quietly away by Kane-iye and her son Michitsuna, now a boy in his 'teens.
It was at this moment that she actually began the composition of the Diary, the first part of which is not a day-to-day record but an autobiographical fragment composed many years later than the events which it records. But henceforward the book has all the character of a diary and is indeed very minute; scarcely a shower passes unrecorded. A new phase in the story begins with the adoption by Lady Gossamer of a little orphan girl aged twelve, a child of her lover Kane-iye by a woman whom years ago he had seduced and immediately abandoned. The child grows up and is ultimately courted by the head of the office in which Lady Gossamer's son Michitsuna is now working. Kane-iye gives his consent to the match; Lady Gossamer hears stories to the young man's discredit, foresees for her adopted daughter a life all too like her own and opposes the plan.
Here (in 974 a.d., twenty years after she first met Kane-iye) the Diary ends abruptly.
Publication in our sense of the word did not of course exist in those days. But no doubt a few copies of the book were made for those who were likely to be interested. Kane-iye himself, who lived on for another twenty-five years, surely possessed one. Now it was in the family of Kane-iye's legitimate son Michinaga[1] that Murasaki, the authoress of the Tale of Genji, served as lady-in-waiting, and we know from Murasaki's diary that this Michinaga fell in love with her and courted her. It is more than probable that Michinaga had inherited a copy of the Gossamer Diary from Kane-iye and in that case it is also very probable that he showed it to Murasaki. This much at any rate is certain, that we find in the Gossamer Diary an anticipation of just those characteristics which mark
- ↑ 966-1027 a.d.
