(a) Branislav L. Slantchev on Arntzen's 1997 translation, The Kagero Diary: A Woman's Autobiographical Text from Tenth-century Japan, which has near the end some interesting comments on male and female translators and readers.
(b) Robert D. Wilson on Paul Gordon Schalow's 2007 study, A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan.
(c) Donald Richie on John R. Wallace's 2005 study, Objects of Discourse: Memoirs by Women of Heian Japan.
(d) Timothy J. Van Compernolle on the 2001 essay collection, The Father-daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father.
(e) Mark Morris on Donald Keene's 1993 history, Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century
8. For historical background:
(a) A 1994 essay on the Fujiwara Regency; Fujiwara no Kaneie was one of its first main figures.
(b) Richard Hooker's 1996 "Women and Women's Communities in Ancient Japan," which includes a short section on Kagero nikki.
(c) The Wikipedia entry on nikki bungaku, the genre of literary diaries of which Kagero nikki is the earliest known example.
========================================================================
[Edward Seidensticker translated Kagero nikki in 1955; his introduction gives good background information on the period, and the notes are helpful:]
Michitsuna no Haha. The gossamer years = Kagero nikki: the
diary of a noblewoman of Heian Japan / translated by Edward Seidensticker
(UNESCO collection of representative works. Japanese series).
Tokyo; Rutland, Vt.: C.E. Tuttle, [1994], 1973. (201 p., [7]
p. of plates: ill., map)
LC# PL789.F8 K313; ISBN: 0804811237, 22014753
[First published as: Asiatic Society of Japan. Transactions.
3d ser., v. 4; Tokyo (1955)].
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But they must all be recounted, events of long ago, events
of but yesterday."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[The first paragraph of the Kagero nikki is told in the third person, the rest in the first person. Seidensticker notes in his introduction that the literal translation of the phrase he gives as "her own dreary life" is in fact "her own not-human position" (p.28):]
These times have passed, and there was one who drifted uncertainly through them, scarcely knowing where she was. It was perhaps natural that such should be her fate. She was less handsome than most, and not remarkably gifted. Yet, as the days went by in monotonous succession, she had occasion to look at the old romances, and found them masses of the rankest fabrication. Perhaps, she said to herself, even the story of her own dreary life, set down in a journal, might be of interest; and it might also answer a question: had that life been one befitting a well-born lady? But they must all be recounted, events of long ago, events of but yesterday. She was by no means certain that she could bring them to order. [p.33]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...wished that he had had the courtesy to hide his new
affair."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Kaneie was 25 when he wanted to marry the narrator, who was about 19; he was already married and had one son by his principal wife:]
....[H]e went directly to my father with hints, possibly half-joking
at first, that he would like to marry me; and even after I had
indicated how inappropriate I found the idea he sent a mounted
messenger to pound on my gate. [p.33]
--------------
[The narrator was married to Kaneie, but, according to custom, continued to live at home waiting for her husband to visit; the wait was frequently a long one. Within a year, her father was sent as a governor far away from the capital:]
The Prince [Kaneie] showed little prospect of becoming the
reliable support we had hoped. [p.37]
--------------
[In the following year she had a son --- Michitsuna. The narrator believed that this would keep Kaneie's interest; she was wrong:]
But the following month I received a shock. Toying with my writing box one morning just after he had left, I came upon a note obviously intended for another woman.... [I] wished that he had had the courtesy to hide his new affair somewhat more cleverly, perhaps to keep it out of sight for awhile, as he could very easily have done, under the cloak of court business. [pp.37-38]
------------------------
"I was satisfied."
------------------------
[There is one surprisingly frank passage; like us, the narrator's contemporaries might well have felt pleasure at a rival's unhappiness, but, like us, they would have hidden it under a facade of polite concern --- at least in retrospect. The "lady in the alley" is the other woman referred to above:]
[In 958] It began to appear that the lady in the alley had fallen from favor since the birth of her child. I had prayed, at the height of my unhappiness, that she would live to know what I was then suffering, and it seemed that my prayers were being answered. She was alone, and now her child was dead....
The lady was of frightfully bad birth --- the unrecognized child of a rather odd prince, it was said. For a moment she had been able to use a person who was unaware of her shortcomings, and now she was abandoned. The pain must be even sharper than mine had been. I was satisfied. [p.44]
---------------------------------------
"I shall be forgiven, I hope,..."
---------------------------------------
[The narrator accepted the conventional restrictions on what a nikki should and should not contain; at one point she apologizes for speaking of the wider world:]
"...[A] remarkable incident upset everything. I do not know what crimes they may have been guilty of, but a number of officials were demoted and banished, and finally..., the Minister of the Left too was dismissed from office. Great numbers of people crowded around his mansion..., but he fled without seeing them.... It was all extremely sad, I thought, and when someone as distant as I from the event was so deeply affected there can hardly have been a dry sleeve in the city. His children were separated and sent off the remote provinces, who knows where, or forced to become priests --- it was indeed unspeakable sad....
Though this is a journal in which I should set down only things that immediately concern me, the shock of the banishment was something very close to me, and I shall be forgiven, I hope, for treating it in such detail. [pp.72-73]
-------------------------------------------------------------
"It was perhaps because I was traveling alone...."
-------------------------------------------------------------
[For much of her life, only travel and exposure to nature were able to bring the narrator out of her self-absorption:]
I had wanted for some years to make a pilgrimage.... I was never free to follow my own inclinations, and I finally had to postpone it to the Ninth Month....
I raised the carriage blinds for a full view of the river. [S]mall boats dotted the surface, now passing up and down, now crossing one another in and out, more of them than I had ever seen before. My men, tired from the long walk, had found some odd-looking limes and pears and were eating them happily. It was most touching....
The water fowl moved me strangely. It was perhaps because I was traveling alone that I was so taken with everything along the way. [p.66]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It was almost as if I had been reborn into a different
world."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
I grew increasingly restless toward the end of the month, and... I decided to go to Karaski on the lake shore for the purification, and in the process possibly to find some peace of mind....
Presently the road turned into the mountains. It was as though we were cleanly shut off from the city, and I felt a strong sense of release, a reaction no doubt to the depression that had been plaguing me so.... Some woodcutters came pulling their carts down from the dark woods above, so new a sight to me that it was almost as if I had been reborn into a different world. [pp.82-83]
------------------------------------
"I had expected too much."
------------------------------------
[By 970, she was able to look back at 16 years of marriage to Kaneie with some objectivity and self-analysis:]
One day, as I sat looking out at the rain, knowing that today there was less chance than usual of seeing him, my thoughts turned to the past. The fault was not mine, there was something wanting in him. It had seemed once that wind and rain could not keep him away.
Yet, thinking back, I saw that I had never been really calm and sure of myself. Perhaps, then, the fault was in fact mine: I had expected too much. Ah, how unwise it had been to hope for what was not to be in the nature of things. [p.93]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What could have prompted that unfortunate display of wit?"
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
[And a year later:]
I remembered how once, when someone had remarked on the incessant fingering of rosaries and reading of sutras that had become fashionable, I had retorted that praying women were worse than nuns and would surely be widows before long. And now where had my cynical ideas gone? Day and night I was busy with prayers, somewhat listlessly and aimlessly, perhaps, but almost without pause. Those who had heard what I said then must certainly be smiling now. My marriage being the uncertain thing it was, what could have prompted that unfortunate display of wit? [pp.97-98]
---------------------------------
"I was sleeping too well."
---------------------------------
[As her son grew up and needed her to help write love poetry, and as she became involved in raising a daughter of Kaneie (by a woman too unimportant to rate jealousy), the narrator became if not happy, at least calmer. In fact, she had to be careful to maintain her public image as an unhappy person:]
I had not yet heard a cuckoo. I was sleeping too well. Cuckoos are for people who have worries and can lie awake listening. "I heard it last night," or "Just at dawn it sang," my people would say, and I was ashamed that only I seemed to have missed it.
"And have I slept so well?" I said to myself, hoping no one would notice. [p.137]
========================================================================
[A newer translation (1997) of Kagero nikki, by Sonja Arntzen, uses a colloquial American English; the tense shifts are sometimes distracting (as they apparently are in the Japanese). Arntzen gives the romanized original of the poems, sets the poems within the text off from the prose, and includes the poems which conclude the book; Seidensticker does none of this. Arntzen's introduction gives a good analysis of the prose style, and the bibliography is thorough. (See the book's table of contents online.):]
The Kagero diary: a woman's autobiographical text from tenth-century
Japan / translated with an introduction and notes by Sonja Arntzen
(Michigan monographs in Japanese studies; no. 19). Ann Arbor:
Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1997. (xv,
415 p.: ill.)
LC#: PL789.F8 Z473413 1997; ISBN: 0939512807, 0939512815
Includes bibliographical references (p. 405-408) and index.
-----------------------------------------------------
"We'll see if it has any effect in the world."
-----------------------------------------------------
[The opening of Book 2, describing the start of the year 969; the sister's verse, "Sew heaven and earth into a bag," was the traditional opening of poems sent as New Year's wishes:]
Thus, while days passed empty and fleetingly, the year came to an end and New Year's morning has come. Oddly enough, for years our household has not observed the custom of avoiding inauspicious speaking at the beginning of the year, so wondering to myself if that was why things had turned out as they had, getting up and crawling out of bed, I say, "Hey, everyone, come here---for this year at least let's avoid speaking inauspiciously, and we'll see if it has any effect in the world."
Hearing this, my sister, still in bed, says, "I've got something to say," and chanted the old poem, "Sew heaven and earth into a bag."
..."Well, as for me," I say, "Thirty days and thirty nights of every month, let him be by my side."
At this, one of my attendants breaks out laughing, "Surely you'll get your wish. Why don't you write that down exactly as you just said it, and send it to his lordship."
In response to this, my sister gets up and says, "What a good idea. It would bring the best luck in the world," and she laughs and laughs.
So, I write it down and had my young lord [Michitsuna] present it. [p.169]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The year's edge has arrived with me deep in the usual endless
thoughts."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[The end of Book 3, of the year 974, and of the nikki; we don't know if the abrupt ending means that the work was unfinished, or if the last line had some symbolic significance:]
This year the weather has not been particularly bad, we have only had snow that stayed in patches on the ground about two times. While I have been preparing the clothes for the assistant director's [Michitsuna's] attendance at the New Year's festivities and then at the Presentation of the White Horses, the end of the year has arrived.
Having the clothes for tomorrow folded and rolled up, directing the work of the attendants, when I think of it, having lived on thus and arrived at this day, it seems somehow amazing. Even as I watch the festival of the souls' return, the year's edge has arrived with me deep in the usual endless thoughts. Since we are at the edge of the capital, it is very late at night indeed when the knocking comes to the door. [p.379]
========================================================================
[One chapter in Paul Gordon Schalow's study is "Poetic
Sequence in The Kagero Diary," which provides a close
reading of several sections of the work to reveal the author's
perspective on friendship between males (and, in less detail,
between females). In the process Schalow compares the translations
of quoted passages by Seidensticker, Arntzen and Helen McCullough,
illustrating differences among them. (See
the book's table of contents online.):]
Schalow, Paul Gordon. A poetics of courtly male friendship in
Heian Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, c2007. (x,
219 p.: col. ill.)
LC#: PL726.2 .S34 2007; ISBN: 9780824830205
Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-211) and index
----------------------
[John R. Wallace's study includes a substantial chapter,
"Gossamer Years --- Coping with Love and Social Uncertainty,"
which questions earlier views of Kagero nikki as the autobiography
of a hysterical woman. Wallace describes in detail the ways in
which the work illustrates the protagonist's learning to cope
with the situation in which she finds herself. The book's introduction
and first chapter provide useful background on the writing of
the period and the role of women in and out of the court; the
notes summarize recent Japanese-language studies. All quoted
passages are given in Wallace's own translation. (See
the book's table of contents online.):]
Wallace, John R. Objects of discourse: memoirs by women of
Heian Japan (Michigan monograph series in Japanese studies; no.
54). Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, the University
of Michigan, 2005. (xi, 325 p.: ill.)
LC#: PL741.2 .W35 2005; ISBN: 1929280343
Includes bibliographical references (p. 296-308) and index
----------------------
[Two essays in this collection deal with Kagero nikki:
(1) Sonja Arntzen's "Of Love and Bondage in the Kagero
Diary: Michitsuna's Mother and Her Father" discusses
what the narrator's changing relationship to her father, husband,
and son reveal about her personal growth. (2) Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen's
"Self-Representation and the Patriarchy in the Heian Female
Memoirs," briefly (pp.54-60) describes the narrator's perception
of herself and of others. Both essayists give their own translations
of quoted passages, and both essays conclude with helpful bibliographies:]
The father-daughter plot: Japanese literary women and the law
of the father / edited by Rebecca L. Copeland and Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen.
Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, c2001. (xi, 384 p.:
ill.)
LC#: PL721.F37 F38 2001; ISBN: 0824821726, 0824824385
Includes bibliographical references and index
----------------------
[This collection includes Valerie Henitiuk's essay, "Walls,
Curtains and Screens: Spatio-Sexual Metaphor in the Kagero
nikki," which looks at the treatment of interior spaces
as refuge from unwanted intrusion as well as places of confinement.
(See the book's
table of contents online.):]
Secret spaces, forbidden places: rethinking culture / edited
by Fran Lloyd and Catherine O'Brien (Polygons; v. 4). New York:
Berghahn Books, 2000. (xxii, 298 p.: ill.)
LC#: HM676 .S43 2000; ISBN: 1571817883, 1571817891
Includes bibliographical references (p. [227]-283) and index
-----------------------
[Edith Sarra's study of Heian women's memoirs includes a chapter
on Kagero nikki; in it Sarra makes clear the distinction
between the author and the narrator's persona presented in the
work. The book's opening chapter gives useful background information.
(See
the book's table of contents online.):]
Sarra, Edith. Fictions of femininity: literary inventions
of gender in Japanese court women's memoirs. Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, c1999. (xii, 328 p.)
LC#: PL741.2 .S26 1999; ISBN: 0804733783
----------------------
[This article gives Richard Bowring's introduction to and translation of a chapter of Watanabe Minoru's 1981 book, Heiancho bunshoshi. It is interesting to compare Watanabe's interpretation with those of Sarra (above); Watanabe makes no distinction between author and persona, and he analyzes the work's style as one of an "unmediated voice":]
Watanabe, Minoru. Style and point of view in the Kagero
nikki. Trans. Richard Bowring. Journal of Japanese Studies,
10 (Summer1984): 365-384.
LC# DS801 .J67 v.10 1984; ISSN: 0095-6848
----------------------
[Joshua S. Mostow's article discusses the relationship of Kagero nikki to contemporary monogatari and to poetry collections written to praise powerful men. (See the issue's table of contents online.):]
Mostow, Joshua S. The amorous stateman and the poetess: The
politics of autobiography and the Kagaro nikki. Japan Forum,
4:2 (1992): 305-316.
LC#: DS801 .J26; ISSN: 0955-5803
----------------------
[Donald Keene's history includes a chapter, "Heian Diaries,"
which discusses Kagero nikki and gives an excellent overview
of the period; Keene's bibliographies are thorough. (See
the book's table of contents online.):]
Keene, Donald. Seeds in the heart: Japanese literature from
earliest times to the late sixteenth century. New York: Henry
Holt & Co., 1993. (xiv, 1265 p.)
LC#: PL726.115 .K44 1993; ISBN: 0805019995
Includes bibliographical references and index.
----------------------
[This 1964 book, by Ivan Morris, is probably still the best single introduction to Japanese court society of the 900s and 1000s. The book is easily available in the Penguin edition:]
Morris, Ivan I. The world of the shining prince: court life
in ancient Japan; with a new introduction by Barbara Ruch (Kodansha
globe). New York : Kodansha International, 1994. (xxvii, 336
p.: ill.)
LC#: DS824 .M6 1994; ISBN:1568360290.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [321]-324) and index.
[Also published: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England; New York,
N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books, 1969, c1964 (1985 printing). ISBN:
0140550836]
========================================================================
Updated 03-09-08