Spotted in the bookstore the other day: a bilingual, facing-pages edition of William N. Porter's early 20th-century translation of the Tosa Nikki (『土佐日記』, or "Diary of [a person from] Tosa [Province]").

There can't be many people who know enough or are interested enough in classical Japanese to benefit from this book yet don't know enough modern Japanese to benefit more from a regular edition aimed at the Japanese-speaking market.

Still, more bilingual editions (of anything) in circulation can only be good for the aliens who will have to sift through the rubble of the Earthling civilisations and learn our languages through comparative hyperphilology. (They will probably already speak Japanese, having been drawn here in the first place by the desire to buy Inu-Yasha merchandise.)

One notable fact about the Tosa Nikki is that although it was probably written by a man (the governer of Tosa himself, in fact), he claims to be a woman. This is doubly funny when you consider that the work starts:

をとこもすなる日記といふものを、をむなもしてみんとてするなり。
"[I], a woman, have decided to try my hand at one of those 'diary' things that men write."

When I first read this, I thought I'd misunderstood -- one thousand years later, the Japanese "diary-like book" canon is practically a female-only zone. Of course there are some exceptions, but...

Also, did you notice the womuna there? Part of the onna (女, woman) family tree, which also includes wouna and began, I believe, with the eerily-similar-to-English womina. If I were a 19th-Century crank, I'd be proposing links between Indo-European and Japanese right about now. (Although I'd probably get shot down by another crank smugly informing me that "woman" was just a shortened form of "woe-to-man".)

Finally, not to undercut Tuttle or anything, but if you weren't married to the whole "book" thing, you could also read G. W. Sargent's translation of the work here, crossreferencing it with one or both of the two editions of the Japanese text available at UVa. Or perhaps you'd prefer a CJ-MJ edition.