SOURCE: Lammers, Wayne P. “Fujiwara Teika and Matsura no Miya Monogatari.” In ‘The Tale of Matsura’: Fujiwara Teika's Experiment in Fiction, translated by Wayne P. Lammers, pp. 3-26. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 1992.

In the following excerpt, Lammers asserts Teika's authorship of Matsura no miya monogatari (The Tale of Matsura) and summarizes the work's story and stylistic features.

Matsura no miya monogatari (The Tale of Matsura, ca. 1190) is a classical Japanese tale or romance that belongs to the same category of courtly fiction as Murasaki Shikibu's unsurpassed masterpiece, Genji monogatari (“The Tale of Genji,” ca. 1010). When compared with most of the best-known works of its genre, however, Matsura no miya monogatari stands out in striking contrast: Whereas the typical monogatari is set in the Heian period (794-1185) and in the Japanese capital of that time, Matsura no miya monogatari is set in the period...