foreign [Music] hello everyone welcome a lot of you I recognize your faces from last time so it's really nice to see you again and for those of you who are new welcome really happy to have you here uh my name is Chris and I'm the special events associate here at the Japan Society of Boston and with me is the lovely Joanne who is our Communications associate um and she's going to help me with the logistical you know behind the scenes stuff and yeah so really happy to see you all here we are starting the kagero diary or the customer diary and as we know it's written by the mother of vichitsuna and translated by Edward seiden sticker and um we read the introduction and the first book because it split up into three books as we know um I just wanted to talk a little bit about herb refresh our memories about the important people we have our authoress here in the middle who is the mother of vichitsuna I like to call her lady kagero because I feel like it gives her a little bit more humanity and also there is a tradition of naming unnamed authors after their works so I call the lady kaguro but her official name is and then we have her husband here fujibara and then of course we have the translator um Mr seiden Sticker who oh I don't see her I hope she comes um we have a member who was a friend of seiden sticker very exciting this is Janice so hopefully um when she gets here we can talk to her about that because that's super cool um she should be coming and so I want to introduce everybody to that um I thought I would cover a couple of General historical facts just to get us in the right mindset so a little bit about the history as um was introduced in the diary was the one of the first really big important fujiwara regions of the hand period and [Music] um he had a lot of power obviously but he's also famous for being the father not just of michitsuna who he read in the book but also of fujibato no Michi Naga who was a very powerful he was the most powerful fujiwara Regent he um took over after akane died and not directly there was a couple of people in between but he took over fairly quickly after Kanye's death and he is important to note because many scholars believe that or there is a theory that fujiwara no Michi Naga actually commissioned Murasaki shikibu to write the tale of Genji because Murasaki shikibu was in the Entourage of the empress Jose which was his daughter and there are reasons for this which I'm not going to get into today because if I do it'll be a spoiler um because they're talked about later on in the book so look forward to that um but this was also one of the first uh Japanese proses which was written by a woman which is really cool and it's known for its striking realism it's with narrative and it's vivid imagery and then also to put the translation into context a little bit side and sticker first translated this in 1953 or he was funded in 1953 by the CIA because it was kind of an effort to humanize the Japanese after World War II and then later on the transition we're reading is a re-edited translation as we know because we he talked about it in the introduction in the 1960s UNESCO wanted that um so I just thought I'd point that out a little bit I also have this I love this quote from his introduction um it's pretty great this diary is in a sense the mother of Richardson as protest against the marriage system of the time and her exposition of the thesis that men are beasts it's a pretty great line I'm sure you all noticed it um and I have a lot to say about it but I thought I'd share it and I just have a little bit of a map of some of the important secondary characters the name that they're known in the work and also their name that we know them by historically which we can reference when we need to I also have a list of the major events that happened like the start of their courtship obviously and other things like her father getting sent away the lady of the alley um all that I also wanted to share this I'm sure some of you are familiar with this but this is really um kind of culturally significant um some of you are probably familiar with the ogoda issue the collection of 100 poems each by a different poet who is very famous in Japanese history the mother of michitsuna is one of them and the poem her poem is poem 53 and the one that is selected to really represent her is the one on page 38 of the book which is do you know how slow the dawn can be when you have to wait alone um so I wanted to point that out because that's a really significant poem she is identified by that as ever since she wrote it that's just been her thing and it really does kind of sum up her literary existence and her literary um Legacy and then I also I have I just have the beginning little paragraph here that was written in the third person that we can reference and the last line where the name of the Diary the kagero Niki comes in because it is a reference as we learned in the introduction to this line a shimmering of the summer sky foreign foreign [Music]