Articles
Liquid Landscapes: Tosa Nikki’s Pioneering Poetic Contribution to Travelogue Prose
Abstract
This article seeks to illuminate the innovative contributions of Tosa nikki to the representation of travel in Heian Japan through a subtle blending of fact with fiction that employed poetic structures to mark space, time, and affect in its prose representation of the places segmenting its narrative. The diary’s placement in a liquid landscape far removed from the capital opens up a distinctive discursive space in which even the most banal sentences are deployed to great effect. Such aspects of the diary enable a greater appreciation of its longstanding significance as a new form of travel narrative, a dimension often overlooked in contemporary Anglophone accounts that focus on its connections to script and gender. This article seeks to illuminate the innovative contributions of Tosa nikki to the representation of travel in Heian Japan through a subtle blending of fact with fiction that employed poetic structures to mark space, time, and affect in its prose representation of the places segmenting its narrative. The diary’s placement in a liquid landscape far removed from the capital opens up a distinctive discursive space in which even the most banal sentences are deployed to great effect. Such aspects of the diary enable a greater appreciation of its longstanding significance as a new form of travel narrative, a dimension often overlooked in contemporary Anglophone accounts that focus on its connections to script and gender.