Meigetsuki (Record of the Clear Moon), Fujiwara no Teika's Diary

Meigetsuki, known in English as the Record of the Clear Moon, is the private diary of the courtier and poet Fujiwara no Teika (1162 to 1241, also read Fujiwara no Sadaie), one of the most influential literary figures of the early Kamakura period and a principal compiler of the Shin Kokin Wakashu. Kept across much of his adult life, the surviving diary spans roughly 1180 to 1235, though only about thirty percent of the original text survives, in manuscript copies rather than a single authoritative autograph. Its entry for the first year of Tenpuku (1233), eighth month, second day, records a man-eating nekomata incident at Nanto in Yamato province, describing the creature as having the eyes of a cat and the body of a dog, roughly a century before Yoshida Kenko's Tsurezuregusa uses the name in surviving literature. Its strength is that Teika was a court diarist recording contemporary report as it reached the capital, making this the earliest reliably dated written attestation of the creature rather than a later literary retelling. Its limit is exactly that position: Teika records what reached him, a report of a rural incident rather than a firsthand sighting, and the diary itself survives only fragmentarily, in later copies rather than his own hand throughout.