Travelers of a Hundred Ages: The Japanese as Revealed Through 1,000 Years of Diaries

In Japan, the diary has acquired the status of a literary genre comparable in importance to the novel and the literary essay. Donald Keene, hailed in the New York Times Book Review as the century’s leading expert on Japanese literature, presents a collection of pre-modern Japanese diaries that is both a literary history of this seminal genre and a source of insight into Japanese life of the last thousand years. Ranging from objective to confessional, selections such as The Poetic Memoirs of Lady Daibu and Diaries of Seventeenth-Century Courtiers are much more than mere narratives of events, and offer unparalleled glimpses into the lives of diverse writers from the Kamakura dynastic period to the Tokugawa period. Travelers of a Hundred Ages illuminates the hidden and largely unknown worlds of imperial courts, Buddhist monasteries, country inns, and merchants’ houses. It is at once an intimate account of the diarists’ lives and a testimony to the greater struggles and advances of Japanese culture.