Sarashina Nikki

This desire came from her knowledge that the autobiographical writing by women around her generation had achieved fame, which assisted the careers of the writers and their family lines.

Her remembrances of the long journey back to the capital (three months) are unique in Heian literature, if terse and geographically inaccurate.

When her life does not turn out as well as she had hoped, she blames her addiction to tales, which made her live in a fantasy world and neglect her spiritual growth.

Heian literature conventionally expresses sorrow at the shortness of life, but Lady Sarashina conveys her pain and regrets at the loss of those she has loved with passionate directness.

This, and the fact that her husband's last appointment was to the province of Shinano (Nagano), probably led to the use by later scholars of "Sarashina" as a point of identification of the text and its author.

The reason is because the content of Sarashina Nikki does not perfectly fit to the term ‘diary’ in English, which it is most commonly understood as private daily records of events.

She also left out or did not elaborate much of the events that would be normally incorporated in a ‘diary’, such as accounts of the author's marriage, the births of her children, or her own family connections.

[3] To compound the problems, sometime in the 17th century Teika's transcription was re-bound, but the binder changed the order of the original in seven places, making the diary less valuable and more difficult for scholars to understand.

In 1924, Nobutsuna Sasaki and Kōsuke Tamai, two classical literature scholars, examined the original Teika manuscript and finally discovered what had happened, leading to a reevaluation of Sarashina's work.