Kagerō Nikki instance of literary work
Kagerō Nikki (蜻蛉日記, The Mayfly Diary) is a work of classical Japanese literature, written around 974, that falls under the genre of nikki bungaku, or diary literature. The author of Kagerō Nikki was a woman known only as the Mother of Michitsuna. Using a combination of waka poems and prose, she conveys the life of a noblewoman during the Heian period.
In English Kagerō Nikki is often called The Gossamer Years, which is the title given to the first English translation by Edward Seidensticker.  The term kagerō has three possible meanings: it may mean a mayfly; a heat wave; or a thin film of cobweb, which is the meaning proposed by the English Orientalist Arthur Waley.Style
Kagerō Nikki is said to be a diary, but it is "written in a mixture of styles; the first half characterized more by memoir, the latter half by day-to-day entry." The amount of time that passes between events is sometimes weeks or months.
The Mother of Michitsuna is credited with creating "a new form of self-expression and psychological exploration that expanded the potential of kana prose writing and influenced subsequent woman's writing, including The Tale of Genji." She achieves this raw, intimate expression by exploiting the first-person point of view allowed by the diary genre. Edward Seidensticker characterized the diary as “a remarkably frank personal confession” that describes “a disturbed state of mind.”  Donald Keene has described Kagerō Nikki as “a self-portrait devastating in its honesty,”  one “written passionately and without a thought to how readers might judge her actions.” Another characteristic of the work is the unique way in which the author labels people in her life. For example, in one entry she writes "that 'splendid' personage of Machi Alley" when referring to the woman with whom Kaneie is having an affair. The sarcastic tone reflects the author’s attitude to the person in question: "This method of labeling people shows how very egocentric she was in her dealings with others, defining them solely in relationship to herself."On the other hand, Sonja Arntzen argued in her 1997 translation that Michitsuna’s Mother “contributed a realistic mode of writing to Japanese prose” and highlights the psychological sophistication shown in Kagerō Nikki that recognizes the mutability of mental states and memories. Arntzen also praised Kagerō Nikki for its “awareness of the fictiveness of her [Michitsuna’s Mother] telling” and described the style of the work as resembling a “stream of consciousness”.Poems
The Mother of Michitsuna was known for her skill in waka, classical thirty-one-syllable poems, as indicated by the inclusion of some of her poems in Fujiwara no Teika's anthology Ogura Hyakunin Isshu (or One Hundred Poets, One Hundred Poems, c. 1235) and in the third imperial waka anthology Shūi Wakashū.
With her expertise on waka, Michitsuna’s Mother composed poems that facilitated social relationships and also put a stop to others. Besides making compositions using her own name, she also wrote poems on behalf of her husband and her son in order to help them advance in social hierarchy and engage in courtship, demonstrating her artistic talent as a skilled poet. In Book 3 of Kagerō Nikki, Michitsuna asks his mother to create poems that can help him court the woman that he was trying to pursue. Another instance was when Michitsuna’s Mother passed on her knowledge of literary excellence by teaching her adopted daughter calligraphy and waka. In addition, to reject the advances of an older man who was trying to court her daughter, the author also produced poems in response to his courtship.Legacy
In a society in which kana writing was considered a women's activity, inferior to the Chinese writing of educated men, Heian women produced what are today known as some of the most enduring and classical works in Japanese literature. The Mother of Michitsuna speculated that her work would be as ephemeral as "the diary of a mayfly or the shimmering heat on a summer's day," yet she played a crucial role in this legacy.In modern times, Kagerō Nikki is often considered by the academia as the first autobiography written by a woman. Despite Michitsuna’s Mother’s portrayal of herself as someone who is ordinary and has little significance, the impact that her work has on Japanese literature would disagree with her sentiment.
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