I was raised somewhere even farther than the end of the Eastern Sea Road, and how countrified I must have been; yet somehow I began to think, since there were said to be such things in the world as tales, that I wanted to see them somehow.
In idle daytimes and when the family gathered at night, my sister, my stepmother and others would tell bits of this tale and that, and of how the Shining Genji was, and hearing them only made me long to read them more; but they could hardly recite them from memory the way I wanted.
It was so frustrating that I had a life-size Yakushi Buddha made, washed my hands clean, and when no one was about, I slipped into the altar room, threw myself down with my forehead to the floor, and prayed: "Let me go up to the capital soon, and show me all the tales they say are there, every one there is."
Then, in the year I turned thirteen, my father's term ended and we were to go up to the capital; on the third of the ninth month we set out and moved to a place called Imatachi.
The house where I had played for years had its doors and screens taken out so that you could see inside from outside, and in a great bustle of preparation, at sunset, as a mist lay thick and very lonely all around, I was about to get into the carriage when I happened to look back and saw the Yakushi Buddha I had always visited when no one was about, standing there. It was so sad to abandon him that I wept where no one could see.
The author was the daughter of Sugawara no Takasue. She spent her girlhood at the provincial capital of Kazusa, her father's post (now Ichihara in Chiba), and in 1020 set out for the capital. With the record of this journey begins a diary of memories spanning some forty years.