The Diary of Izumi Shikibu

A Heian court love story told in letters and poems.

In the spring after her lover, a prince, has died, a woman of no great rank is visited by a page boy carrying an orange blossom from his younger brother. What follows, over nine months, is one of the great records of a love affair in world literature: poems sent at dawn and dusk, a night when the gate is not opened, a flood, a typhoon, a pilgrimage to Ishiyama, frost on a lover's sleeve, and at last the woman's removal to the Prince's own household, with all its jealousy and gossip.

The diary is told in the third person, and its heart is its 145 waka, here rendered as verse, with the order of the exchanges and who says what kept exactly as in the Japanese. Wordplay and allusion are explained in endnotes.