Writings of Ki no Tsurayuki

In 935 C.E. the poet and nobleman Ki no Tsurayuki wrote Tosa Nikki, or the Tosa Diary, his creative non-fiction account of his fifty-five-day ocean journey to travel two hundred miles from the province of Tosa back to Kyoto, the then-capital of Japan (see, for example, William N. Porter's 1912 translateion The Tosa Diary). Tsurayuki wrote Tosa Nikki in the character of a woman, reporting in prose the journey that Tsurayuki made and interleaving the text with roughly a poem per day, the majority of the poems being attributed to Tsurayuki (portrayed in the third person in the diary). Tsurayuki used a character set that reinforced the reader's acceptance of the author's female persona: he wrote in phonetic characters that were perceived as the "women's" writing of that day, rather than the ideographs (the "men's" writing) that educated Japanese men were adopting from the Chinese. Each date of the journey could be considered a section heading, dividing the diary into sections.

Facts on the Tosa Nikki journey:

935 (11 years before his death).
55 days
traveled by boat
approximately 200 miles (320 kilometers)

Time Line

905-922: With assistance, compiled the Kokinshu, an early collection of Japanese poetry for which he wrote the forword.
930: Appointed Governor of the Province of Tosa in Shikoku. His later journey returning to Kyoto gave his the material for his Nikki Tosa.
935: Wrote Nikki Tosa.
946: Death of Ki no Tsurayuki.

Links and Books

Links and Books

Related pages: Poetry index. How to Write Poetry.
How to write specific forms: Haibun. Haiku. Hay(na)ku. Rengay. Tanka.

Books of Poetry Form.

Copyright © 2013-2016 by J. Zimmerman, except for the quoted poems.
All rights reserved.

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