The ''Tosa Nikki'' (''Tosa Diary'' 土佐日記) is a

poetic diary or is a Japanese literary genre, dating back to Ki no Tsurayuki's ''Tosa Nikki'', compiled in roughly 935. Nikki bungaku is a genre including prominent works such as the ''Tosa Nikki'', ''Kagerō Nikki'', and '' Murasaki Shikibu Nikki''. While d ...

written anonymously by the tenth-century Japanese poet

Ki no Tsurayuki was a Japanese author, poet and court noble of the Heian period. He is best known as the principal compiler of the ''Kokin Wakashū'', also writing its Japanese Preface, and as a possible author of the '' Tosa Diary'', although this was publish ...

. The text details a 55-day journey in 935 returning to

Kyoto Kyoto (; Japanese language, Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin, Keihanshin metropolitan area along wi ...

from

Tosa province was a province of Japan in the area of southern Shikoku. Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005). "''Tosa''" in . Tosa bordered on Awa to the northeast, and Iyo to the northwest. Its abbreviated form name was . In terms of the Gokishichidō sys ...

, where Tsurayuki had been the provincial governor. The prose account of the journey is punctuated by Japanese poems, purported to have been composed on the spot by the characters.

Diary Prose

The ''Tosa Nikki'' is the first notable example of the Japanese diary as literature. Until its time, the word “diary” (''nikki'') denoted dry official records of government or family affairs, written by men in Sino-Japanese. By contrast, the ''Tosa Diary'' is written in the Japanese language, using phonetic ''

kana The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most p ...

'' characters. Literate men of the period wrote in both ''kana'' and ''

kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese ...

'', but women typically were not taught the latter, being restricted to ''kana'' literature. By framing the diary in the point of view of a fictitious female narrator, Tsurayuki could avoid employing Chinese characters or citing Chinese poems, focusing instead on the aesthetics of the Japanese language and its poetry.

Travel poetry

The ''Tosa Nikki'' is associated with travel poems (''kiryoka'') (such as those compiled in the '' Man'yōshū'') as well as the ''

utamakura is a rhetorical concept in Japanese poetry. Definition is a category of poetic words, often involving place names, that allow for greater allusions and intertextuality across Japanese poems. enables poets to express ideas and themes concisel ...

'' and ''utanikki''. These texts constitute the Japanese travel journal, which - as a literary genre - is considered inseparable from poetry. These follow the tradition of weaving of poems and the use of introductory narratives written in a logical structure. Like other poems in the genre, the Tosa Nikki also explored the significance of landscape as well poems written about it. Even the ''Tosa Nikki'' was also alluded to by other poems such as the ''maeku''. The "Tosa Nikki" also implements fictional names of places to call on earlier and traditional Japanese texts. The usage of fictional names also allows a merge between fictional and autobiographical genres. By incorporating fictional elements with real scenery in both narration and poems, ''Tosa Nikki'' allows allusions to previous works and conveys different images and significance to those already popular locations.

Locations in Tosa Nikki

Below are the dates and locations the narrator travelled to. The dates are written according to the lunar calendar.

Themes

Grief

The loss of a child and a grieving parent are frequently mentioned by the narrator and the many that accompany the journey. For example, on the 27th of the 12th month, it referenced "a parent howas lost in grief for an absent child" with the poem accompanying the day also written about "one among us who will not be going home". This suggests that the child had passed recently or during the journey. Another example can be found on the 5th day of the 2nd month, as the grieving mother composes her own poem and expresses her pain and unwillingness to forget about her child. An interpretation can be that the child is still among the group spiritually, and the mother's grief is the emotional attachment keeping the child from moving on. It is speculated that Ki no Tsurayuki has lost a child during this time, and alluded to his and his family's grief through various characters the narrator encounters.

References

External links

* Fiction set in the 10th century 10th-century Japanese books 10th-century poems Diaries Heian period in literature Japanese poems Late Old Japanese texts Travel books 935 10th century in Japan Ki no Tsurayuki Diaries of the Heian period {{poem-stub