Page:The Sacred Tree (Waley 1926).pdf/24

 disconnected. I have translated one of the longer episodes in my Japanese Poetry. The Yamato Tales, about half century later, also centre round poems. They consist of rather trivial anecdotes about courtiers of the period.

We now come to the one book which, though it is not a work of fiction and though it lacks the qualities of deliberate art which make Genji so astonishing, at least seems to move in the same world of thought and feeling. This is the Gossamer Diary ('Kagerō Nikki').

The writer was mistress of the great statesman Fujiwara no Kane-iye (929-999). By him she had a son called Michitsuna, and her name not being recorded she is known to history as Michitsuna's mother. He made her acquaintance in 954 and Michitsuna was born the year after. But Kane-iye already had a wife, a legitimate family and numerous mistresses. Lady Gossamer (as we will for convenience call the writer of the Diary) could not expect undivided attention. This was a fact that she took years to recognize, and when the diary closes (in the twentieth year of their liaison!) she had indeed recognized her position, but was still as far from accepting it as at the start.

The record begins in 954, the year in which they met. 'For twenty days he has not been here at all.' 'This month he has written only twice Such entries are frequent from the beginning. Her grievance grew and grew. It became her whole life. When he did not come, she wept; when he came, she wept because he had not come sooner. She was immersed in perpetual devotions; while he, like our own eighteenth-century bucks whom in every particular he so strongly resembled, only turned religious when he was ill. Often he found her kneeling before an image of Buddha, lost in prayer; and one day, suddenly infuriated by this dismal reception, he kicked