Page "Murasaki Shikibu" Paragraph 13

Poetic Memoirs is a collection of 128 poems Mulhern describes as " arranged in a biographical sequence ".

The original set has been lost.

According to custom, the verses would have been passed from person to person and often copied.

Some appear written for a lover — possibly her husband before he died — but she may have merely followed tradition and written simple love poems.

They contain biographical details: she mentions a sister who died, the visit to Echizen province with her father and that she wrote poetry for Shōshi.

Murasaki's poems were published in 1206 by Fujiwara Teika, in what Mulhern believes to be the collection that is closest to the original form ; at around the same time Teika included a selection of Murasaki's works in an imperial anthology, New Collections of Ancient and Modern Times.