2026 January 30 (Fri) 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm | (In-Person) | Porté Room (S250), Second Level, CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge St.

Navigating Narratives: Tsurayuki's Tosa Diary as History and Fiction

Speaker: GUSTAV HELDT, Professor of Japanese Literature, University of Virginia

Moderator: DAVID C. ATHERTON, Thorley D. Briggs 1953 Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University

Presentation abstract:

This talk will highlight some of the unique insights into Heian Japan provided by one of its most enigmatic and consequential texts. Named after the province once governed by its creator, Ki no Tsurayuki (d. 946), Tosa nikki (the Tosa Diary) purports to be the record of a voyage kept by an anonymous woman in the entourage of an ex-governor returning to the capital. This split between fictional narrator and historical author has usually led readers to place the diary in narratives privileging one of those two figures, with the result that Tosa nikki has been valued primarily as either the first Heian woman's memoir or the last aesthetic manifesto of a man whose writings shaped the Japanese poetic tradition for centuries afterward. By focusing instead on the diary's reception as a parody by its earliest readers, I will argue rather that it merits attention ifor the discursive practices, representational conventions and non-elite social contexts it illuminates as the world' first short novelistic work of fiction.

Reischauer Institute Japan Forum Lecture Series