A short essay on impermanence by a Kyoto poet and shrine official who had failed to win his family's post at the Kamo shrine. It describes the great fire of 1177, the whirlwind of 1180, the move of the capital to Fukuhara, the famine and plague of 1181 to 1182 and the earthquake of 1185, then the author's hut in the hills. For 1200 it is background: a picture of the capital's fragility and its poor in the generation before, by a man who in 1200 was a minor courtier in Go-Toba's poetry circle (he joined the Bureau of Poetry in 1201).
About this source
- Title
- Hojoki (方丈記)
- Author
- Kamo no Chomei (鴨長明)
- Author's dates
- about 1155 to 1216
- Written
- 1212
- Language
- Japanese
- Covers
- the disasters of Kyoto from 1177 to 1185 and the author's retirement, written in 1212
- Kind
- Collection of sources
The 1905 and 1907 Dickins versions are out of copyright but no scan was located within this task's search budget. No Japanese text link could be verified either; the work is on Japanese Wikisource and in every Japanese classics series. Keene's 1955 translation is under copyright.
Where to read it
Translations
- Hojoki, English version (Series of Japanese Classics in English 1, Tokyo, 1961; translator not named on the record), at the Internet Archive
- F. V. Dickins, Ho-jo-ki: Notes from a Ten Feet Square Hut (1907); Minakata Kumagusu and Dickins, 'A Japanese Thoreau of the Twelfth Century', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1905), English (not freely online)