Kamo no Chomei born

1135

The future author of the Hojoki, one of the most celebrated essays in Japanese literature, was born into a low-ranking Shinto priest's family in Kyoto. He would spend his last years as a hermit in a ten-foot-square hut and write a Buddhist meditation on the transience of the capital. His account of fire, earthquake, famine, and political chaos in Kyoto remains one of the most vivid descriptions of urban disaster in medieval literature.