Lady Nijō enters imperial service as a child, becomes Retired Emperor GoFukakusa's favored concubine, bears his child and the children of other lovers he tacitly permits, then is expelled from court after his consort's jealousy and political disfavor. Stripped of status and security, she spends her remaining decades as a wandering Buddhist nun, retracing the physical and emotional geography of her lost court life through pilgrimage.
A high-status woman's apparent erotic latitude, taking lovers beyond her imperial patron, operates entirely at the patron's discretion and for his purposes, including his own intrigues and sense of generosity. Nijō's liaisons are permitted, arranged, or forgiven by GoFukakusa, which means her sexual life displays his control rather than her autonomy.
Taking Buddhist vows and wandering as a nun is narrated not as a clean renunciation of worldly ties but as a transformed way of carrying them: pilgrimage sites, poems, and chance encounters keep returning Nijō to the emperor and the court she left. Spiritual withdrawal becomes the medium through which attachment is reenacted and mourned rather than dissolved.
A person expelled from an institution that controlled her record can use first-person narrative to reassert the significance of a life the institution discarded, selecting episodes that establish her centrality, her loves, and her griefs. The account's value lies partly in preserving a perspective official histories had no reason to keep.