Tosa Diary

The famous phrase, “A man may write a diary, but a woman may try to do the same,” is quite acrobatic. At that time, diaries were supposed to be written by male aristocrats in Chinese characters. They wrote about the events of the day in Chinese characters on a scroll-shaped calendar called the Gushoku Yoshi, which had come from China. The diary was written by a man, Ki no Tsurayuki, so there is a virtual transgender character in the diary. Even more boldly, the diary is not written in Chinese, but in kana. The “Tosa Diary” was a virtual experiment that straddled both the “borderline between Japanese and Chinese” and the “borderline between men and women. This virtual experiment quickly had a tremendous impact. Wives began to write pseudonymous diaries and texts as they pleased. The Pillow Book, The Sarashina Diary, The Tale of Genji, and The Izumishikibu Diary were all created in this way.