Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 627, Flowering Fortunes, Part 2.

There have been more than 60 emperors in this country since its beginnings, but I cannot describe all their reins in detail.

I shall merely attempt to speak of some of the most recent.

So begins the Eiga Monogatari, Akazome Emon's attempt to write a new kind of history.

And right off the jump, we have to keep in mind she's not really being honest about what it is she's trying to do.

Because within about a paragraph of that first sentence,

Akazome Emon gives up any pretense of focusing on the history of imperial reigns for her real interest,

the Sekankake, the family of the Seshawang Kampaku regents from the main branch of the Fujiwara clan,

who actually ran Japan back in her day.

Now, as we covered last week, Akazome does not exactly give equal air time to all of the Fujiwara regents,

and we're going to skip through quite a few of the ones she describes,

because frankly you don't really need to know that much about them,

and skip ahead to a name that, well, you probably won't recognize because it's from an episode from like five years ago,

Fujiwara no Kane I.

Now, we have encountered Kane Ia before, but more as a secondary character than anything else.

He was the husband of the woman known only as the mother of Michituna, one of the many wives

Kaniyea took, but one who rather unusually wrote a diary of her experiences as his wife,

which survives down to today, known as the Kagor Nikki or Gossamer diary.

The best known translation today in English is the Gossamer Years by Ed Seidenstaker.

Now, if the only things you knew about Fujiwara and Okanea came from the

Gossamer Diary or Kagorniki, then he would come off as, frankly, kind of an ass, more than

anything else. When he first meets the mother of Michituna, Kanaiiya relies on being young,

...