SOURCE: "The Izumi Shikibu nikki as a work of Courtly Literature," The Literary Review, Vol. 23, No. 4, 1980, pp. 463-80.

In the following essay, Walker provides an overview of the Izumi Shikibu nikki and discusses its emphasis on illicit love.

The culture of tenth- and eleventh-century Japan, the apogee of the Heian period (795-1185), was in every respect a culture of the court.¹ It was also an urban culture which saw itself as superior in every way to the rural rice culture that made its existence possible. As in the medieval West, courtlyculture in Japan was the property of a few individuals of noble origin—in Japan, not much more than one-tenth of one per cent of the population. For the yoki hito(good people), the courtly ideal of behavior was miyabi (elegance); the culture hero of the age was he or she who understood the pathos of things (mono...