SOURCE: Moore, Evelyn. “Aesthetic Records: A Comparison of Max Frisch's Tagebuch 1946-1949 and the Diary of Kenkō, Essays in Idleness.” Comparative Literature Studies 25, no. 2 (1988): 167-81.

In the following essay, Moore finds parallels between the diaries of Frisch and Kenkō, asserting that the books include “the authors' reflections on their own creative process.”

Max Frisch's diary, Tagebuch 1946-1949, breaks from the tradition of most Western diaries, i.e., historical treatments and autobiographies, and approaches the diary form as it had evolved in the Japanese tradition: art diaries in which fiction was intertwined with facts to reveal universal themes. This study, a comparison of Tagebuch 1946-1949 and Kenkō's Essays in Idleness, does not assume the derivation of form and content. It rather attempts at a clearer understanding of each of these works, and of the tradition from which each emerges. My thesis is that the diary form of two...