Nun Abutsu (1225–83) was an exceptional figure who left a corpus of self-authored writing, which Laffin has used effectively to reveal what this Japanese woman contributed to the historical and literary narrative. Abutsu did it all—served a princess at court, married a respected court poet and bore him several children, and took Buddhist vows and became a nun. But the most important thing she accomplished was to write about her life in diaries, memoirs, and letters, and to produce the first female-authored treatise on poetry, thereby indelibly imprinting her voice on history. There is no dearth of primary or secondary literature on Abutsu, and scholars working on other medieval women will be envious of the vast number of sources available. Laffin has done yeoman service in collating and analyzing all of this information and in contextualizing it for her audience.

Women's literary output, which flowered during the Heian period (794–1185), became less prominent during the Kamakura period (1185–1333) for a number of reasons. Channeling her investigation through a careful analysis of Abutsu's own work, Laffin gives ample examples of how institutional and cultural changes affected the education, social mobility, and literary production of aristocratic women in the thirteenth century. She also considers how various events in Abutsu's tumultuous life impacted her writing (and vice versa), and what her many written works reveal about the possibilities for women's writing in medieval Japan. The information presented in the volume provides important context that links Abutsu to a larger network of educated women who similarly sought to survive and thrive within the new military system.

The first of the book's five chapters is the shortest and broadest. In it, Laffin outlines the political, economic, and social context of thirteenth-century Japan and discusses the changes these factors brought to bear on the lives and careers of upper-class women. Each of the following four chapters takes up one of Abutsu's major literary works and examines it in the context of her life at the time of its writing; an epilogue examines her legacy and role in founding the Reizei lineage.

The focus of chapter 2 is The nursemaid's letter (Menoto no fumi, ca. 1264), a letter Abutsu wrote for her daughter, Ki no Naishi (1251–?), instructing her on how to survive as a court attendant. But the chapter also documents Abutsu's own experiences at court—her early life and upbringing and her career at the salon of Ankamon'in (Princess Hōshi)—that ultimately gave her the knowledge to write this guide for her daughter. The chapter examines the importance of artistic training for court women in music, poetry, knowledge of incense for scenting robes, writing skills, and painting, but cautions that while these skills were useful, “true success is gained through sexual ties to a wealthy male patron” (p. 31). Holding estate lands, however, proved to be an even more effective way for upper-class women to achieve financial stability, and Laffin's discussion of the workings of Ankamon'in's salon highlights how absolutely critical land-holdings and control of estate incomes were for their well-being and independence, a topic that begs further study.

In chapter 3, Laffin interprets Abutsu's memoir, Fitful slumbers (Utatane, ca. 1265), as a literary work that offers alternative lifestyles for women who withdrew from court life. I had some difficulty following the chronology of this memoir. Laffin states, for example, that the scholarly consensus is that Fitful slumbers was written when Abutsu was in her thirties, as a memoir recounting her teens (p. 62), but the date attributed to the work is ca. 1265, when Abutsu was forty-one (by Japanese count). Later we are told the text is “to be read as an autobiographical representation of Abutsu's life in the 1240s” (p. 62). These dates and numbers are confusing and hinder the reader's ability to follow the discussion easily, forcing this reader to flip back to the provided chronology (appendix II) for clarification. As an aside, although book editors seem to prefer that Japanese book titles be translated into English for their readers, this practice renders them meaningless to most specialists because titles can be translated quite differently. The Japanese title of Fitful slumbers does not appear anywhere in this chapter; I finally located it much earlier on p. 14. It would be helpful if the Japanese title could be given at least once when it first appears in the chapter.

Chapter 4 examines Abutsu's activities as a poet and scholar of the Tale of Genji. Laffin analyzes a series of love poems, an exchange of sentiments between Abutsu and her future husband, Fujiwara no Tameie (1198–1275), that were later included in the imperial anthology, Gyokuyōshū, edited by Tameie's grandson. During the writing of these poems, Abutsu was also working as a copyist of the Tale of Genji for Tameie, an activity that put her in close contact with the eminent poet and courtier and led to their affair. Here, too, using actual dates would help the reader better define the timeframe under discussion. For example, we are told that Abutsu copied the Genji “during the decade after the events described in Fitful Slumbers” (p. 98), but to interpret that phrase, one must be able to recall when those events took place and which decade followed them.

In 1279, Nun Abutsu journeyed to the new political center of Kamakura to appeal her son Tamesuke's right to his father's estate. The record she kept of that journey, Diary of the sixteenth night moon (Izayoi nikki, 1279), is discussed in the final chapter. But the diary is more than a travelogue. According to Laffin, it really functions as a manifesto that asserts Abutsu's claim to her husband's poetic lineage (Mikohidari), and her son's legitimate claim to his father's estate. The problem of legitimacy arose because Abutsu was not Tameie's primary wife, causing another son to challenge her right to inherit his estate lands and poetic capital. Although Abutsu's case was ultimately successful, she did not live to see her efforts pay off. Her success in securing land rights and documents for her son (decided some thirty years after Abutsu's death), however, allowed Tamesuke's branch of the house, known as the Reizei, to survive. The epilogue traces how, in the eighteenth century, Tamesuke's descendant, Reizei Tamemura (1712–74), celebrated and honored Abutsu, reasserting her as the founder of the Reizei lineage.

The scholarship in the book is top-notch, and there is a wealth of exciting information in this volume about Nun Abutsu and about how a woman of her station survived and even flourished in thirteenth-century Japan. This “picture” of Abutsu could, however, have been further enhanced through an analysis of the arresting portrait on the book jacket, showing Abutsu wearing court robes, with cropped hair and holding Buddhist prayer beads. Laffin identifies the portrait as an Edo-period painting by Sugawara Shigeki that belongs to Kyoto's Daitsūji, but what else do we know about this image? Laffin does not elaborate, and a cursory search turned up nothing about the artist. That one of Abutsu's grave markers is located at Daitsūji suggests the portrait is a memorial image, likely made around the time Reizei Tamemura resurrected Abutsu as the originator of the lineage. It would be interesting to know why Laffin chose this particular image to represent Abutsu rather than a much older (ca. fourteenth century) and more famous portrait of her wearing the robes of a Buddhist nun—a portrait that also has poems from her Diary of the sixteenth night moon affixed to it. This fourteenth-century image, kept in the Reizei storehouse for centuries, also functioned as a memorial portrait, marking Abutsu's important place within the Reizei lineage centuries earlier. As portraits are vital primary documents, both of these images could have been more effectively utilized to highlight how Abutsu was perceived shortly after her own lifetime and also in the Edo period. Nonetheless, although one always wants more, Laffin is to be commended for bringing real depth to our understanding of this talented and passionate medieval woman.