In 1940, a scholar was going through the holdings of the Imperial Household when a manuscript in the geography section caught his eye. Seeing it titled "Towazugatari," meaning "Unrequested Tale," he took it home to inspect it more closely. It soon became clear that the work was not a treatise on geography at all, but a lost masterpiece of Japanese literature. Translated as "The Confessions of Lady Nijo," the book is an extraordinary evocation of a life governed by ritual, dreams and nostalgia for an idealized past.