The Tosa Diary

"It is said that diaries are things written by men, but I thought I would see whether a woman could not write one too." So begins the first literary diary in Japanese, written by the poet Ki no Tsurayuki — a man — in the voice of a woman in his party, on the fifty-five-day voyage by boat from Tosa back to the capital in the winter of 934.

His term as provincial governor is over. What follows is not a record of office but of waiting: a ship pinned in harbour for days by wind, drunken farewells, a physician bearing New Year's medicine that blows into the sea, rumours of pirates in the straits, a steersman who cannot read the weather and who shouts an order that comes out, by accident, as a poem. A child asks whether a place called Hane has wings. An old woman seasick in the bottom of the boat astonishes everyone with the best verse of the voyage.

And under all of it, never named directly and never absent, the grief for a small daughter who was born in the capital, died in Tosa, and is not coming home. The diary ends at a ruined house, in front of a pine seedling that has grown in five years while she did not.