Histories of the Self: Women's Diaries in Heian Japan

In “Histories of the Self: Women’s Diaries from Japan’s Heian Period (794–1185),” published in Education About Asia, Sonja Arntzen reads The Kagerō Diary, the Murasaki Shikibu Diary, and The Sarashina Diary as forms through which women organized experience in writing. The essay is not a study of The Pillow Book alone, but it closes by proposing a comparison between Murasaki Shikibu’s court and the one Sei Shōnagon wrote about. Its value is to move women’s writing beyond “private feeling” and toward a practice shaped by literary form, social position, and self-understanding. The journal page provides the full article; it appeared in volume 20, issue 2 (2015), DOI 10.65959/eaa.1336.

Arntzen first shows that waka poetry is not decoration outside the prose narrative. In these diaries, events, poetic exchanges, and retrospective observation often work together: a poem answers a relationship in the moment and may also become a way to understand feeling later. The Kagerō Diary follows its author’s marriage to Fujiwara no Kaneie and records waiting, jealousy, disappointment, and religious journeys. To read it only as testimony to marital suffering is to miss how its writer creates a position from which to observe through poetry, memory, and travel. Arntzen emphasizes the diary’s self-observation: it gives difficult, at times unmanageable feeling a form that can be examined, rather than making suffering beautiful.

The Murasaki Shikibu Diary places private observation alongside court ritual and displays of power. Arntzen notices that Murasaki records an important birth ceremony and aristocratic spectacle but also scrutinizes ladies-in-waiting—their clothes, the inscriptions on their fans, and the similarity of their phrases—before questioning why she cannot simply share in the court’s celebration. Women writers were not restricted to “private” subjects: they could describe how ceremony worked, who served it, and how its splendor felt to those inside it. Comparing Murasaki’s account with male courtiers’ Chinese-language records of the same ritual also opens a question about genre, duty, and position. The difference need not be reduced to a timeless “female viewpoint.”

The Sarashina Diary places reading itself within one woman’s life story. Its author looks back on her youthful absorption in tales such as The Tale of Genji. At moments she regrets the time spent on literature, yet the narrative she leaves behind shows how reading provided imagination, consolation, and a way to interpret the world. Arntzen encourages readers to attend to the tension between an author’s self-judgment and what the narrative actually makes visible. Reading can be moralized as distraction; it can also be a resource through which a woman builds an interior life and links texts to experience. The diary’s journeys and retrospective view of old age further suggest that “selfhood” is not a core outside relationships, but something narrated through family, religion, literature, and time.

This article pairs best with The Pillow Book without collapsing the works into one genre of “women’s diary.” Arntzen’s classroom exercise places Murasaki’s court beside the different court represented by Sei Shōnagon, inviting readers to compare patronage, form, audience, and political setting. The Pillow Book develops its own rhythm through lists, short notes, and aesthetic judgments; the three diaries follow distinct paths through marriage, court service, reading, and retrospective life-writing. The point of reading them together is not to prove that women wrote the same kind of “self,” but to see how different forms made different narrative positions possible.

Arntzen’s teaching essay also calls for distance as well as attention. It places Heian women’s writing within a cross-cultural question about the self and proposes classroom analogies between ancient lives and modern figures. Such devices can invite discussion, but cannot replace historical difference. The authors in the essay are mostly aristocratic women with access to literacy, court relationships, and cultural resources; they do not represent women throughout Japan or across social ranks. Describing their writing as the “discovery” of female self-consciousness risks making European modernity the sole measure. A more careful question is what material conditions, labor relations, and literary traditions allowed some women to leave texts—and whose experiences did not enter the surviving archive. Begin with the teaching video on Heian court women and literature, then return to The Pillow Book for a closer reading of form.