The Sarashina Diary: A Woman’s Life in Eleventh-Century Japan by Sugawara no Takasue no Musume (review)

The Sarashina Diary is a relatively brief autobiography by Sugawara no Takasue no Musume, an eleventh-century Japanese aristocratic woman, and is one of a number of literary prose works written in the tenth and eleventh centuries by women of high social standing who described aspects of their private affairs and thoughts and which now have a canonical place in the Japanese premodern literary corpus. These works from the Heian period, Japan’s high classical era—Kagerō Diary (c. 974), Murasaki Shikibu Diary (c. 1010), Izumi Shikibu Diary (c. 1008), Pillow Book (c. 1000)—for the most part lack the sweeping scope of memoirs but rise above a daily format that the term “diary” might suggest. In The Sarashina Diary, the primary tension is between the narrator’s efforts to embrace Buddhism and an avid interest in reading tales or narrative fiction (at that time held in low esteem) that focused on the romantic fates of men and women in aristocratic society. The narrator bemoans, somewhat unconvincingly, how an irreligious interest in the latter has led to a disappointing life. Through prose and numerous poems, she also shares observations made while traveling, brief romantic encounters, conversations and poem exchanges with friends, the social status struggles of her family, and something of her relationships with her father, mother, sister and stepmother. Her marriage and children are not explicitly dwelled upon, which was customary for this type of writing, but do have a powerful influence on the narrative. The narrator seems tentative in her life direction but full of yearning; she is capable of empathy but deeply involved in herself.

We cannot say with certainty what readership was envisioned by the women authors of this class of texts; however, based on what we know of how the era’s literature was circulated and consumed, these texts were likely written primarily for other women of similar social circumstances. In that light, the translation by Sonja Arntzen and Itō Moriyuki deserves to be appreciated as an important contribution to a much-needed process of recovering early journals written by women primarily for women but which have been translated almost exclusively by men, probably with a male readership in mind. Such earlier translations almost universally embraced a subtle or not-so-subtle undervaluing of the literary quality of the texts and of the sophistication of the authors themselves. In the case of The Sarashina Diary, the widely used translation by Ivan Morris (As I Crossed A Bridge of Dreams, 1975) is better than many translations of that early group. There are times when the Arntzen-Itō translation might be overcompensating as a counterweight to Morris, but the new translators’ premise that what Morris called the “girlish” tone is a skillful literary pose with a larger narrative purpose, rather than a symptom of a woman of underdeveloped character, succeeds in inviting the reader into the many interesting layers of this work in a way that Morris’s translation has obstructed.¹ The translators clearly wish to reintroduce the text in a way that does justice to its literary qualities and to the keen observations of its author, and in this endeavor, they have succeeded.

The Sarashina Diary is the second translation by Arntzen of a Japanese woman’s memoir from the Heian period. Her first effort, The Kagerō Diary (1997), is perhaps the better of the two projects in that the original itself is a much longer, more incisive work, and the earlier translation against which Arntzen was writing was more problematic. However, like that work, The Sarashina Diary is an accurate and satisfying translation. It constructs a narrator whose voice and sensibilities are complex. While this version of the diary is a vast improvement over Morris’s translation, which offered a simple-minded, naive, and petulant narrator, Arntzen and [End Page...