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Introduction
Ki no Tsurayuki's Tosa Diary (Tosa nikki, ca. 934) looms large in modern Japanese literary history as the mother of the "memoir literature" (nikki bungaku) genre. Combining the daily-entry format of a diary written in classical Chinese (kanbun nikki) with a predominantly native script, the text relates the impressions of a female attendant over a span of fifty-five days, as she sails back to the capital in the entourage of a former provincial governor of Tosa. Despite the diary's varied content, treatment of it has almost entirely been limited to discussions of how and why its author's gender differs from that of its narrator. So universal are the commonplaces surrounding this discussion that to read the Tosa Diary otherwise entails revising several longstanding assumptions about gender and writing in early Japan. Contrary to most such formulations, this article will argue that the relations between femininity and diary writing within the Tosa Diary comment on the diary's social status as a form of property rather than its linguistic status as a vernacular text. Reading gender in the Tosa Diary thus entails a more general consideration of the ways in which the circulation of texts affirmed social, economic, and political distinctions in Heian Japan.
The variable ways that writing structures relations among social classes informs both the historical context surrounding the Tosa Diary and its content. An investigation of the former suggests that literacy in the Heian court (794-1185) was primarily determined by social background rather than gender. Literacy was not simply an attribute of social class but also a means to distinguish one's place within the court as either a producer or owner of texts. Trends in the practice of writing both diaries and poetry in Tsurayuki's time suggest a growing gap between the two positions, one which his diary can only address obliquely because it is being written to satisfy rather than question the demands of this new textual economy. At the same time, the assumption of a female persona by Tsurayuki serves to mark the imbalances that this gap creates. Gender in the diary thus functions to comment in critical ways on the fact that authorship of a text is determined by the identity of its owner, not its writer(s).
The question of...
