The Molten Notebook

The Towazugatari is better known in English as The Confessions of Lady Nijo.

“Confessions” lends an air of scandal and penitence to this memoir of a royal concubine-turned-nun in 13th-century Japan. But does Lady Nijo really regret the years she “served” the ex-emperor and juggled the attentions, desired or not, of at least three passionate noblemen?

The reader of the early chapters certainly expects her to regret them. Lady Nijo chronicles her forced seduction — statuatory rape, in modern terms — at age 14 by the ex-emperor Go Fukakusa (1243-1304 CE).

Her furtive encounters with other nobles are officially off-the-record, but the ex-emperor slyly alludes to them. He even sets her up with his brother, a tortured monk who locks her into a back room after a service. Meanwhile, Lady Nijo secrets away the “unofficial” children she yearns to raise.

While she shares her feelings of disgust and strange affection for these men, Lady Nijo never lets emoting get in the way of good storytelling. Each encounter unfolds with a sense of immediacy, suspense, and drama. The Japanese original is also full of learned allusions to other texts, according to translators Wilfrid Whitehouse and Eizo Yanagisawa.

The translators suggest that Lady Nijo’s cultural sophistication gave her a sense of superiority to the ex-emperor , a superiority that led to a cooling of his affections. The intrigues end abruptly when the Lady Nijo is expelled from court – likely because of the machinations of the ex-emperor’s wife, but also, it seems, with the ex-emperor’s consent.

And so Lady Nijo is free to pursue what she describes as a lifelong dream: to walk the path of the poet-monk Saigyo, whose travel diary she read as a child. She had often claimed she wanted to renounce the material world and leave the court. The last third of the Story chronicles her pilgrimages.

For all that she travels beyond the capital, Lady Nijo never seems to leave it in her mind. She seeks out artistic and cultured folk and attends their salons; she approaches the ex-emperor’s daughter and visits her regularly. It is in these chapters that the ex-emperor visits her one last time to explain why he had pursued her from the beginning.

This is “Lady Nijo’s Own Story,” as Whitehouse and Yanagisawa call it, or more literally, “Without Having Been Asked.” She is not confessing or apologizing. At the mercy of powerful men and competing women, Lady Nijo’s memoir is the one thing she gives without being asked. She is, at least within its pages, self-determined.

Or is she? The book ends with a note from the 17th-century copyist: “The rest seems to have been cut away with a sword.” Whose sword, and why? For this reader, it’s a sad metaphor for what seems to happen to Lady Nijo throughout the book: the violation of her body and the right to govern it.

Translation: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1974. 372 pages (plus appendices). Whitehouse and Yanagisawa appeal to a general, non-scholarly reader by minimizing footnotes and keeping the historical and biographical information in the back rather than front-loading them in a formal introduction.

Note: Lady Nijo also appears as a character in Caryl Churchill’s 1983 play “Top Girls.” The Molten Notebook entry on the play is here.