First fiction
We were alone in the darkness on the top deck of the ferry coming back from Shikoku, the two of us wrapped in a single windbreaker, me thinking about the ex-governor who had sailed a thousand years before into this same headwind, rocked & buffeted, who for some reason envisioned a woman in his stead — the log she would keep, the songs & poems she would salt it with — & she, whose name signified safety, place of refuge, thinking perhaps that I was proving more difficult than she had imagined.
“the log she would keep”: The Tosa nikki is the first work of fiction in Japanese (see here for a typo-laden version of an abridged translation). It describes in the voice of a female aristocrat a sea voyage the author himself took, from Tosa in southern Shikoku back to the capital, Kyoto. Ki no Tsurayuki , c.872-945, was the preeminent poet of his day, and authored in addition the first work of Japanese literary criticism, the preface to the Kokinshu.