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A Tale Unasked

byLady Nijo, Meredith McKinney (Translator)

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Lady Nijo’s A Tale Unasked (Towazugatari) is the last, and arguably the finest, among classical Japanese literature's famous ‘women's diaries’. Thought to have been completed around 1307, when the author was in her late forties, the first two thirds of this autobiographical work document in rich and compelling detail the experiences of an imperial concubine whose time at court was ruled and finally ruined by her passionate and complicated love life. The final third of the work equally memorably describes her peripatetic life after the emperor expelled her from the court in her mid-twenties and she became a nun, wandering the roads of Japan as a form of Buddhist austerity.

Meredith McKinney's superb translation breathes new life into Lady Nijo's fascinating diaries, which survived her era in a single copy and were only rediscovered in the 1940s.
In thirteenth-century Japan, there lived a woman called Lady Nijo. Born into a noble family, she became by turns an imperial concubine, the mother of four children by three different men, and, last of all, a wandering nun. Reading this beautiful translation of her memoirs, you feel as if Nijo were sitting beside you, whispering her story across the centuries that divide her world from ours.
Dr Janine Beichman

About Lady Nijo

Lady Nijo (1258–after 1307) was a Japanese noblewoman, poet and author. She was raised in the court of Emperor Go-Fukakusa and became his concubine, before being expelled for her affairs with other men. She became a travelling Buddhist nun and eventually wrote a memoir, Towazugatari ('A Tale Untold'). It survived in a single copy and remained hidden for years in the library of the Imperial Family Household before being rediscovered in 1940.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9780141999852
  • Length: 288 pages
  • Price: £5.99
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