Writings of Ki no Tsurayuki


Ki no Tsurayuki
* Tosa Nikki. * Time Line.

Writings (alphabetical by translator or biographer)

Tanka

Kokinshu

Nikki Tosa

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:


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.

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