Lonely Moon in Sarashina

“Diary of a Journey from Tosa to the Capital” was the first work in the genre of “nikki”. The author was a man – poet Ki-no Tsurayuki – but he wrote from a woman's perspective. In the “Diary,” he described the hardships of travel and what he saw along the way. “Lonely Moon in Sarashina,” whose author is known solely as the daughter of Sugawara-no Takasue, spans almost four decades of her life: marriage and childbirth, court service and pilgrimage, the death of her husband and the ensuing solitude. “Diary of a Flying Spider Web” is among the four most important works of the Heian era and tells of the complicated relationship between the heroine and the father of her child.