The Sixteenth-Night Diary

A mother leaves the capital to defend her children's future. Along the road to Kamakura, autumn rain, river crossings, uncertain lodgings, and the moon become part of her argument—and part of her poetry.

In The Sixteenth-Night Diary, the medieval Japanese writer Abutsu-ni recounts her eastward journey and the letters that sustain her while she waits far from home. Family affection and literary inheritance run through the work: poems pass between mother and children, friends answer across the distance, and memories of her late husband return in dreams.

This new English translation follows the Japanese text in the 1903 Kokubun taikan edition. It includes the full diary, the exchanged poems, and the closing long poem and envoy, with a translator's note and concise explanatory notes. It preserves the original's unresolved ending.