The Sarashina Diary: A Woman's Life in Eleventh-Century Japan

187 Pages·2014·3.86 MB·English

by  Sugawara no Takasue no Musume

The Sarashina Diary
TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ASIAN CLASSICS
TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ASIAN CLASSICS
Editorial Board
Wm. Theodore de Bary, Chair
Paul Anderer
Donald Keene
George A. Saliba
Haruo Shirane
Burton Watson
Wei Shang
The Sarashina Diary
A WOMAN’S LIFE IN ELEVENTH-CENTURY JAPAN
SUGAWARA NO TAKASUE NO MUSUME
TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY
SONJA ARNTZEN AND ITŌ MORIYUKI
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press All rights reserved E-ISBN 978-0-231-53745-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sugawara no Takasue no Musume, 1008– author.
[Sarashina nikki. English]
The Sarashina Diary : a Woman’s Life in Eleventh-Century Japan / Sugawara no Takasue no Musume;
translated, with an introduction, by Sonja Arntzen and Itō Moriyuki.
pages cm. — (Translations from the Asian Classics) Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-16718-5 (cloth : acid-free paper) ISBN 978-0-231-53745-2 (e-book) 1. Sugawara no
Takasue no Musume, 1008—Diaries.
2. Authors, Japanese—Heian period, 794–1185—Diaries.
I. Arntzen, Sonja, 1945– translator. II. Moriyuki, Itō, translator.
III. Title.
PL789.S8Z4713 2014
741.5’973—dc23
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].
Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Japan Foundation
toward the cost of publishing this book.
Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Pushkin Fund
toward the cost of publishing this book.
COVER IMAGE: Detail from “Azumaya I,” in The Tale of Genji Scroll.
(© Tokugawa Art Museum Archive/DNP Art Communications) COVER AND BOOK DESIGN: Lisa Hamm
CONTENTS
Preface: A Collaborative Project
SONJA ARNTZEN
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Translation and Technical Matters
SONJA ARNTZEN
Introduction and Study
SONJA ARNTZEN AND ITŌ MORIYUKI
1 Text and Author
2 The Relationship of Theme and Structure
3 Dreams and Religious Consciousness
4 A Child’s Viewpoint and Layers of Narration
5 Text and Intertext: The Sarashina Diary and the Tale of Genji
6 A Life Composed in Counterpoint
Sarashina Diary
Afterword
ITŌ MORIYUKI
Appendix 1. Family and Social Connections
Appendix 2. Maps
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
A Collaborative Project
SONJA ARNTZEN
The Sarashina Diary (Sarashina nikki, ca. 1060) records the life of a Japanese
woman from the age of thirteen to sometime in her mid-fifties. Rather than a
daily account of events in the writer’s life (as the term “diary” might suggest), it
focuses on moments of personal meaning, often centered on the composition of a
thirty-one-syllable waka poem. The author, Sugawara no Takasue no Musume,
was a direct descendant of Sugawara no Michizane (845–903), one of the most
distinguished literary figures in Japanese history. The Sarashina Diary has a
long history of appreciation in Japan, with the first annotated text appearing in
the thirteenth century. In the modern period, it was accorded the status of a
“classic”—that is, one of the works representing the golden era of Japanese
classical literature, the mid-Heian period (early tenth to eleventh century).
During this period, women writers had the domain of prose writing almost to
themselves, and they produced numerous works of sophisticated “self-writing”
as well as fiction. Indeed, the surviving works by women in the mid-Heian
period comprise the earliest substantial body of women’s writing in the world.
The Sarashina Diary was written after the other major autobiographical works
by women, and it displays a subtle awareness of its predecessors.
The impetus for this translation and study of the Sarashina Diary was
provided by my coauthor, Itō Moriyuki, who has dedicated most of his academic
career to studying the Sarashina Diary.1 Itō is unusual among native Japanese
scholars of classical Japanese literature for the attention he has given to English-
language scholarship on classical texts in general and the Sarashina Diary in
particular. Moreover, he has made an effort to write papers in English on these
texts and to present them at conferences in North America. We met at just such
conference in 1998. Then, about nine years ago, Itō proposed that he and I do a
new translation of the Sarashina Diary. He was keen to see a new translation of
the work in English and to share his perception of the text with an English-
reading public.
Just a few years earlier, I had completed the translation and study of another
mid-Heian woman’s autobiographical text, the Kagerō Diary, and thus felt
prepared for the task. The animated conversations that Itō and I had had at
conferences in the past indicated that we had compatible views of Heian
women’s literature, enough alike for easy understanding and enough different to
be stimulating. Another inspiration for my participation in the project was my
fresh view of the text from Edith Sarra’s study of Heian diaries, Fictions of
Femininity: Literary Inventions of Gender in Japanese Court Women’s Memoirs.
In this work, Sarra devotes a lot of attention to the Sarashina Diary, and her
translations of excerpts for analysis reveal an utterly different text from the one I
knew only from previous translations. Her work made me want to study the
original for myself, so Itō and I began.
This project has been a mutual collaboration from start to finish. We did most
of the work during brief periods every year when we could get together, either in
Japan or on Gabriola Island, Canada, where I now live. My responsibility was
creating the English rendering of the original text, and Itō’s was explaining the
problems of the text and guiding our interpretation. In our original plan, Itō was
going to write the introduction, which I would translate. But because our
understanding of the work evolved in conversation with each other, in the end it
seemed appropriate to compose the introduction together. Although the
foundation of the introduction rests on Itō’s lifetime of research on the text, the
articulation of our interpretation of the text has been significantly inflected by
me.
Our approach focuses on the diary as a literary creation rather than an
unmediated record of the author’s life, yet at the same time we are deeply
interested in the author herself. Most of all, we see her as an artist who creates
different personae in this work to capture the full complexity of her life. Our
translation and the accompanying introduction also pay close attention to the
thirty-one-syllable poems (waka), which add depth and color to the text. In
particular, we are interested in the role of poetry in the orchestration of the text’s
structure.
Itō has used the metaphor of a crystal for his overarching view of the diary as
a complex and multifaceted work of art.2 Although the diary’s text may appear
transparent superficially, it is not a simple transparency. Like the facets of a
crystal that reveal different colors, each facet of the text offers different
perspectives of meaning, depending on the angle from which it is viewed. Our
analyses of specific passages show how they enable diverse readings and how
opposite meanings are woven into the text by means of its structure. After years
of reading the text together, Itō and I came up with a second metaphor, that of
musical counterpoint, to convey how the patterning of contrasting motifs and
intertextual references in the text brings its meta-meanings into play. We hope
that together the introduction and the translation help readers, figuratively, see
the color and hear the music in Takasue no Musume’s remarkable work.
NOTES
1. Over a span of twenty years, Itō Moriyuki has published more than fifteen articles on the Sarashina
Diary. His Sarashina nikki kenkyū (Tokyo: Shintensha, 1995) provides a synthesis of his findings and
ideas.
2. Ibid., 9.