The autobiographical Confessions of Lady Nijo, written…

The autobiographical Confessions of Lady Nijo, written in 1306 by the imperial consort, continues the classical Japanese literary style.

At the age of fourteen, she had been given by her father to Gofukakusa, the Emperor of Japan, to become his consort.

Later, she was expelled from the Emperor's court and became a traveling Buddhist nun, journeying for twenty years in Japan.

Books 1-3 cover Nijo's time at court; Books 4 and 5 deal with her life and travels as a nun.

The first books show a naive, though outwardly sophisticated, adolescent and young woman.

The last books show a wiser woman reflecting on her life and responding to the "common" people she meets and the tales she hears. (The Confessions of Lady Nijo was not widely circulated after it was written and only a single manuscript has survived. It was discovered in 1940 by a scholar named Yamagishi Tohukei and was published in 1950. A complete annotated edition was published in 1966.)