Paul Atkins: My Meigetsuki
Prof. Paul Atkins will be presenting on the journal Meigetsuki in conjunction with the 2026 USC Kambun Workshop. The author of Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet, Atkins will consider the research possibilities of this vibrant text.
The presentation will be held over Zoom, August 7, 3-4 PDT. Please contact Dr. Emily Warren for access.
My Meigetsuki
Meigetsuki, the diary Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241) kept for more than fifty years, is not one text but several, depending on who has opened it. Historians read it for the court and the political world of the Genpei and early Kamakura years. Paleographers read it for Teika's hand and for the long history of the manuscript's transmission. Students of literature read it for the poet standing behind the poems. Scientists read it for what he set down about the sky. Teika recorded all of this deliberately, as courtiers did, so that his sons and grandsons would have a store of precedent to consult. I have worked in all four of these realms over twenty-five years.
Among readers of Meigetsuki there is a game, which is to read the year in which Teika was the age you are now. I have played it long enough to watch my own Teika change, and the change has had as much to do with my age as with my scholarship. This talk is an account of what the diary has yielded and what it has withheld across those four fields, and of the Teika I have arrived at. This is my Meigetsuki. What is yours?
