A Book of One's Own: The Gossamer Years; The Pillow Book; and the Confessions of Lady Nijō

The early Japanese literary tradition of poetry, fiction, and nonfic-tion narrative is based on the language of women and written in an orthography used by women or by men communicating with women. It was this vernacular Japanese of the aristocratic class with its special script, as opposed to Chinese (the Latin of East Asia) used in official writing by men, that lies at the foundation of the Japanese literary consciousness. In no other culture can we find extant a major and early written literature that is a woman’s literature. This alone excites the imagination.