A Tale Unasked – Lady Nijo Meredith McKinney

As the night drew on, he called for cormorant fishing,164 and had a cormorant boat brought up and attached to his so that he could watch. He then decided to reward the three fishermen with the set of unlined gowns I wore.165 After he returned, more sake was consumed and His Highness became quite excessively drunk. Very late that night, he finally retired, at which point Lord Kanehira appeared once more. ‘How dull it is to spend all these nights away from home!’ he began.

‘And besides, Fushimi is known from of old to cause sleepless nights.166 Here, light me a taper. There are sure to be all sorts of unpleasant creatures around.’ On and on he went, driving me mad with his pestering. ‘Go on, why don’t you go to him?’ His Highness himself urged. I was truly miserable. ‘You must forgive an old man his perversities,’ continued Lord Kanehira. ‘Our ages may raise eyebrows, but there are plenty of examples from the past where an older man becomes a young girl’s protector.’

He said all this right beside where His Highness was lying. Words cannot express how wretched I felt. His Highness was, as usual, in high spirits. ‘I’ll be lonely sleeping here by myself,’ he declared, and insisted we stay close by, so I spent a second night with Lord Kanehira right next door to where he lay. The following morning there was a great flurry of preparation for departure before dawn. We rose and parted, leaving me feeling ‘a mere empty shell’.167 On the way back to the capital I sat behind His Highness in his carriage, along with Sanekane.

All the carriages travelled together as far as the Kiyomizu bridge, but at Kyōgoku Street His Highness’s carriage continued north while Lord Kanehira’s and the others turned west, and as I watched them receding into the distance the pang that I felt at parting astonished me to wonder just how I could have learned to feel like this. 1kitap1.com/en (1281–1285) With everything becoming ever more difficult and distressing and no obvious way out of this oppressive situation, I longed constantly to leave the world and retreat to some mountain temple, and my failure to be able to fulfil this urge made me despise myself for my weakness and worldly attachment.

Haunted by these thoughts, even my dreams portended a growing distance from His Highness. I did everything in my power to avert it, but to no avail.

Born in 1258 into a high-ranking aristocratic family in Japan’s capital (present-day Kyoto), LADY NIJŌ was largely raised in the court of Retired Emperor Go-Fukakusa, and at fourteen became his concubine. Their increasingly difficult relationship continued until 1283, when Go-Fukakusa abruptly expelled her from the court. Nijō subsequently became a Buddhist nun, and thereafter spent much of her time wandering Japan on pilgrimage.

She died sometime after 1306. MEREDITH McKINNEY is a translator of Japanese literature, both classical and modern. She lived in Japan for twenty years and is currently Honorary Associate Professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. Her translations for Penguin Classics include The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, Essays in Idleness and Hōjōki by Kenkō and Chōmei, Travels with a Writing Brush: Classical Japanese Travel Writing from the Manyōshū to Bashō, and two novels by Natsume Sōseki.

1kitap1.com/en Lady Nijō A TALE UNASKED Translated by MEREDITH McKINNEY 1kitap1.com/en Table of Contents Introduction List of Principal Characters Timeline of Principal Events Map 1: The Capital and Surrounds Map 2: Nijō’s Travels A TALE UNASKED BOOK 1 (1270–1274) BOOK 2 (1275–1277) BOOK 3 (1281–1285) BOOK 4 (1289–1293) BOOK 5 (1302–1306) Acknowledgements Notes 1kitap1.com/en To Royall Tyler, friend and mentor 1kitap1.com/en Introduction In 1938 a scholar stumbled upon an old manuscript with the intriguing title of Towazugatari (A Tale Unasked) tucked away in the Travel section of the Imperial Household Library in Tokyo, and decided to take a closer look.

He discovered it was a late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century copy of a much earlier work that was about very much more than just travel, apparently written by a high-ranking lady at the court of Retired Emperor Go-Fukakusa (1243–1304) and containing startling and detailed revelations of the sexual politics of courtly life. He also realized very quickly that A Tale Unasked was an impressive work of literature that surely ranked with the great women’s diaries1 of earlier centuries.

Scholars were soon at work deciphering and transcribing the lengthy handwritten manuscript, and in 1950 this precious and long-forgotten classic was finally introduced to the public. Internal evidence dates the completion of A Tale Unasked to around 1306. The memoir spans more than thirty-five years, beginning with a detailed account of the events leading up to the author Lady Nijō’s first sexual encounter with Go-Fukakusa at the age of fourteen,2 and coming to an end when she was an ageing nun of forty-nine.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 7e829eb05c200cba
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 2,938,345 bytes (2.802 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 268
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 472.77 minutes
• Total Words: 94,555
• Total Characters: 525,960
• Average Words per Page: 352.82
• Average Characters per Page: 1962.54

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