seems that despite all my precautions he[1] caught wind of my plan, and sent some servants to escort me; but by then I suppose I had already started. They were at first wrongly directed; hence the delay. The boat pulled inshore, room was made for us, and soon we were on our homeward way, the oarsmen singing lustily. As we passed along the side of Seta Bridge it began to grow quite light. A covey of sand-plovers, with much frilling of wings, flew right across us; and indeed, before we reached the quay where two days ago I had taken boat, we had seen many lovely and moving sights. A carriage was waiting for me at the quay and I was back in the City soon after the hour of the Snake (10 a.m.). No sooner did I reach home than my women gathered round me full of lurid stories about all that had been going on in the world since my departure. It is really very odd that they should still think such things have any interest for me; and so I told them.'
In the Izumi Shikibu Nikki, the record of a love-affair which took place in 1003-1004, we find the romantic diary already becoming a rather effete and self-conscious genre. This little book (some forty pages) is utterly lacking in the intensity and directness of Lady Gossamer's journal; it has been translated into English[2] and the environment of the story is so new to European readers that its weakness as literature tends to be condoned. Another work which preceded Genji by a few years was the Makura no Sōshi or 'Pillow Sketches' of Sei Shõnagon. This is a spirited commonplace-book, but it contains no connected narrative and therefore does not here concern us. The greater part of it was translated by the late Abbé Noël Péri, and no doubt his translation will one day be published.
