mid-Heian period · 936?–995Mother of Michitsuna

A mid-Heian woman poet and diarist, daughter of Fujiwara no Tomoyasu. In 954 she married the future regent Fujiwara no Kaneie and bore him a son, Michitsuna. Her Kagerō Diary, chronicling twenty-one years of marriage and the anguish of a wife in a polygamous society, is the earliest surviving diary by a Japanese woman and influenced The Tale of Genji. Ōkagami calls her one of the three great beauties of the age. One of the Late Classical Thirty-Six Immortals, she has about thirty-five poems in imperial anthologies.