Sarashina Nikki

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The Sarashina Nikki (Sarashina Diary) is a kind of memoir written by Japanese Lady Sarashina (as she is known) in the Heian period. As most works of the period, it is mostly read in selections by Japanese schoolchildren. Her work stands out for the description of her travels and pilgrimages. It is unique in the literature of the period and one of the first in the genre of travel writing. She is niece from her mother's side to Michitsuna's mother, the author of the Kagero Nikki (her real name also unknown).

Lady Sarashina (also known as "Sugawara no Takasue no musume", Takasue's daughter, since her real name is unknown) wrote her memoirs in her later years. She was born in 1008, A.D. and in her childhood traveled to the provinces with her father, an assistant governor, and back to the capital some years later. Her remembrances of the long journey back to the capital (three months) are unique in Heian literature, if terse and geographically inaccurate. Here she describes Mount Fuji, then an active volcano:

"It has a most unusual shape and seems to have been painted deep blue; its thick cover of unmelting snow gives the impression that the mountain is wearing a white jacket over a dress of deep violet."^[1]

Her memoirs start with her childhood days, where she shamefully remembers her joy at reading tales to the point of praying to the Buddha to be able to read all of them, and relegating spiritual life as a lesser priority, despite several dreams which she interpreted as admonishments from the heavens. She records her joy when presented with a complete copy of the Tale of Genji, and how she dreamed of living a romance like those described in it. When her life doesn't turn out as well as she had hoped, she blames her addiction to tales, which made her live in a fantasy world and neglect her spiritual growth. In contrast with other works of its kind, the Sarashina Nikki covers almost all of her author's life, but only specific moments of it: travel and dreams, her father and sister, almost ignoring her husband and sons and day-to-day life.

She spent her youth living at her father's house. In her thirties, when she was rather old by Heian standards, she married and became a lady-in-waiting. She was too shy and old to make a career in Court and indifferent to her husband and children, who are barely mentioned in her diary. She stopped writing it some time in her fifties and no details about her death are known. While Heian aristocracy were expected to express gloom and sorrow about the shortness of life, Lady Sarashina seems to have been genuinely sincere about it, as each death in her life (especially her sister's and father's) making her life more painful.

Her real name is unknown, and she is called either Takasue's daughter or Lady Sarashina. Sarashina is a Japanese district never mentioned in the diary, but it is alluded to in one of the book's poems and for some reason chosen to name the whole work.

The most authoritative copy is the one produced by Lord Teika in the 13th century, some two hundred years after Lady Sarashina wrote the original. Lord Teika copied Lady Sarashina's work once, but his first transcription was borrowed and lost; the surviving manuscript is itself a copy of a copy of the lost transcription, and therefore inaccurate, as Lord Teika himself admits, even marking the places he believes are wrong. To compound the problems, sometime in the 17th century Teika's manuscript was rebound, but the binder changed the order of the original in seven places, making the diary less valuable and more difficult to understand to scholars. It was until 1924 when Prof. Tamai was finally able to examine the original Teika manuscript and discover what had happened, leading to a reevaluation of Sarashina's work. It is from this corrected version that all modern versions are made.

[edit] References

1. ↑  As I crossed a bridge of Dreams. Ivan Morris's translation of the Sarashina Nikki. ISBN 0-14-044282-0.