Ki no Tsurayuki, c.872-945, early Japanese diarist, literary theorist, and poet. Renowned for his erudition and skill in Chinese and Japanese poetry, Tsurayuki took the leading role in the compilation of the Kokinwakashû [collection of ancient and modern verse], the first imperial anthology of poetry. His much-cited preface to that work is the first formal articulation of a Japanese poetics and established a paradigm for future generations of poetic criticism. Tsurayuki's Tosa nikki [Tosa diary] (935), an account of an arduous journey by sea narrated in the first person by a female persona, represents the oldest extant Japanese prose fiction and the beginnings of the great tradition of diary literature.

See Ki no Tsurayuki