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Jacqueline Pigeot, professor emeritus at Paris VII University, one of the outstanding scholars of French Japan studies, and the author of several seminal studies on medieval Japanese literature (see Michiyuki-bun: Poétique de l'itinéraire dans la littérature du Japon ancien [Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1983]; and Questions de poétique japonaise [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997]), hereby offers us a translation and a substantial study of a text that has been translated twice into English, by Edward Seidensticker and more recently by Sonja Arntzen (The Kagero Diary: A Woman's Autobiographical Text from Tenth-Century Japan [Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1997).
The volume is composed of literary keys for the reading of Kagero nikki ; a translation with explanatory footnotes (pp. 9-195); and commentaries on the life of the author, who is successively designated as Tomoyasu's daughter, Kaneie's wife, and Michitsuna's mother, and on Kagero nikki itself (pp. 238-98). The volume also includes a general and synthetic list of all facts, notions, and toponyms referred to (pp. 319-27); a shorter list of the main characters (p. 329); and an analytic table of the main episodes (pp. 331-32), a map (p. 333), a bibliography inclusive of all European translations and studies of Kagero nikki (pp. 335-40), and plates including the author's photographs of Japanese realia and sites referred to.
The framework of Kagero nikki is well known. In the second half of the tenth century, a woman of the middle-class nobility, designated Michitsuna's mother in this edition, undertakes to write down the events that marked her lifetime as the wife of Kaneie, an influential member of the upper-class nobility, and the mother of Michitsuna, the son conceived with her husband. Kaneie, a seductive and funny fellow, brings her happiness at times, but he is also a wanton man, does not show up very often, has more than one affair, discomfits her, and makes her so...