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This talk will outline several unique insights into Heian Japan provided by Ki no Tsurayuki’s Tosa nikki (Tosa Diary), which is ostensibly the record of an ex-governor’s voyage back to the capital kept by an anonymous woman in his entourage. The resulting split between fictional female narrator and historical male author has usually led Tosa nikki to be viewed as either the first Heian woman’s memoir or the last aesthetic manifesto of one of the Japanese poetic tradition’s foremost figures. In lieu of these narratives, it will be argued that the diary merits attention for the discursive practices, representational conventions and non-elite social contexts it illuminates.
Gustav Heldt is professor of Japanese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan (Cornell East Asia Series, 2008), The Kojiki: An Account of Ancient Matters (Columbia University Press, 2014) and Navigating Narratives: Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary as History and Fiction (Harvard Asia Center, 2024).
