Kamo no Chōmei

Kamo no Chōmei was born about 1155 into the priestly family of the Shimogamo Shrine in Kyoto; his father was its chief priest. Losing his father while still young, he also lost the chance to inherit the office, and became known instead as a poet and a player of the biwa lute, and was called by the retired emperor Go-Toba to serve in the Bureau of Poetry. When the emperor later wished to make him priest of a shrine, his kinsmen blocked it; bitterly disappointed, he became a monk at fifty and at last built a hut ten feet square in the hills of Hino outside Kyoto, where he lived alone and wrote An Account of My Hut.