UCLA

Like many vernacular kana texts of the Heian period (794–1185), the writing of Kagerō nikki (ca. 972-974) is predicated on correspondence as the essential mode of informal writing for men and women. The records of poetry composition and exchange throughout Michitsuna’s Mother’s (935–995) diary emphasize how correspondence between figures in the aristocratic social world of the Imperial capital and across geographies in the material world of the Heian realm utilized epistolary and poetic conventions to negotiate for real-world benefits, play with literary convention, and experiment with vernacular forms of individual expression. Moreover, Kagerō’s autobiographical narrative of these exchanges reveals how the abstract, discursive spaces in which the social, political, and literary intersect: Letters, poems, and the messengers who carry them traverse the geographic, social, gendered, and ritual spaces of the Heian capital and beyond, and the poetic content of these missives takes advantage of poets’ knowledge of their environment, even though this knowledge must be tacitly recognized by readers. As such, geographic and material spaces are implicated in certain social and cosmological discourses of movement and access, which are then implicated in sociopolitical discourses unique to the Heian capital. Because correspondence is a written/literary expression of movement, moments of epistolary exchange in Kagerō illuminate the elements of space and provide for the dedicated analysis of place, rather than merely time, in the narrative. This dissertation considers space as a lens for bringing into focus a narratological approach in considering the literary techniques that Michitsuna’s Mother inscribes and the interpersonal contexts she ascribes to imagined, poetic geographies, which also have social and material significance to herself. Through her narrativization of these correspondences in her diary, the author and other contributors advocate and negotiate for social and material outcomes through a poetic logic that expands with Michitsuna’s Mother’s literary experience into a more individualized vernacular prose style. Ultimately, my examination of space in Kagerō nikki considers both the material and cultural conditions of space and place through the social practice of written poetic correspondence that constructs the unique literary space of the diary.