"[A] wonderful and welcome gift. . . . All that is left to us now is to order the paperback for classroom use and benefit from the chain of right decisions that have gone into this new life for an old text."
--Linda H. Chance in the Journal of Japanese Studies

"'This superb version of Kagerô nikki sets a new standard for the translation of Heian courtly literature."
--Margaret H. Childs in The Journal of Asian Studies

". . . a wonderful reenactment of Michitsuna's mother's distinctively female voice. . . . Arntzen's reclaiming of Michitsuna's mother's voice as a woman is an important contribution to the field and one long overdue."
--Lynne Miyake in Monumenta Nipponica

"(Arntzen) has given us a reading which returns to the original much of its original intention. It is, says Arntzen, merely 'one of the many possible versions of the Kagerô Diary,' but it is also one which speaks most clearly to us right now."
--Donald Richie in The Japan Times

"Arntzen breaks new ground by striving to reproduce seemingly untranslatable qualities of the original. . . . She succeeds in this difficult enterprise; her (at times) unconventional but always readable English, together with the generous notes, make the distinctive voice of the author more accessible and establish fresh possibilities for future translations of classical Japanese."
--S.M. Strong, Bates College

Japan is the only country in the world where primarily the works of women writers laid the foundation for the classical literary tradition, and the Kagerô Diary commands our attention as the first extant work of that rich and brilliant tradition. The author, known to posterity as Michitsuna's Mother, a member of the middle-ranking aristocracy of the Heian period (794-1185), wrote an account of twenty years of her life (954-74), and this autobiographical text now gives readers access to a woman's experience of a thousand years ago.

The author's account centers on her relationship with her husband, Fujiwara Kaneie. Their marriage ended in divorce, but, particularly in the first part of the diary, Michitsuna's Mother is drawn to record those events and moments when the marriage lived up to a romantic ideal fostered by the Japanese tradition of love poetry. At the same time, another trajectory of the diary is toward finding the freedom to live and write outside the romance myth and without a husband.

Since the author was by inclination and talent a poet and lived in a time when poetry was a part of everyday social intercourse, her account of her life is shaped by a lyrical consciousness. The poems she records are crystalline moments of awareness that vividly recall the past. While the reader will find much of interest in this text from a historical and anthropological point of view, this information is embedded in a consummately literary text.

This new translation of the Kagerô Diary conveys the long, fluid sentences, the complex polyphony of voices, and the floating temporality of the original. It also pays careful attention to the poems of the text, rendering as much as possible their complex imagery and open-ended quality. The translation is accompanied by running notes on facing pages and an introduction that places the work within the context of contemporary discussions regarding feminist literature and the genre of autobiography and provides detailed historical information and a description of the stylistic qualities of the text.