Histories of the Self: Women’s Diaries from Japan’s Heian Period (794–1185)

This essay outlines three diaries written by women in Japan a millennium ago. The sidebars provide exercise suggestions that are intended to provide a basis for an instructor to generate essay or classroom discussion topics but could also be used by the individual reader to deepen appreciation. These three texts, The Kagerō Diary (c. 974), Murasaki Shikibu Diary (c. 1008), and The Sarashina Diary (c. 1060), are selected from the largest body of premodern personal histories extant in the world. There are five major texts1 and several minor ones,2 and, extraordinarily, most of these texts are by women. Why were so many women at this particular time in Japan from (roughly 950–1100) moved to write personal accounts of their lives? How did they see themselves? To what social and personal needs were these women responding? What mirrors do these texts present to our own culture and time? The mid Heian period was an epoch in which literate, intelligent women could find a kind of employment based on their creative skills. The large courts around the emperor’s principal consorts were filled with women whose work consisted primarily of creating amusement through conversation, writing, and other artistic pursuits. Amusement may seem an inessential part of human life, but we have only to look at the huge economic and social role played by the entertainment industry in our own culture to realize that human beings, when the least bit of economic surplus arises, exhibit an unquenchable need for amusement. At the Heian court, the chief entertainment was the reading and writing of poetry and fiction (monogatari, “tales”). A phonetic writing script, (as opposed to official writing in literary Chinese, kanbun) enabled the production of vernacular writing. This script/language was so associated with female literacy that its alternate name during the Heian period was onnade, “women’s hand.” Thus, these aristocratic women lived at a time and place when women’s literary activity had social and economic value, and they had a flexible writing medium related closely to the spoken language. These conditions did not pertain to women until much later in Europe and other parts of Asia.