Sarashina and the Longing for Another Life

The woman we know as the author of The Sarashina Diary writes from the far side of expectation.

Unlike Sei Shōnagon, who delights in the exact surface of the moment, or Murasaki Shikibu, who anatomizes emotional consequence with merciless clarity, the Sarashina diarist lives forward—always toward something not yet arrived. Her diary is shaped less by attention than by yearning. It unfolds across decades as a record of what she hoped for, what she imagined, and what life, stubbornly ordinary, failed to deliver.

She was born into the middle ranks of the Heian aristocracy, a girl of promise but not of power, and from an early age her inner life was dominated by stories. The Tale of Genji and other romances did not simply entertain her; they formed her emotional vocabulary. She longed for the world of luminous lovers, moonlit trysts, and exquisite sorrow. She wanted to live inside narrative.

Reality disappointed her.

Marriage brought not romance but frustration. Court life proved duller than she had imagined. Advancement stalled. Love affairs, if they existed, left little trace of fulfillment. Where Shōnagon records pleasure with confidence and Murasaki records desire with moral gravity, the Sarashina diarist records absence—what did not happen, what should have happened, what was imagined and then lost.

Yet this absence is not emptiness. It is erotic in a different register.

Desire in The Sarashina Diary is not sharp or situational; it is diffuse and persistent. It attaches itself to texts, dreams, pilgrimages, and religious vows. Sexual longing is displaced into fantasy and devotion, into the ache of reading, into the sorrow of realizing that one’s life will never resemble the stories that once seemed like prophecy.

Her most famous confession—that she wasted her youth dreaming of romances instead of cultivating virtue—has often been read as repentance. But the tone is more complicated. What she mourns is not sin, but misalignment: the painful realization that her desires were trained on a world she could never enter.

Time, in Sarashina, moves relentlessly forward.

Unlike Shōnagon’s timeless lists or Murasaki’s cyclical emotional patterns, Sarashina is haunted by time. Not time as abstraction, but time as accumulation: years noted, seasons repeated with diminishing expectation, the slow realization that certain moments will not return. The diarist marks the passing of youth almost inadvertently—through references to illness, to fatigue, to the shrinking horizon of possibility. Beauty fades not as tragedy, but as fact. Opportunities do not shatter; they simply close, one by one, with a quiet finality.

The diary becomes a place where longing is not indulged in the present tense, but reviewed in retrospect. Fantasy lingers as memory rather than promise. The romances that once shaped her inner life remain vivid, but increasingly out of reach, recalled with a mixture of tenderness and self-reproach. Buddhism enters here not as a philosophical system or moral framework, but as consolation—something to lean against when the life imagined no longer aligns with the life lived. Faith is not embraced in triumph, but in weariness.

Sexuality, in The Sarashina Diary, is correspondingly subdued, almost ghostly.

It surfaces in dreams that feel more real than waking life, in imagined scenes borrowed from literature, in regret over experiences that never unfolded as they should have—or at all. Erotic longing is displaced into memory and fantasy, then slowly thinned by time. The body rarely asserts itself through pleasure; it announces itself through vulnerability. Illness, aging, and loss become the primary registers of embodiment. Where Izumi Shikibu writes desire as consuming fire and Shōnagon writes it as quick, brilliant sparkle, Sarashina writes it as ache—persistent, low-grade, and unresolved.

This ache cannot be separated from class.

The Sarashina diarist stands close enough to elite culture to be shaped by its ideals, yet too far from its center to command its rewards. She knows the codes. She reads the texts. She understands what a life of romance and aesthetic distinction should look like. But her position denies her sustained access to the world she desires. Court life remains intermittent. Patronage remains uncertain. Marriage offers stability but not transcendence.

Literature, then, becomes both refuge and injury. The tales that nourished her imagination also sharpened her dissatisfaction. They taught her what to want—intensity, beauty, narrative significance—then placed those desires just beyond reach. Reading opens the world and simultaneously forecloses it. The diary records this double bind with painful clarity.

And yet, the act of writing becomes a form of survival.

By tracing her long arc of longing—its beginnings in fantasy, its collisions with disappointment, its gradual softening into religious acceptance—the Sarashina diarist claims a different kind of authority. Not the authority of taste, as in Shōnagon, and not the authority of insight, as in Murasaki, but the authority of duration. She does not resolve desire. She does not transcend it. She lives with it, watches it change shape, and carries it forward into old age.

There is something quietly radical in this refusal of narrative triumph.

The Sarashina Diary refuses the fantasy that a woman’s life resolves neatly—through romance, enlightenment, or artistic triumph. Instead, it offers duration. Desire fades, returns, reshapes itself. Regret coexists with gratitude. Faith emerges not from certainty, but from exhaustion.

If The Pillow Book teaches us how to feel correctly in the moment, Sarashina teaches us how to live with feelings that never quite find their object. It is the diary of someone who wanted more than she received—and who learned, slowly and imperfectly, how to remain alive inside that gap.