Unsuitable Books for Women Genji Monogatari and Ise Monogatari in Late Seventeenth-Century Japan, Kornicki

Unsuitable Books for Women? Genji Monogatari and Ise Monogatariin Late Seventeenth-Century Japan

Kornicki, Peter F. (Peter Francis)

Monumenta Nipponica, Volume 60, Number 2, Summer 2005,pp. 147-193 (Article)

Published by Sophia UniversityDOI: 10.1353/mni.2005.0021

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THE AUTHOR is professor of Japanese history and bibliography at the University of Cambridge.He would like to express his thanks to Professor Hayakawa Monta 早川門多 for palaeographicassistance; to Dr. T. J. Harper for making available his unpublished translation of an excerpt fromSeji hyakudan 世事百談; to Professor Toshio Yokoyama 横山俊夫 for making available photo-copies of material in Kyoto University Library; and to Richard Bowring, Tom Harper, JamesMcMullen, Joshua Mostow, Francesca Orsini, Gaye Rowley, and the anonymous readers for inci-sive and invaluable comments on earlier versions.

1 Pliny 1969, pp. 36, 40, 62 (letters 1.2, 1.8, 2.5); on Zhu Xi, see Gardner 1990, pp. 21–22,139–40; on Wilkie Collins and his contemporaries, see Brantlinger 1998, esp. pp. 17–21.

2 On the pros and cons of using this term, and doubts about its suitability for use in the con-text of Japan, see the introduction to Ko et al. 2003.

Unsuitable Books for Women?

Genji Monogatari and Ise Monogatariin Late Seventeenth-Century Japan

P. F. KORNICKI

PUBLICATION entails loss of control over texts: over who reads them, overhow they are read, over what texts people read, and over what construc-tions are put upon them. The Younger Pliny was well aware of this in

ancient Rome, though of course in his day “publication” meant putting manu-scripts in the hands of professional copyists and booksellers. The advent of printin both Asia and Europe thus merely exacerbated a problem that existed in scribalcultures, too. It was the publication of texts in print that occasioned Zhu Xi’sanxious response to what he perceived as the undesirably liberal availability ofbooks in twelfth-century China and that later spurred the worries of nineteenth-century British writers about the reading habits of what Wilkie Collins calledthe “Unknown Public.”1 Similar circumstances obtained in early seventeenth-century Japan, where the abundance of printed publications was a new, andpotentially worrying, phenomenon. Among these new publications were the firstprinted editions of Genji monogatari源氏物語 and Ise monogatari伊勢物語, andtheir ready availability aroused disquiet, particularly among the sinologicalscholars we habitually, but inaccurately, refer to as “Confucianists.”2

This article seeks to explore the consequences of print for the female reader-ship of Genji monogatari and Ise monogatari, for it was in the context mainlyof women readers of these two texts that the anxieties were commonly articu-lated. We see here a notable difference from the situation in nineteenth-century

Derek Young

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Europe, where disquiet about what women were reading related principally tocurrent fiction.3 In seventeenth-century Japan, by contrast, it was rather the clas-sics of the Heian period, especially Genji monogatari and Ise monogatari, andthe tradition of court poetry, that gave rise to anxiety. Why should these andother works of Heian literature have been seen to be unsuitable reading matterfor women? What effect did such views have on the reading practices of women,and what responses did they elicit? These questions bristle with difficulties, soit will be as well to map out a strategy beforehand for answering them. Since itwas print that made these texts easily accessible, I consider, firstly, the earlyseventeenth-century appearance of these two works in print and the ways inwhich their presentation affected reading possibilities and practices; secondly,the views of sinologists and others who took exception to them as suitable textsfor women and urged women instead to turn to morally beneficial sinologicaltexts; thirdly, the resistance to such views from male defenders of Genji; fourthly,the actual reading practices of women readers; and fifthly, the appropriation ofGenji in other contexts that cast light upon the question of women readers.Finally, I argue that if the issue of gender is ignored, the print revolution of theseventeenth century cannot be fully understood, and consider the implicationsof this study for the further exploration of women’s literacy and reading inseventeenth-century Japan.

From Manuscript to PrintBy1600 printing had already been practiced for hundreds of years in Japan, butit was not until the advent of commercial printers and publishers in the earlyyears of the seventeenth century that Japanese literature, including both fictionand histories, was put into print for the first time. This circumstance is largelyattributable to the monastic rather than commercial functions of print before theseventeenth century and to the exclusivity of the courtly world in which literaryworks had been transmitted. The commercial booksellers that began operatingin Kyoto in the early years of the seventeenth century rapidly brought most ofthe corpus of earlier fictional literature into print, however, and by the end of thecentury both Genji monogatari and Ise monogatari had been published in numer-ous editions. Although textual scholars have for the most part dismissed thesevarious printed editions, such works, together with their extensive illustrations,continued to serve as the main point of access to the world of the Heian mono-gatari until the Meiji period.4 They form, therefore, an essential part of any con-sideration of the readership of these two works in the seventeenth century.

A brief examination of the extensive range of texts and digests of Genji andcommentaries on it published in the course of the seventeenth century willdemonstrate its ready availability. Four movable-type editions of Genji are

Monumenta Nipponica 60:2148

3 See Flint 1993 and Brantlinger 1998.4 It is astonishing that surveys of the various texts of Genji ignore the very existence of these

editions; see, for example, Ikeda 1953–1962, vol. 7; and Nihon koten bungaku daijiten, vol. 2, pp.433–34.

known to have been printed between 1600 and 1644.5 Woodblock editions beganto appear in the early 1650s, when Yamamoto Shunshô 山本春正 (1610–1682)produced the first large-format illustrated version. Shunshô was an active wakapoet in both Kyoto and Edo and a follower of the celebrated poet MatsunagaTeitoku 松永貞徳 (1571–1653), who had already been involved in the popular-ization of hitherto restricted genres.6 Over the next twenty years Shunshô’s illus-trated version went through a bewildering number of reprints and new editionsin various formats and sizes, evidence in itself of the extent and diversity of themarket for printed copies of Genji.7

This was by no means the whole picture, for there were also digests, or con-densed versions of the text, offering easier access to it in more familiar language.Digests of Genji had been produced since the Kamakura period, but in the sev-enteenth century they began to appear in print. More than a dozen editions of thefifteenth-century Genji kokagami 源氏小鏡 were published between 1651 and1680. In the 1650s Nonoguchi Ryûho 野々口立圃 (1595–1669), another followerof Matsunaga Teitoku, created the first digest written for a commercial audience,the illustrated Jûjô Genji 十帖源氏. It was followed shortly thereafter by a sim-plified version for children, Osana Genji おさな源氏. Both works went throughinnumerable editions and reprints in the seventeenth century.8 Of printed texts,then, there was an abundance.

Genji was not, however, an easy text for seventeenth-century readers. Thepractice of studying it with a teacher was still very much alive even at the endof the seventeenth century and doubtless remained the elite and scholarly modeof access to the text for some time to come.9 But once printed commentaries onthe text became available, complete with philological crutches for those whoneeded them, it was for the first time possible to imagine reading Genji withouta teacher. There can be no doubt that these printed commentaries had a profoundimpact on how the text was read and studied. One of the earliest to be printedwas Bansui ichiro万水一露, drawn up by the renga poet Eikan 永閑 at the end of

KORNICKI: Unsuitable Books for Women? 149

5 Kawase 1932, p. 90; Kawase 1967, vol. 1, pp. 512–13; vol. 2, pp. 886–88. On the putativeSagabon 嵯峨本 edition, which does not carry any overt indication of its place of publication orits publisher, see Ii 2002, pp. 672–87.

6 On Yamamoto Shunshô, see Odaka 1964, pp. 468–503.7 On Yamamoto Shunshô’s illustrated editions, see Yoshida 1987, vol. 1, pp. 9–115; and

Shimizu 2003, pp. 39–103. Shimizu mostly accepts Yoshida’s judgments, but argues against hisordering of some of the undated editions; see the meticulous bibliographical analysis in Shimizu2003, pp. 14, 41–71. In English there is Markus 1982, pp. 167–74; although still rewarding, thisoffers incomplete bibliographical data and in that respect is superseded by Shimizu and Yoshida;see also Kokusho sômokuroku, vol. 3, p. 124; Shorin shuppan, vol. 1, p. 43.

8 Genji kokagami had appeared in seven movable-type editions by 1640, three unillustratedwood-block editions between 1651 and 1666, and numerous other illustrated wood-block editionsin various sizes from 1657 onwards; Jûjô Genji was reissued three times in the 1660s. First pub-lished in Kyoto in 1661, Osana Genji was reprinted numerous times in the seventeenth century;it was published in a separate Edo edition in 1672 with four reprints in the 1680s. Yoshida 1987,vol. 1, pp. 194–218, 245–66, 323–40.

9 See the innumerable references gathered conveniently in Ii 2001, pp. 657ff.

the sixteenth century. The manuscript was amplified by Matsunaga Teitoku andeventually published in 1663. In his afterword, Teitoku acknowledged that ide-ally Genji should be approached with the four leading commentaries at one’sside and with access to the “lectures of a distinguished teacher.” He claimed,however, that Eikan had distilled the essence of these commentaries so that areader could manage with Bansui ichiro alone. Clearly Teitoku accepted thepractice of reading Genji without the mediation of an instructor.10

In 1673 another extensive commentary appeared, Shusho Genji monogatari首書源氏物語, but this has been overshadowed by the much better knownKogetsushô 湖月抄, published in the same year. Kogetsushô was prepared byKitamura Kigin 北村季吟 (1624–1705), a prominent poet and scholar, and he, too,sought to make the world of Genji commentaries and scholarship public prop-erty in the form of an annotated edition of the text based extensively upon ear-lier exegetical literature. This edition is generally considered to have achievedthe widest circulation in the Edo period. To be sure, it is not easy to verify thisassumption. Nishida Naokai 西田直養 (1793–1865), a Kokugakusha and associ-ate of Hirata Atsutane 平田篤胤, for example, had high esteem for Kogetsushôand considered it indispensable, but how representative was his opinion?11 Thefrequency of textual and visual reference to Kogetsushô in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries does, however, lend some credence to the premise of its pre-eminence.12

Enough has been said now of the printing history of Genji, and it would besupererogatory to enumerate the various other digests and commentaries here.The grounds for Yoshida Kôichi’s 吉田幸一 claim that there was a veritable Genjipublishing boom in the 1660s are obvious.13 Ise monogatari, too, likewise sud-denly became accessible in two senses, the availability of copies and the publi-cation of commentaries facilitating private reading. The same was true of mostof the canonical texts of Heian and Kamakura literature in their seventeenth-century incarnations.14

We can now identify three stages in the process whereby, in the course of theseventeenth century, Genji and Ise came into the public domain. First movable-type editions appeared. These were in all likelihood produced in small quanti-ties, and readers of these copies still needed instruction, so the established oral


10 Ii 1988–1992, vol. 28, p. 413. On the various commentaries, Ii 2001 is exceptionally useful.11 See his Sasanoya manpitsu篠舎漫筆, in Nihon zuihitsu taisei, 2nd series, vol. 2, pp. 149–50.12 See, for example, the references to Kogetsushô in works by Ihara Saikaku 井原西鶴, Tamenaga

Shunsui 為永春水, and Santô Kyôden 山東京伝, in, respectively, Saikaku zenshû, vol. 2, pp.270–71; NKBZ 47, p. 392; NKBT 59, p. 427.

13 Yoshida 1987, vol. 1, p. 413; for details of other digests, see vol. 1, pp. 272, 289–93. Nakano1997 provides information about other works, but it should be noted that he is dependent uponYoshida in the case of works discussed by both.

14 On the early printing history of Ise monogatari, see Kawase 1932, pp. 23–41; Kawase 1967,vol. 1, pp. 430–40, 508–509; vol. 2, p. 855; Tanaka 1965, pp. 319ff. See also Vos 1957, pp. 101–14,for an examination of the commentarial tradition; and Bowring 1992, pp. 466–77, for the polemicsof the Edo-period commentaries.

context for the transmission of received interpretations continued unchanged.Second came illustrated wood-block editions. These may well have been pro-duced in larger numbers, but were not easy reading for the untrained. They didoffer readers some help, however, in the form of glosses (furigana, dakuten, etc.)and notes to facilitate solitary reading. Third were the texts equipped with com-mentaries and the digests, and here we can identify the possibility of access forthe untrained, without the need for a teacher to indicate how to construe andinterpret the text.

Surviving seventeenth-century booksellers’ catalogues provide a further angleon the flood of published editions. An undated catalogue printed during the 1660sincludes four entries for Genji, including commentaries, illustrated editions, andso on, and seven for Ise monogatari, and the catalogues of 1670 and 1675 includeprogressively more entries for each of the two works.15 The simultaneous avail-ability of such a range of editions bespeaks a vigorous contemporary demandfor copies of the text, but also raises the question of the potential economicconstraints on this market. Andrew Markus has made much of the high cost,relative to other books, of Kitamura Kigin’s Kogetsushô in the booksellers’ cat-alogues.16 The prices given in the catalogues for 1681 and 1696 were indeedhigh at 130 monme; but after all, Kogetsushô consisted of sixty-two volumes.On the other hand, one could purchase the reduced-size version of YamamotoShunshô’s illustrated Genji for less than half the cost (50 monme in 1681), acopy of Osana Genji in ten volumes for only 12 monme, and a copy of Genjikokagami for just 3.5 monme. Ise monogatari, meanwhile, which in most edi-tions filled only two volumes, could be had, even with illustrations, for less than2 monme.17 To contextualize these prices, we might note that in 1657 the dailywages of skilled laborers like carpenters and thatchers were fixed at 3 monme;in 1710, day laborers in Kyoto were paid 1.5 monme; and between 1662 and1700, the price of one koku (5.1 U.S. bushels) of white rice ranged between 39and 105 monme; while Kogetsushô was thus indeed expensive, Ise monogatariand the cheaper digests were financially within reach for a skilled laborer.18 Andwe should not forget that by the end of the seventeenth century, booksellers werein the habit of renting out their books as well as selling them, a practice thatreduced the cost of access to any given item as well as extended the range ofbooks available to customers of relatively modest means.19

The various printed editions described here created new readership possibili-ties, for we are talking about new readers, not simply old readers acquiring newopportunities for perusing familiar texts. It is true that manuscript production ofGenji and other Heian texts continued throughout the Edo period and that an


15 Shorin shuppan, vol. 1, pp. 43, 96–97, 142, 198, 209, 290, etc.16 Markus 1982, pp. 170–71.17 Shorin shuppan, vol. 2, pp. 164, 189; for the prices in 1696 and 1709, which were for the

most part unchanged, see vol. 2, pp. 216, 297–98.18 Ono 1979, pp. 207, 451–52.19 Nagatomo 1982, pp. 19–32.

illustrated manuscript in a fine calligraphic hand, preferably copied from anancient exemplar, carried far more cultural prestige than any printed edition. Butprint, meanwhile, generated copies of Genji in quantities previously unthinkableand reached an audience with little chance of access to the manuscript tradi-tions.20

The Case Against Genji Monogatari and Ise MonogatariThe view that monogatari were at best a distraction and probably of some harmto women is of greater antiquity than Genji itself and can be traced back to Sanbô-e三宝絵 (984).21 The subsequent elaboration of Buddhist justifications of Genjitestifies to the perception that it was vulnerable to criticism and needed to bedefended against detractors.22 Our concern here is the direction taken by this dis-course in the seventeenth century. Male sinologists were the major source ofearly Edo criticism of Genji, but the debate widened, especially in the eighteenthcentury, when adherents of other intellectual traditions, such as Kokugaku, tookup opposing positions.

The long-established consensus is that sinologists considered Genji mono-gatari to be morally objectionable, but the circumstances surrounding this issuedeserve further consideration. Many of the sinologists addressed themselves notonly to Genji but also to Ise monogatari: why did they concern themselves withthese two works in particular? What does a close reading of their writings revealof the context for their views? Were these two texts in fact “snatched from thehands of women readers,” as has been claimed?23 Was it really “paradoxical”that some sinologists turned their attention to texts considered to be morallyrepellent, and, if so, why did they do so?24

Let us begin with Hayashi Razan 林羅山 (1583–1657) and his son and heir,Gahô 鵞峰 (1618–1680). Both were not only lecturers to successive shogun butalso scholars, bibliophiles, and book collectors on a heroic scale; they were atthe heart of the sinological establishment in seventeenth-century Japan. Sometime in the 1650s, they published together a pair of bibliographic guides, the firstto appear in print in Japan; the proliferation of printed matter since the begin-ning of the century had undoubtedly made such guidance seem a matter ofurgency. Razan’s bibliography concerned Chinese books and Gahô’s listedJapanese; unlike most of Razan and Gahô’s other writings, however, these twobibliographies were written not in Chinese but in simple Japanese, katakanamixed with characters, and were furnished with ample furigana glosses.According to the two postfaces, the object was to impart the “general outline”of Chinese and Japanese literature broadly conceived and to “instruct children”;


20 As Shimizu takes pains to emphasize, all the block-printed editions were openly for sale;Shimizu 2003, pp. 20–25.

21 Rowley 2000, pp. 18–19; Kamens 1988.22 On the “religious allegorization” of Ise monogatari, see Klein 2002, pp. 124ff and passim.23 Noguchi 1995, p. 7.24 McMullen 1999, pp. 4–5.

a brief explanation of the work’s contents accompanied each title. It appears,then, that the bibliographies were compiled to guide those setting out on the firststages of a course of serious reading.25

The fact that these bibliographies were published in tandem suggests accep-tance of the value of reading Japanese texts as well as canonical Chinese works,a stance that by no means was taken for granted among Japanese sinologists.That said, many of the Japanese texts listed were actually written in Chinese(kanbun), and, with the exception of a few chronicles concerning the wars at theend of the sixteenth century, most were of considerable antiquity. So this wasno guide to recent Japanese literature. The list included some texts in Japanese,such as Heike monogatari 平家物語, Jinnô shôtôki 神皇正統記, and Kokonchomonjû古今著聞集, but there were significant absences: excluded were all thecourt anthologies of waka poetry and all the Heian monogatari, with the solitaryexception of Eiga monogatari栄花物語. These omissions were no accident. It isevident that Hayashi Gahô declined to recommend any literature of this sort,including Genji monogatari and Ise monogatari, to the young. Why?

The omissions from Gahô’s bibliography would seem to corroborate NakamuraYukihiko’s 中村幸彦 observation that Razan and many of his contemporaries didnot accept the authority of the Japanese canon when individual works affrontedtheir sense of moral propriety.26 This is an important difference between theseventeenth-century sinologists and the courtly intellectuals of the precedingage, such as Sanjônishi Sanetaka 三条西実隆 (1455–1537), for whom the author-ity of the canon was paramount. In the preface to his commentary on Tsure-zuregusa 徒然草, Razan attributed the moral shortcomings of monogatari, which“contain the language of sycophantic laughter and false wit and lack the meansto instruct or reprove,” to the fact that they were written by “women and girls.”27

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that Razan himself had read Genji in hisyouth, and he remained engaged with it, for around 1605 he had a vigorousexchange of views with Ikkadô Jôa 一華堂乗阿 (1531–1619) on the interpretationof a particular passage. One of the leading practitioners and theoreticians of wakaat court, Jôa lectured on the subject to Emperor Go-Yôzei 後陽成; Razan was byfifty years Jôa’s junior, and yet he delivered his riposte to Jôa with supreme


25 Hayashi 1996, vol. 1, pp. 1–31; Hayashi 1979, vol. 2, pp. 391–401. The first dated edition ofthese two works is that of 1667, but an earlier edition may have been published in the Jôô era(1652–1655); Kokusho sômokuroku, vol. 6, p. 394.

26 Nakamura 1958, pp. 4–8.27 For the preface to Nozuchi 野槌, Razan’s commentary on Tsurezuregusa, which was pub-

lished some time before 1650, see Kokubun chûshaku zensho, vol. 13, p. 1 (separately paginated);and Hayashi 1930a, p. 564. Razan made a similar observation in his miscellany Baison saihitsu梅村載筆; see Nihon zuihitsu taisei, 1st series, vol. 1, p. 21. The authorship of the latter work isdisputed, but see the convincing arguments for Razan’s authorship of most of it, including theremark quoted, in Hori 1964, p. 54. Gahô included Eiga monogatari in his bibliography of rec-ommended books in spite of its attribution to a woman writer, Akazome Emon 赤染衛門; pre-sumably he either was more tolerant of female authorship than his father, or he considered Eigamonogatari, with its focus on the life and times of Fujiwara no Michinaga 藤原道長, to be a his-torical work and therefore to be distinguished from the fictional monogatari.

confidence and minute knowledge of Genji.28 He also paraded his knowledge ofGenji in his commentary on Tsurezuregusa, and he compiled a collection ofextracts from Genji commentaries that unfortunately was lost with the bulk ofhis library during the Meireki 明暦 fire of 1657.29 Even if he did not regard Genjias suitable reading for the young, then, he clearly found it acceptable for a scholarsuch as himself. His son did not dissent from this view.

Should we be surprised that Razan paid so much attention to Genji? Perhapsnot, if we recall that, committed sinologists though both he and his son were,they were simultaneously concerned to “domesticate” the way of the sages inJapan and were anything but blind to the history and social conditions of theJapan in which they lived.30 How much Gahô knew of Genji is unclear, but,according to his autobiography, on his father’s instructions he studied Japaneseas a boy under Matsunaga Teitoku; later he became an avid reader of Japanese“books” (sôshi 草子, a word that at the time connoted literary works, includingmonogatari).31 Rejecting the tradition of secret transmissions in which the inter-pretation of texts had hitherto been cocooned, in 1603, well before Gahô’s birth,Teitoku had taken part with Razan and a few others in a series of public read-ings and lectures on Taiheiki太平記, Rongo shitchû論語集注, Tsurezuregusa, andHyakunin isshu 百人一首.32 He also, as noted above, contributed to several edi-tions of Genji by writing prefaces or undertaking editorial work. In the light ofthe association with Teitoku, then, the sôshi Gahô enjoyed reading likelyincluded Genji and other texts that he forebore to recommend in his bibliogra-phy. Gahô wrote extensively on Japanese history, and his published works showhim to have been thoroughly conversant with the fictional literature of the Heianperiod.33 And if knowledge of Genji seems unlikely in the Hayashi father andson, let us remember that even Ogyû Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728), notorious forhis sinophilia and supposed disdain for things Japanese, knew Genji well.34


28 The letters are cited in Odaka 1964, pp. 230–33, from Razan-sensei besshû羅山先生別集, anunpublished manuscript in the Naikaku Bunko 内閣文庫. On Jôa, see Odaka 1964, pp. 204–37.

29 See the bibliography of Razan’s writings compiled by Gahô in 1659 and included in the sep-arately paginated supplement to Hayashi 1930b, pp. 64–65. As James McMullen points out inMcMullen 1999, p. 59, n. 213, some of Razan’s comments on Genji are also preserved in ananonymous work by a contemporary entitled Zechishô 是知抄. This work does not appear to bein the public domain, but extracts from it are cited in Shigematsu 1961, pp. 273–74.

30 I borrow the term “domesticate” in this context from the subtle examination of this problemin Nakai 1980, p. 159.

31 Gahô’s autobiographical account, Jijo ryakufu自叙略譜, is contained in the supplement to thevoluminous collection of his writings, Hayashi 1689, pp. 2a–2b. Hayashi 1997, which is a partialfacsimile of this work, does not include the supplement.

32 See Odaka 1953, pp. 124ff; and Odaka 1996, vol. 7, pp. 240–45.33 Odaka has complained (Odaka 1964, p. 169) of the inadequate biographical and biblio-

graphical study of Razan; this remains the case today, but Gahô is totally neglected. Gahô pub-lished Nihon ôdai ichiran 日本王代一覧 (1663 and numerous later editions) and played a majorpart in the compilation of the official kanbun history of Japan sponsored by the bakufu, Honchôtsugan 本朝通鑑. For a brief biography, see the introduction to the partial facsimile edition ofGahô-sensei Rin-gakushi zenshû鵞峰先生林学士全集, in Hayashi 1997, vol. 12, pp. 2–17.

34 This is obvious from his Narubeshi南留別志; see Ogyû 1973–1978, vol. 5, pp. 643, 652, 661.See also Iwahashi 1934, pp. 432–33.

Yet this is to say nothing of how these sinologists read their Genji. It has beensuggested that their Neo-Confucian allegiances left Razan and his contempo-raries with too utilitarian, too moralistic a view of fictional literature to be ableto see it as anything but salacious, or to be able to appreciate its literary quali-ties; that, like the “blind in front of a famous painting,” they treated the Japaneseclassics as historical sources and little more.35 While there is too little evidenceto reach a confident judgment on this question, it seems fair to say that, for Razan,Genji was not so much a literary treasure as a window onto a degenerate past. Italso remains true, however, that, as seen above, he considered it a text that couldbe studied without disgrace by an adult male and a scholar.

Declining to recommend such works as Genji, Razan and Gahô passed overthem in silence in the guidance they offered to young readers. Their epigones,however, were too anxious about the accessibility of Genji and Ise monogatari,especially to young women, to content themselves with discretion, and they gavesometimes vigorous expression to their views. In the second half of the seven-teenth century the concerns about Genji voiced discreetly or in private by Razanthus became more specific and more public as the next generation of sinologiststurned to print.36

The earliest explicit expression in print of disquiet about Genji monogatariand Ise monogatari in the hands of women that has so far come to light datesfrom 1653. It appears in the writings of Nagata Zensai 永田善斎 (1597–1664), aformer pupil of Hayashi Razan who later became a domain scholar in Wakayamaon Razan’s recommendation:

In this country, from the highest in the land down to officials, samurai, merchants,and farmers, all educate their daughters with Genji monogatari and Ise mono-gatari. This is doubtless because they want to have them compose waka. Whatpossible benefit can there be in women composing waka? People simply want toaccustom women to lewd behavior.37

While Zensai suggested that his contemporaries widely considered Genjimonogatari and Ise monogatari suitable books to place in the hands of youngwomen even of the agricultural and mercantile classes, we cannot give muchcredence to this perception of universal female literacy and should probably putit down to rhetorical exaggeration. More notable are his objections to what hesaw as the purpose of reading these works, namely facility in waka composition.Presumably reflecting his distaste for literature concerning the relations betweenmen and women, Zensai equated this literary consumption and creativity with


35 Odaka 1964, pp. 159–61, 171–72 (quotation from p. 161).36 This topic has been touched upon in Nakamura 1975, pp. 21–28; in Markus 1982, pp. 177–79;

and in McMullen 1999, pp. 59–60. From all of these I have learned much, but my focus is dif-ferent.

37 Nakamura 1975, pp. 26–27. The quotation comes from vol. 1 of Kaiyo zatsuroku 膾余雑録,which has never been reprinted; block-printed editions dated 1653 survive in Kyoto UniversityLibrary, the Mitsui Bunko at the University of California at Berkeley, and other libraries.

lewdness. It is worth recalling in this connection that Hayashi Gahô had excludedwaka poetry from his guide to reading; for some, waka poetry was morally sus-pect territory. Having established what, in his view, women should not be read-ing, in the remainder of the passage Zensai proposed that daughters be broughtup instead on such early Chinese texts as the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiao jing孝経) and Biographies of Notable Women (Lie nü zhuan列女伝), stipulating thatkana glosses should be added for those who could not read the Chinese.38 Whathe does not say here is as important as what he does say: he is not dismissive ofwomen as readers per se, he does not object to the prospect of women readingChinese, and he does not object to men reading Genji.39

Nagata Zensai was not a lone voice, and it is worth examining with some carethe later seventeenth-century discourse on Genji and Ise as reading matter. In1659, a few years after Nagata published his views, Yamazaki Ansai 山崎闇斎(1618–1682), one of the most prominent thinkers of his time, wrote a primer foryoung girls and did so precisely because he wished to supply them with alter-native reading matter in language they could understand, that is, in Japaneserather than kanbun. According to his preface to this work, Yamato shôgaku大和小学, he had been in Edo the previous year, and when he had expostulated againstthe use of Genji and similar texts, someone had suggested that he put theConfucian primer Xiao xue 小学 into kana so that women could read it. In thepreface he firmly rejected Buddhist and Confucian defenses of Genji:

The fact that people today will frivolously walk down a road from which thereis no return [i.e., go astray morally] is due to the existence of The Tale of Genjiand The Tales of Ise. It is said that The Tale of Genji was written as an admon-ishment for men and women. It is extremely doubtful, however, that such friv-olity could serve to admonish anyone. Kiyohara no Nobukata asserted thatalthough The Tales of Ise deals with matters of lust, it also includes depictionsof ritual decorum and humaneness and that Confucius and Mencius would haveacted in the same way as Narihira did if they had been in his position. It is notworth discussing the merits or failings of such falsehoods!40


38 According to seventeenth-century publishers’ catalogues, Zensai himself produced a Japaneseversion of Lie nü zhuan, Honchô retsujoden本朝烈女伝, but this is probably an error for the ver-sion by Kurosawa Hirotada 黒沢弘忠 (1622–1678), which was published in 1668 and carried apostface by Nagata dated 1657. Shorin shuppan vol. 1, pp. 100, 145, 200, 214, 301.

39 We might note that none of the figures considered here opposed women reading or thoughtto suggest that it would be better if women were kept illiterate or at basic levels of literacy. Muchlater, Matsudaira Sadanobu 松平定信 (1758–1829) did express the view that illiteracy was to bepreferred in women, and he considered intelligence in a woman a source of trouble, but even heconceded that they might read books in kana. See Shûshinroku 修心録, in Matsudaira 1893, vol.1, p. 37; cited in Umehara 1988, p. 252.

40 Nihon kyôiku bunko, Kyôkashohen 教科書篇, p. 25; translated by Lawrence Marceau inShirane 2002, pp. 360–62. In his discussion of Yamato shôgaku, Herman Ooms claims that Ansaiwrote this work for Inoue Masatoshi 井上正利, daimyo of Kasama 笠間, but offers no evidencefor this view. Ooms 1985, pp. 217–19. Kiyohara no Nobukata 清原宣賢 (1475–1550) was a teacherof sinology to court aristocrats and Buddhist clergy.

Ansai’s follower, Asami Keisai 浅見絅斎 (1652–1711), made his master’s dis-taste more general in a lecture on poetic morality delivered in 1706:

Love poems cause harm to the teachings for husbands and wives; Genji mono-gatari and Ise monogatari are in the same tradition and are at the forefront oflicentious teaching; it is not appropriate to justify handling them by claiming thatthey have been passed down as valuable works for poets.

As Keisai’s subsequent remarks show, his principal concern, too, was with “youngchildren and girls” and how they were to be encouraged to derive moral lessonsfrom classical poetry.41

A few years earlier a book published in 1690 advised pregnant women on theirreading, evidently with Yamazaki Ansai’s views in mind:

When reading be sure to choose books that are not lubricious either in text orillustration. Works like Yamato shôgaku and Kagamigusa 鏡草 are appropriate,but Genji monogatari and the like should not be read under any circumstances.42

Noguchi Takehiko 野口武彦 considers, probably rightly, that this advice wasintended for women in general, not solely pregnant women.43 And here, too, wefind an effort not only to direct women away from Genji but also to suggest alter-natives: the premise is that women want, and that it is appropriate for them, toread. In this case the texts recommended are Ansai’s Yamato shôgaku and NakaeTôju’s 中江藤樹 Kagamigusa, a didactic work for women with extensive refer-ence to Chinese history and legend, first published in 1647 and reprinted in 1669and 1675.44

The most determined treatment of this topic is to be found in the teachings ofYamaga Sokô 山鹿素行 (1622–1685), a pupil of Hayashi Razan who laterdeparted from the sinological orthodoxy of his day. The moral dangers of Genjimonogatari and Ise monogatari were evidently a matter of some concern to him,for he referred to them a number of times in his discourses with his followers,which the latter edited between 1663 and 1665 and which circulated in manu-script until published in the 1940s. In a section devoted to the education ofwomen, Sokô argued that while the values to be imparted to young women werethe same as those directed at young men, the objective of instruction was dif-ferent, namely to train women to be subservient wives.45 He went on as follows:

It is common in our country to give girls still being brought up in the recesses ofthe home Genji monogatari, Ise monogatari, and such like books, and to employa woman teacher and have her explain the text to them. Girls then devote them-selves to poetry composition, do painting and calligraphy, make artificial flow-ers, play the koto, and hold merry feasts. This is because people have lost


41 Satsuroku剳録, in NST 31, p. 365.42 Inagogusaいなご草, in Nihon kyôiku bunko, Eisei oyobi yûgi hen衛生及遊戯篇, p. 50.43 Noguchi 1995, p. 7.44 Nakae 1940, vol. 3, pp. 297–466.45 Yamaga 1940–1942, vol. 6, pp. 299–302.

[understanding of] the instruction of girls. In my opinion, books like Genji mono-gatari and Ise monogatari pursue the emotional relationships of the sexes andprincipally concern the sensual; consequently, ethics are forgotten, and the essen-tial relationships between lord and retainer, father and son, husband and wife fallinto disarray.46

As James McMullen points out, in his youth Yamaga Sokô had evidently triedhis hand at writing a commentary on Genji; but this was not simply a youthfulindiscretion, for even in 1675 his personal library contained copies of Genjimonogatari, Ise monogatari, and several commentaries on Genji.47 This was nota man, then, who utterly repudiated these texts, but rather one who thought themunsuitable reading matter for women. In this he shared much the same views thatwe have already seen to enjoy some currency among contemporary sinologists.

One of the last major writers to inveigh against Genji and Ise in the contextof the education of young women was the sinologist educator Kaibara Ekiken貝原益軒 (1630–1714). In Wazoku dôjikun 和俗童子訓, published in 1710, heincluded a section on what young girls should be offered to read:

One must be selective in what one allows young women to read. There is no harmin those books depicting the events of the past. Do not allow them to read koutaand jôruri books: they do not teach the true way of the sages and are tinged withfrivolity. Moreover, one should not readily allow them to read such books as Isemonogatari, Genji monogatari, and their ilk, which, although possessed of a lit-erary elegance, depict licentious behavior.48

Several writers apart from Nagata Zensai recommended introducing womento sinological works as a positive alternative to pieces such as Genji. In com-ments published posthumously in 1715, Fujii Ransai 藤井懶斎 (1618?–1705?), afollower of Yamazaki Ansai, allowed that few later female writers in Japan couldcompare with the Heian authors, but advised that for proper instruction womenshould turn to sinological texts:

There have been no learned women in our country the equal of Ise [to whom Isemonogatari was attributed], Murasaki Shikibu 紫式部, Sei Shônagon 清少納言,Daini no Sanmi 大弐三位, and Akazome Emon. Their writings should be readcarefully. Yet they do not know the learning of the sages: they are little morethan latter-day equivalents of Cai Yan 蔡� of the Han dynasty and her ilk. Howcould they possibly be free of error? To what, then, should women turn to forlearning? First they should read such books as Warnings for Women (Nüjie女誡,Jp. Jokai) by Cao Taigu 曹大家.49

Nakayama Sanryû 中山三柳 (1614–1684), a doctor who attended Emperor Go-Mizunoo 後水尾, was more dubious than the others considered here about the


46 Yamaga 1940–1942, vol. 6, p. 301.47 McMullen 1999, p. 59; Yamaga 1940–1942, vol. 15, pp. 888–89.48 Kaibara 1910–1911, vol. 3, p. 217; translation from Rowley 2000, p. 31.49 Kansai hikki閑際筆記, in Nihon zuihitsu taisei, 1st series, vol. 9, p. 171. Daini no Sanmi was

a poet active in the eleventh century. Cai Yan was abducted and spent twelve years among Turkic

wisdom of encouraging women to study. If they were to do so, he wrote in apiece published in 1670, they should be directed to sinological works rather thanJapanese fictional literature and poetry:

Perhaps because it is not a good thing to encourage women to study, when theydo, their hearts become proud, they look down on their husbands and they fallaway from righteousness. Girls hereabouts [sc. Kyoto?] study by reading unwor-thy books such as the tales of Genji, Sagoromo 狭衣, Ise, and so on. Consequentlythe way of the Buddhist prelates is in ruins and the girls immerse themselvessolely in vice. Ono no Komachi 小野小町, Sei Shônagon, Murasaki Shikibu, andIzumi Shikibu 和泉式部 were all accomplished writers and skilled in waka com-position, and it was probably for that reason that they were all strumpets. It mustbe realized that in another country [sc. China], too, women skilled in the poeticarts all became strumpets. A woman follows her husband, so even if she is learnedit is of no benefit. . . . If it is the will of a girl’s parents to encourage her in learn-ing, it would be good for her to acquaint herself with Zhu Xi’s [edition of] Xiaoxue or Biographies of Notable Women.50

Another of this persuasion was Nagaoka Itan 長岡意丹 (seventeenth century,dates unknown), who replaced his wife’s copies of Genji monogatari and Isemonogatari with Chinese didactic works for women.51 Nakamura Tekisai 中村�斎 (1629–1702), a famous sinologist and encyclopedist, considered it valuablefor girls to be taught to read not only Biographies of Notable Women but alsocanonical Chinese texts such as the Analects, Classic of Filial Piety, and so on,in order to acquire the womanly virtues, provided that, from the age of eight,they were taught at home either by their mothers or by hired women tutors.52

(Both Tekisai’s recommendations and the critical remarks voiced by YamagaSokô above testify to the existence of female home tutors at this time.)Sinological education for girls did not have a long history, and what persuadedthese seventeenth-century men to encourage an incursion into what had beenmarked as an exclusively male field of scholarship was clearly their moral objec-tions to the Japanese classics and the need to find advisable alternatives.

What we see in these writers, then, is learning interpreted solely in sinologi-cal terms and women being advised to read Chinese literature for women. Wefind grudging admiration for the great women writers of the distant past, but alsocriticism of the perceived lewdness of their writings, their supposed ignoranceof Chinese canons of taste and decorum, and even their propensity to write waka,


peoples; she left a collection of poems and other writings. Nüjie is a collection of precepts forwomen written in the Later Han dynasty by Cao Taigu.

50 From Daigo zuihitsu醍醐随筆, in Zoku Nihon zuihitsu taisei, vol. 10, p. 55; partially cited inNakamura 1975, pp. 27–28.

51 Text cited in Nakamura 1975, p. 27, from Nagaoka Kyôsai’s 長岡恭斎Bibôroku備忘録, whichI have been unable to locate.

52 Himekagami 比売鑑, in Kinsei joshi kyôiku shisô, vol. 2, p. 23. Himekagami was first pub-lished in two parts in 1709 and 1712, but Tekisai’s preface bears the date 1661, and this work wasobviously written before his death in 1702. For a discussion of this and later texts bearing on thequestion of reading in women’s education, see Nakaizumi 1966, ch. 9.

a genre that some sinologists obviously found suspect. The Heian writers’ gen-der likewise turns out to be a serious handicap, for, like Hayashi Razan, thesesinologists considered that monogatari had moral shortcomings preciselybecause they were written by “women and girls.” Even Keichû 契沖 (1640–1701),whose commitment to the Japanese classics is obvious from the numerous com-mentaries he devoted to them, held that Murasaki may have unintentionally ledreaders astray for, “having the body of a woman,” she had written extensivelyof kôshoku 好色 (lewdness, the erotic).53

The observations quoted above have sometimes been taken to express moralobjections tout court to Genji and Ise monogatari. In fact, as we have seen, thesinological writers themselves read these works. They no more condemned thosetexts in toto than did Sarah Ellis condemn Shakespeare when she wrote in 1845that “It is scarcely possible to imagine a prudent and judicious mother allowingthe unrestrained and private reading of Shakespeare amongst her children.”54

The issue was the supposed effect of these works on young minds, in the Japanesecase, young female minds.

In addition to the observations of the sinologists, booksellers’ catalogues offervaluable evidence of what, if Genji was not considered appropriate, might havepassed muster as suitable reading matter for women in the seventeenth century.The classified catalogue of 1670 introduced a new category into its scheme ofclassification, that of “women’s books” ( josho/nyosho女書), a development thatbespeaks professional recognition of a new class of reader, if not of purchaser,and identification of certain types of book as appropriate for women.55 Whatwere these “women’s books,” which almost without exception carried the word“woman” at the head of the title? They consisted initially of Chinese books forwomen such as Four Books for Women, Japanese books of etiquette or morals,and letter-writing manuals; later editions of the booksellers’ catalogues addedother works of this sort.56 The category of “women’s books” did not includebooks of court poetry or texts of Genji and Ise, which were to be found in quitea separate section devoted to classical literature.57 Clearly, there was some con-gruence between what the booksellers conceived of as women’s books and whatYamaga Sokô and the others thought women should be reading. And thisremained for some time the recommendation for respectable reading: in a col-lection of moralistic stories published in 1752, a farmer was advised to offer hisdaughters Onna daigaku 女大学 (the archetype of didactic works for women,


53 In his commentary on Genji, Genchû shûi源註拾遺; Keichû 1926, vol. 6, p. 393.54 Ellis, The Young Ladies Reader (1845), cited in Flint 1993, p. 83.55 Shorin shuppan, vol. 1, p. 100.56 I consider here only the editions of 1670, 1671, 1675, 1685, and 1699; Shorin shuppan, vol.

1, pp. 100, 145, 200–201, 214; vol. 2, p. 40. For the category “women’s books” in later editions,see vol. 3, pp. 139, 178, 216.

57 Shorin shuppan, vol. 1, pp. 94–95. This does not signify, of course, that women read only thebooks listed in the catalogues under the new rubric of “women’s books.” Tiziana Plebani makesa similar point in Plebani 2001, pp. 37–40, demonstrating that in sixteenth-century Italy the read-ing of women went beyond the limited range of books, mostly books of hours, included in the cat-egory “libri da donna” used by copyists and booksellers.

attributed to Kaibara Ekiken), Yamato shôgaku, and a moralistic book for womenby Kumazawa Banzan 熊沢蕃山 (1619–1691) entitled Joshikun女子訓; when theywere a little older, they could read Biographies of Notable Women and FourBooks for Women.58

In the second half of the seventeenth century, then, the classic works ofJapanese fiction written by women, Genji monogatari and Ise monogatari in par-ticular, were deemed unsuitable reading matter for young women by many malescholars, most of whom belonged to what we call the Confucian tradition. In theeighteenth century, the sinologists no longer dominated the debate over suitablereadings for women as they once had; scholars from other traditions began tospeak up, and many of them were less exercised by the problems with Genji andIse than had been the seventeenth-century sinologists.59 The notion that theseparticular Japanese classics were morally corrupting for young women never-theless continued to feature from time to time in books on education and read-ing for women. The haikai poet Tanboku 潭北 (1677–1744), who traveled widelyoffering instruction to rustics, advised them, for instance, that Genji led to viceand that Yamato shôgaku and the Japanese version of Biographies of NotableWomen made better reading.60 Ôe Genpo 大江玄圃 (1729–1794) included a sec-tion on reading in his Onna gakuhan女学範 (1764) in which he quoted YamazakiAnsai’s preface to Yamato shôgaku and suggested a range of suitably upliftingworks of an instructional nature for women to read instead of Genji.61 IseSadatake 伊勢貞丈 (1717–1784), a historian of the samurai class and an acuteobserver of his time, described Genji and Ise as “lewd, salacious, improper andoffensive” in their subject matter. Accusing Murasaki Shikibu of improprietyand immorality, he concluded:

Our scholars of the poetic persuasion revere Genji monogatari as if it were holywrit or the pronouncements of a sage; in fact, it is a pernicious fiction. Since thenovel was written by a woman, there is no point in condemning it. But MurasakiShikibu was a woman of literary genius, and possessed intelligence enough tounderstand these things. So condemn it I do.62


58 Kyôkun zônagamochi教訓雑長持, in NST 59, p. 359.59 A few sinologists, such as Muro Kyûsô 室鳩巣 (1658–1734) and Inoue Kinga 井上金峨

(1732–1784), continued to insist that both Genji monogatari and Ise monogatari were salacious.See Sundai zatsuwa駿台雑話, in Nihon zuihitsu taisei, 3rd series, vol. 3, p. 667; and Byôkan chôgo病間長語, in Onchi sôsho, vol. 11, p. 53 (separately paginated), respectively.

60 Minka dômôkai民家童蒙解 (1736), in Tsûzoku keizai bunko, vol. 11, p. 213.61 See Jogaku sôsho, vol. 2, pp. 4–7; or the facsimile in Kinsei joshi kyôiku shisô, vol. 3, pp.

413–21.62 Ansai zuihitsu安斎随筆, in Kojitsu sôsho, vol. 8, p. 133. I quote from an unpublished trans-

lation by T. J. Harper of Yamazaki Yoshishige’s 山崎美成 Seji hyakudan, Nihon zuihitsu taisei,1st series, vol. 9, pp. 441–42, in which Yamazaki cites Ise Sadatake. The same passage is citedby the pseudonymous Gankôdô Gûsai 含弘堂偶斎 in his Hyakusôro百草露, which is of uncertaindate; see Nihon zuihitsu taisei, 3rd series, vol. 6, pp. 87–88. I have so far failed to locate the orig-inal citation in Ise Sadatake’s writings, but both Yamazaki and Gankôdô quote the same text andrefer to it as the work of Sadatake. In the same passage Sadatake also allows, however, that Genjiand Ise were suitable for private reading, especially for the study of court poetry and history.

Before bringing this section to a close, a word of caution is in order. A sur-prisingly large amount of the writings of seventeenth-century sinologists con-tinues to be available only in manuscripts or block-printed editions. The pointsmade here may need refinement or revision as more texts become accessible inmodern printed form. At present, however, my examination of reprinted writ-ings for passages critical of Genji monogatari and Ise monogatari has revealedonly those quoted above. They are not numerous, extensive, or elaborate, andtheir authors do not refer to each other in open debate until the eighteenth cen-tury; the passages partake less of the character of a discourse than of Sartre’snotion of seriality. Might there have been a more extensive discourse that is notreflected in the sources that have come down to us, perhaps because it was trans-mitted orally or was taken so much for granted? This is certainly possible. Thegreat calligrapher and arbiter of taste Honnami Kôetsu 本阿弥光悦 (1558–1637),for example, hints at a climate of broad moral condemnation: “Hayashi Dôshun(=Razan), who is now flourishing, reviles . . . Tsurezuregusa and Genji mono-gatari; he is merely imitating the leavings of Zhu Xi and to us he is absurd.”63

Yet, such a climate of condemnation, if there was one, was not taken for grantedby Yamaga Sokô or the others who put their views on paper.

It should also be noted that no attempt was made to ban Genji monogatari orIse monogatari on grounds of lewdness. Censorship was already on the point ofbeing systematized, and there is evidence that an edict was issued in the Kanbun寛文 era (1661–1673) banning books of waka poetry and kôshokubon 好色本(erotica).64 In 1687, the question was raised, “if kôshokubon are to be destroyed,should we also destroy Genji monogatari and Ise monogatari?”65 Yet no casesare known in which works of Heian literature were actually suppressed, and theconclusion must be that the availability of Genji and Ise in print was at least tol-erated. Criticisms of them, even when voiced vehemently, turn out to be not somuch outright condemnations as reservations arising from the assumption of afemale readership.

Defending GenjiResistance to the critical discourse outlined above took many forms and camefrom many quarters, and in a few cases it even anticipated the warnings in print.Some defenders of Genji and Ise reiterated earlier arguments in favor of theseworks. The anonymous author of Kiyomizu monogatari 清水物語 (1638), forinstance, advised readers interested in waka composition to read Genji, indicat-ing an instrumental, if not particularly novel, approach to the work that distanceditself from moral appraisal.66 Ikkadô Jôa, mentioned above as Hayashi Razan’s


63 Masaki 1981, p. 69. Honnami is sometimes read Hon’ami. There is a passage in KumazawaBanzan’s writings that similarly seems to be referring to contemporaries who found Genji morallyrepugnant tout court (see p. 166, below).

64 Tokugawa kinreikô 2953, vol. 5, pp. 255–56; see also Kornicki 1998, pp. 334–35.65 See Kôshoku hajakenjô好色破邪顕正, in Kôshokumono sôshishû, p. 367.66 Kanazôshi shûsei, vol. 22, p. 292.

adversary in a dispute over Genji, argued on the other hand that “the reason [Ise]monogatari was written largely with lewdness (kôshoku) on the surface was todraw people to the Way by means of what they find appealing.”67 This was per-haps the first expression in the Tokugawa period of the old “means to an end”argument, which acknowledged the “lewdness” but considered it merely thesugar on the pill. Ikkadô Setsurin 一華堂切臨 (1591–1662) took a similar posi-tion in a collection of notes on Genji published in 1650. He accepted that it con-tained a great deal of lewdness but held that so, too, did other books seeking toteach moral lessons; Genji, he asserted, was actually an epitome of moral teach-ings.68 Honnami Kôetsu put the matter more sharply, stating that it was “laugh-able that scholars continue to consider that the monogatari of Japan areconducive to vice and make depressing reading.”69

Honnami and Ikkadô did not take up specifically the question of suitability forwomen readers, but most others addressed precisely this issue. Take an anony-mous defender writing in 1630:

Recently a certain stubborn person has been speaking about Genji monogatari.He says, “Murasaki Shikibu is said to have written it to instruct people, but inher heart she is a slut. Parts of it are lewd (kôshoku), and those who read it can-not but be damaged, so it should on no account be shown to girls.” This man isa fool who does not know the Way. . . . [Genji monogatari] contains the spiritof encouraging virtue and reproving vice (kanzen chôaku 勧善懲悪); on the sur-face it seems lewd, but actually it is fully in accord with the Way of benevolence,righteousness, and [the rest of] the Five Cardinal Virtues ( jingi gojô 仁義五常),revealing the good as good and the evil as evil.70

Those who edited texts or digests of Genji for solitary readers were, not unex-pectedly, sensitive to the need to justify making it available to the public (includ-ing women as well as men) in printed form. Yamamoto Shunshô appended apostface to his first illustrated edition of Genji of 1654 in which he explained theillustrations by saying that they were to assist women and girls in their reading.He made use of both traditional defenses of the text: Genji was essential read-ing for poets, and while on the surface it might be lubricious in content, under-neath it was morally instructive and beneficial.71 Matsunaga Teitoku wrote inthe same vein in his introductory remarks to his amplification of Bansui ichiro,the commentary on Genji, that the tale was an allegory offering instruction inthe proper human relationships.72


67 Cited from an unidentified source in Odaka 1964, p. 235. Jôa was also the author of an unpub-lished commentary, Ise monogatari shinchû 伊勢物語新註, of which a solitary copy survives inDaitôkyû Kinen Bunko 大東急記念文庫.

68 Gengi ben’inshô源義弁引抄, in Hihyô shûsei, vol. 1, pp. 10–11.69 Masaki 1981, p. 91. See also Matsuda 1963, p. 99.70 Tsukinokarumoshû, in ZGR 33:1, pp. 86–87. On the dating of this work to 1630, see

Shigematsu 1961, pp. 304–305. Could the reference to a “fool” be an oblique reference to Razan?71 The postface to the 1659 edition of Jûni Genji sodekagami made similar point. Yoshida 1987,

vol. 1, pp. 28–32, 293–98.72 Ii 1988–1992, vol. 1, p. 6.

The author of the extensively annotated Shusho Genji monogatari (1673) usedsimilar arguments to justify presenting it to the public. The introductory mater-ial in this edition borrows extensively from an earlier commentary, Myôjôshô明星抄, written by Sanjônishi Kin’eda 三条西公条 (1487–1563) and first printed in1657. Kin’eda had defended Genji as only superficially lewd and in reality con-cerned to foster virtue. Shusho Genji monogatari cited both this passage andanother that depicted Genji as a bridge to virtues hallowed in the Confucian tra-dition as well as to Buddhist enlightenment:

The gist of part of this tale is on the surface formed of lewdness and volup-tuousness (kôshoku yôen 好色妖艶), but the author’s intention is to lead peopleon the path of Benevolence and Righteousness and the Five Cardinal Virtues,and ultimately to awaken them to the truths of the Middle Way and the True Stateof Affairs (chûdô jissô 中道実相).73

Another who pursued arguments of this sort was Kitamura Kigin, the authorof the celebrated Kogetsushô. Kigin was cautious in his approach to Genji. Hismoral concern about women’s reading is evident from the fact that in 1655 hehad published Kana retsujoden 仮名列女伝, a Japanese-language adaptation ofthe Ming edition of Biographies of Notable Women. The detractors of Genji, itwill be recalled, had recommended the Chinese original as a suitable alternative,and in 1653–1654 it had just been reprinted in Japan. In his postface to hisreworking of this edition Kigin in effect aligned himself with Nagata Zensai’scall two years earlier for a kana version of Biographies of Notable Women forwomen to read:

[Biographies of Notable Women] first unfolds various examples of benevolence,wisdom, chastity, and morality and finally tells of some concubines; the inten-tion is to encourage good and reprove evil, and it makes readers respect virtueand take care over their behavior. In our country, the authors of Ise monogatari,Yamato monogatari大和物語, Genji monogatari, and Sagoromo monogatari aresupposed to have had precisely the same intention. However, these works arewritten in ancient language, which for the uninitiated is difficult to understand.The original Biographies of Notable Women, on the other hand, is written inChinese, so the likes of young girls cannot decipher it.

Kigin’s Japanese version of Biographies of Notable Women seems to haveenjoyed some popularity, for it was reprinted in 1665, 1730, and the 1750s, butwhat concerns us here is his equivocation about the Japanese classics hementions.74 He does not share Nagata Zensai’s disdain, but he does not mountan explicit defense, either.

How, then, did Kigin present Kogetsushô, his vast commentary on Genji, tothe public? In his introduction he cited extensively, and with evident approval,


73 Arikawa 1927–1928, vol. 1, pp. 11–12. On Myôjôshô, see Ii 2001, pp. 452–58. For ShushoGenji monogatari’s use of these points, see Katagiri 1980, pp. 36–37, 126, 133.

74 The complete text is contained in vol. 17 of Kanazôshi shûsei; see p. 266 for Kigin’s post-face, and pp. 276–78 for the bibliographic history.

from Sanjônishi Kin’eda’s Myôjôshô, including the passage quoted by the com-piler of Shusho Genji monogatari.75 At the head of his notes to readers (hanrei凡例) at the beginning of Kogetsushô, Kigin also cited, again without comment,the following passage from Môshinshô孟津抄, a commentary by Kujô Tanemichi九条稙通 (1507–1594) completed in 1575:

When you read Genji you must do so with the correct state of mind and a senseof the evanescence of things. Without the correct state of mind you will inclinefoolishly towards lewdness (kôshoku). Therefore you must read Genji withcare.76

Whatever his private feelings on the matter may have been, Kigin, therefore, wasaware of the need to tread a careful path in public. He cited various morally favor-able appraisals of Genji, but he did not go so far as to defend it explicitly. Yetby making Genji approachable without a teacher, Kogetsushô contributed to itsburgeoning commercial readership and its accessibility to women.

Other commentators spoke out more positively in favor of Genji. Genji gaiden源氏外伝, Kumazawa Banzan’s commentary on Genji, on which he embarked in1673, the year Kogetsushô was published,77 opens with the statement:

A certain woman said, “. . . The Genji monogatari depicts the most indecentdoings. But it was written by such a brilliant woman, and in such lovely lan-guage, and moreover it appeals to a woman’s heart, and there are so many thingsto be learnt from reading it that—well, it seems to me that in spite of the sort ofbook it is, it could not but be edifying for an ignorant woman.”78

In view of the anxieties we have already examined, it is unlikely to be by per-adventure that Banzan’s opening words alluded to the issue of women’s read-ing. He was surely addressing himself to the critics. He went on to expressgeneral agreement with the views he attributed to “a certain woman,” but dis-puted the premise that Genji was indecent. As Noguchi Takehiko has argued,these opening words reveal one side of Banzan’s enterprise to be the instructionof women.79 This was a matter in which Banzan took serious interest. Like histeacher, Nakae Tôju, Banzan, as noted above, wrote a book of moral preceptsfor women, Joshikun (1691). Of course, he did not repine against the patriarchalsociety to which he belonged, but McMullen notes that he looked favorably onthe wives of some of his followers who studied the Confucian canon and consid-ers that his views were more “liberal and compassionate” than those of many ofhis contemporaries. McMullen further points out that Banzan considered


75 The text quoted by Kigin slightly diverges from that of the 1657 edition of Myôjôshô; seeNakano 1989–1990, vol. 5, pp. 16–18.

76 Arikawa 1927–1928, vol. 1, p. 32.77 As James McMullen has established, Genji gaiden was in fact a colloborative venture under-

taken by Banzan and Nakanoin Michishige 中院通茂; see McMullen 1991 and 1999.78 Banzan zenshû, vol. 2, p. 419; translation from Harper 1971, p. 84.79 Noguchi 1995, pp. 226–27.

Murasaki to have written Genji for the instruction of women and that he regardedLady Akashi as a “mirror for women.”80

To be sure, as McMullen puts it, “[t]hroughout his long involvement with theGenji, Banzan was conscious that he pleaded a difficult cause.” This was onaccount both of its status as a work of fiction and of its focus on sexual rela-tionships. But he never sought to expurgate the text.81 How, then, did he dealwith its supposed indecency? As in the opening passage of Genji gaiden, heresorted to the old line of argument about the sugar to coat the pill, but at a moresubtle level he also drew an analogy with the supposedly lubricious passages inthe Book of Odes:

It is my belief that the prevailing opinion held by scholars of the Tale of Genjias a licentious, corrupting, and dirty book stems from their failure to arrive at theinner significance of the Odes as a means for understanding the correctness orincorrectness of human attitudes.82

Arguing that others had been influenced by certain passages into misreading boththe Book of Odes and Genji, Banzan resisted the opinions of his contemporariesand in doing so made it defensible for women to read Genji.

Somewhat more explicit on the connection between the moral value of Genjiand female readership was Andô Tameakira 安藤為章 (1659–1716) in his studyof Genji published in 1703 under the title Shika shichiron 紫家七論.

Genji monogatari portrays human feelings and social conventions without pass-ing judgment on such matters. . . . Readers are left to draw moral lessons fromthe story on their own. While the novel’s greater purpose is to provide instruc-tion for women, it also contains numerous lessons for men. . . . In the way thatit portrays the lives of people as they existed in this world, Genji monogatariencourages good and punishes evil. Those who fail to appreciate the author’sintention as such—instead calling the novel a guide to indecent behavior—arenot even worthy of contempt.83

The vigor of Tameakira’s language suggests that the advantage in the debate wasshifting to the defenders. The moral issue, particularly as it related to women,was nevertheless still at the forefront and determining the discourse. For a dif-ferent level of defense, one less dependent on a moral interpretation of litera-ture, we have to await the contribution later in the eighteenth century of MotooriNorinaga 本居宣長 (1730–1801), who explicitly rejected the moralism in theapproaches of both Banzan and Tameakira.

Reading and GenjiWhat were the practices of women readers themselves regarding Genji and Ise?In addition to the textual sources there is a considerable body of visual evidence,


80 McMullen 1999, pp. 364–66, 372–73, 381.81 McMullen 1999, pp. 308–309.82 Translated in McMullen 1999, pp. 322–23, from Banzan zenshû, vol. 2, p. 369.83 NST 39, pp. 431–33; translated by Patrick Caddeau, in Shirane 2002, pp. 361–62.

and although often chimerical or ambiguous, it has, I would argue, some valu-able contributions to make.

Women in the Tokugawa period of whom we have record made no attempt toconceal their reading of Genji and in some cases implicitly rejected the argu-ments of the detractors. Take the case of Nonaka En 野中婉 (1660–1725), thedaughter of a senior retainer of the daimyo of Tosa. She practiced medicine in avillage now subsumed by the city of Kôchi and wrote a guide to behavior for awoman acquaintance who was about to marry. In it she lamented that youngwomen paid less attention to the books that could teach them valuable morallessons than to hairstyles and fashion. Chinese models of womanhood might beunattractive, she acknowledged, presumably referring to the likes of Biographiesof Notable Women, and in their place she recommended the “gentle Japaneseways” found in Tsurezuregusa and Genji. En expressed concern that somewomen misused poetry anthologies as a means of matchmaking, but she indu-bitably considered Genji more of a help than a hindrance to women.84

Direct testimony of women readers in the Edo period is rare, but there is suffi-cient evidence to show that En was far from an isolated example. ÔgimachiMachiko 正親町町子 (d. 1724), consort of the senior shogunal retainer YanagisawaYoshiyasu 柳沢吉保, and Kanzawa Tami 神沢民, daughter of an official in Kyoto,both read Genji without apparently feeling any need for deception.85 The samewas true of Inoue Tsû 井上通 (1660–1738), daughter of a Marugame 丸亀 domainsamurai, who read not only Ise monogatari and Genji in the Kogetsushô editionbut also the texts for women recommended by the sinologists. She likewise com-posed poetry in both Chinese and Japanese and is said to have written an accountof secrets relating to Genji that she had heard.86 Further evidence comes fromGenji binkagami 源氏鬢鏡 (1660), a condensed version of the tale that includedan illustration and a haiku on each of the fifty-four chapters. Among the haikuwere ones by Matsunaga Teitoku, Nonoguchi Ryûho, and Kitamura Kigin, alldeeply implicated in the popularization of Genji, and by three women: Chô, thedaughter of a Mr. Hayashi 林氏息女長 of Osaka, the wife of one Mitsusada 実貞of Ise Yamada, and Myôsen 妙仙, the wife of Kaedei Ryôtoku 鶏冠井令徳(1589–1679), an associate of Teitoku (a number of Myôsen’s verses were pub-lished in her lifetime). The anonymous compiler of Genji binkagami noted thatwhile Genji was the “foremost treasure of our nation,” there was a danger of beingled astray if one read it carelessly and misunderstood Murasaki’s purpose. Theinclusion of verses by three women, who can hardly have written them withoutsome familiarity with Genji, testifies both that women were reading the tale andthat the compiler assumed at least some women could be trusted to do so withappropriate care.87


84 Oboroyonotsuki朧夜の月, in Nihon kyôikushi shiryô, vol. 5, pp. 699–701.85 See the discussion and translations in Rowley 2000, pp. 27–30.86 According to the biography appended to Inoue Tsûjo zenshû, pp. 234–35, 245. See also Chikaishi

1973. On Inoue’s Gengo hiketsu kikigaki源語秘決聞書, see Joshi Gakushûin 1939, p. 139.87 For the text of Genji binkagami, see Teimon, vol. 1, pp. 484–503; the compiler’s comments

Similar examples can be found right up to the end of the Tokugawa period.Tadano Makuzu 只野真葛 (1763–1825) considered, for example, that “it wasundoubtedly because I had read The Tale of Ise as a child and had learned towrite in that manner that my piece [passed muster].”88 Matsuo Taseko 松尾多勢子 (1811–1894) may have been a devotee of the ideas of Hirata Atsutane, whosemoral disdain for Genji was vehement, but she bought a copy of Kigin’sKogetsushô and evidently read both this (or another text of Genji) and Ise mono-gatari.89 And Yoshida Ito 吉田いと (b. 1824), who went up to Edo and boardedwith the Kokugaku scholar Tachibana no Moribe 橘守部, studied Genji and theMan’yôshû with his son.90 Finally, not only did successive shogun from Ieyasuonwards hear lectures on Genji, but they sometimes did so in the presence ofwomen, and the presents given to the shogun’s daughter on her marriage in 1685included copies of Genji, Ise monogatari, and the first eight imperially com-missioned anthologies of poetry.91

Women readers of Genji and Ise monogatari also figure in fiction and visualrepresentations. The heroine of Jûnidan sôshi十二段さうし, published during the1660s, reads not only Genji and Ise monogatari but also Sagoromo monogatari,the Kokinshû, and the Man’yôshû, not to mention various Chinese texts.92 A fewyears later Ihara Saikaku 井原西鶴 gave a detailed description of the extravaganthousehold of a merchant’s wife, whose “year-long work is to divert herself idlywith Genji monogatari to hand.”93 A novel by Ishikawa Tomonobu 石川流宣 (ca.1661–ca. 1721) published in 1686 portrays a thirteen-year-old girl who “spendsall her time in writing practice and absorbed in Genji monogatari and Ise mono-gatari.” Her brother is in low spirits, and she concludes that, “judging by thesôshi that have been passed down from ancient times,” he must be suffering fromlovesickness.94

Contemporary artists similarly depicted both in prints and in paintings a vari-ety of female reading practices. As early as 1658 a didactic book for womenshowed a woman reading with piles of books around her, thus presenting a mes-sage about the desirability of reading.95 Hishikawa Moronobu 菱川師宣, whoplayed an important part in the vulgarization of Genji and Ise, produced manysuch representations of women reading, some of which explicitly indicate thetexts to be Genji and Ise monogatari (see figures 1 and 2). An illustration in his


may be found in the preface (p. 485) and postface (p. 501); the reference to the “foremost trea-sure of our nation” comes from the writings of Ichijô Kaneyoshi 一条兼良. On Myôsen, see alsoOdaka 1964, p. 459.

88 Goodwin, Gramlich-Oka et al. 2001, pp. 180.89 Walthall 1998, pp. 26, 35–36.90 Takai 1991, pp. 49–51.91 Tokugawa jikki, vol. 38, pp. 343–44, 672, 677; vol. 39, pp. 59, 64, 69; vol. 41, p. 570; vol.

42, p. 538; vol. 43, p. 739.92 See Mori 1962, p. 274.93 Saikaku oridome西鶴織留, in Saikaku zenshû, vol. 7, p. 323.94 Kôshoku Edo murasaki好色江戸紫, in Yoshida 1995, vol. 1, pp. 151–54.95 See illustration in the 1658 edition of Jokunshô, in Nihon hanga bijutsu zenshû, vol. 2, p. 81.


Figure 1. Scene from Hishikawa Moronobu’s Wakoku hyakujo 和国百女, pub-lished in 1695. Nihon fûzoku zueshû, pp. 12–13. Courtesy of Nihon Tosho Sentâ日本図書センター. The text in the column above reads as follows:

とのさま他こく／あそばされて御／るすのうちさミし／さのまま御なぐさ／み

のためにとて古／今集万葉いせもの／がたりげんじさ衣／えいぐはものがた

り／もじほくさかず／あるさうしをミづ／からよませられし事ほいなれつ

れ／々々ぐさなどには／かのよしだのけんかう／ほうしのふミがら／をおもし

ろく作りをきし／事なとを聞くに／つけても女ハかミ／のめでたからんこそ／

とハあり／またいせ／ものがたりにはなりひらの事を／はじめおハり／かきし

るせり／かりそめ／のたはむれ／あそび／にも／さうしをよみてなくさむこそ

よしといへり

This may be translated as:

While their lord is away in another province, for their amusement in theirloneliness during his absence, they enjoy themselves by reading all sortsof books, like Kokinshû, Man’yôshû, Ise monogatari, Genji monogatari,Sagoromo monogatari, Eiga monogatari, and Moshiogusa [probablyreferring to the renga manual compiled by Sôseki 宗磧, which was printedfor the first time around the 1630s]. Hearing that the famous YoshidaKenkô wrote interestingly in his Tsurezuregusa, the women consider it adivine blessing. Again, Ise monogatari tells all about Narihira. It is good,they say, to amuse oneself reading these books even to divert oneself fora while.

Uchiwa ezukushi 団扇絵つくし (1684) likewise shows three women sitting orsprawled on the floor, each reading a book, with an explanatory text above:

Oh, the blessings of this benevolent age of peace! Those who have lived longfind pleasure in literature and peep day and night at the volumes of Nihon shoki日本書紀 or Lao zi 老子. Women, too, thinking this splendid, meet up and fromdawn until dusk amuse themselves reading the poems of the Kokinshû andMan’yôshû, Genji monogatari or Ise monogatari.96


96 Tenri 1983, p. 261. Other depictions by Moronobu of women reading are included in Chiba2000, but an examination of these and other representations of women reading will have to awaitanother opportunity.

Figure 2. Scene from Moronobu’s Imayô makura byôbu 今様枕屏風 (early1680s). The text above sets the scene: a young samurai, identifiable by hissword, is visiting a woman (not a courtesan); she is reading Ise monogatari andis impressed by the sex-appeal of Narihira, the hero. Kikan ukiyo-e 62 (1975),p. 89; for the text, see Kikan ukiyo-e 63 (1975), p. 144. Courtesy of Gabundô画文堂.

Another work illustrated by Moronobu, Genji yamato ekagami 源氏大和絵鑑(1685), would seem to have been deliberately targeted at a female audience. Thiswork devotes one page to each chapter of Genji with an illustration in a roundeland above it the name of the book and brief textual comment or quotation.97

Moronobu explained in his preface that he was dissatisfied with existing Genjiillustrations because they failed to indicate precisely what scenes were being rep-resented; his objective, therefore, was to provide proper captions to his visual-izations so that they could serve as ehon絵本 or as nagusami慰み (amusement).The term nagusami is more often than not associated with female rather thanmale reading, and it is unlikely to be a coincidence that the copy of this work inthe British Library bears an inscription identifying it as the property of awoman.98

Related to the image of women as readers is that of them as writers. For thefrontispiece to Ise monogatari hirakotoba 伊勢物語ひら言葉 (1678), Moronobudepicted Lady Ise, the putative author of Ise monogatari, in the act of composi-tion.99 The primary visualization of female authorship in the Edo period was,however, the figure of Murasaki at her desk writing Genji. The legend that placesMurasaki in Ishiyamadera 石山寺 near Lake Biwa when she began writing Genjiwas in circulation from the late Heian period, and although little credence canbe attached to it, the frontispiece to most illustrated editions of Genji portrayedprecisely this scene, a solitary woman engaged in writing with the lake stretch-ing out in front of her. Similar scenes were featured in many books for women,too (see figure 3).100 These depictions did more than merely illustrate the scene:they also presented Murasaki with the paraphernalia of the scholar, that is, witha mass of books within arm’s reach. In some cases these were shown as scrollsbut usually they were anachronistically given the form of books in the Edoperiod, thus locating the image of the learned woman in a contemporary setting.Such images provided the female counterpart to the topos of the solitary malescholar as depicted, for example, in illustrated versions of Tsurezuregusa. In thisway, Murasaki Shikibu in the act of writing represented not a profligate womanwriting a lubricious tale, but a woman with the accoutrements of scholarship ina solitary meditative setting; the image undermined the connection between writ-ing women and frivolity or lewdness made by Hayashi Razan and others after


97 British Library, 16055.cc.5; Gardner 1993, pp. 312–13; Matsudaira 1988, pp. 89–91.98 The inscription, found in both volumes, reads: “owner, of the Iinuma family, woman” (持主／飯沼氏／女). It is not clear, alas, who she was and when or where she lived. For the implicationsof an association of reading with amusement or pleasure, see below, pp. 180–81.

99 Imanishi 1991, pp. 2–3. Moronobu also did the illustrations for Ise monogatari eshô 伊勢物語絵抄. An undated copy of this book purchased in Japan by Engelbert Kaempfer shortly after itspublication is held by the British Library, Or. 75. f. 14. Whether this Ise monogatari eshô is iden-tical to the work of the same title published in 1679 held in the Ryerson Library of the Art Instituteof Chicago and other locations has yet to be established. See Gardner 1993, pp. 323–24.100 On the legend and its literary expression, see Teramoto 1984, pp. 589ff; for illustrations of

the scene, see Yoshida 1987, vol. 3, pp. 5, 327; and (E-iri) Meijo monogatari (絵入)名女物語 (1670and many later reprints), vol. 5, pp. 2b–3a, in Edo jidai josei bunko, vol. 81. For a painting of thescene by Miyagawa Chôshun 宮川長春 in Tokyo National Museum, see Calza 2004, p. 132.

him and accorded it serious status.101 Intertwined with such images, however,were others of women reading Genji that complicated things.

Appropriation and RecuperationBy the end of the seventeenth century, those women with the literacy and themeans to have access to books had achieved a measure of autonomy as readers,notwithstanding the recommendations of male moralists. A corollary of print,the availability of books that women enjoyed also resulted in new contexts forthe reading of Genji monogatari and Ise monogatari and new discourses in whichto place them. Here I shall deal briefly with two such discourses, those of sexand of etiquette, for the former arguably impinged upon the anxieties of the sinol-ogists while the latter furnished a new justification for women’s readingaddressed to women readers themselves.

By the late seventeenth century both Genji and Ise monogatari had long beensubjected to erotic adaptation and parody. Numerous printed works borrowed


101 On this subject, see, by way of comparison, Kroll 1999, pp. 89–110.

Figure 3. Murasaki Shikibu at her desk by Lake Biwa as shown in the 1659 edi-tion of the digest Jûni Genji sodekagami. The books piled up on her rightanachronistically take the form of Edo-period printed books. Yoshida 1987,vol. 3, p. 327.

their inspiration from, and used the title of, Genji, starting around 1670 when anuntitled erotic version of the tale was published; another example is Genjion’iroasobi 源氏御色遊 (1681), produced by the prominent illustrator YoshidaHanbei 吉田半兵衛.102 Much the same was true of Ise monogatari, which inspireda number of erotic paintings and, in the year 1662 alone, three books connect-ing it with the world of the so-called pleasure quarters.103 Twenty years later,when Saikaku’s hero Yonosuke 世之介 set sail on his ship for the fantasy islandof women at the end of Kôshoku ichidai otoko 好色一代男 (1682), he took withhim two hundred copies of Ise monogatari, two hundred makura-e 枕絵 (i.e.,erotic pictures), and assorted aphrodisiacs and other equipment, making the con-nection with eroticism explicit.104

Sexualization extended to images of reading, too. Many of the paintings andprints produced by Moronobu and his contemporaries, for instance, depict not“respectable” women but courtesans in the act of reading (see figure 4), and inmany scenes the implied narrative is that reading gives way to sex, for in manya shunga scene books lie scattered about the floor.105 Sometimes the woman por-trayed reading is clearly stated not to be a courtesan, but is nevertheless shownin a situation of intimacy (see figure 2). Even the most sober didactic works werenot immune to treatment of this sort. A particularly apposite example is an eroticparody of Onna daigaku. This inevitably anonymous and undated piece, enti-tled Onna dairaku 女大楽 (Great Pleasure for Women) and probably publishedin the 1720s, includes a scene in which a woman’s reading is interrupted by aman who is genitally stimulating her from the other side of the kotatsu. Here thevery act of reading is invaded by the fantasies of the erotic tradition.106

Developments of this sort have suggested to Andrew Markus that by theGenroku period there was a dichotomy between courtly and amatory percep-tions of Genji, that there was in some quarters a “desire to pursue the salaciousside of the work, to see in it a kind of erotic casebook or vade mecum for the


102 Kikan ukiyo-e 39 (1969), p. 95; for a facsimile of another untitled erotic Genji parody, attrib-uted by Richard Lane to Moronobu and dated around 1671, see 57 (1974), pp. 69–126; for Genjion’iroasobi, see Nakano 1997, p. 26. See also Screech 1999, pp. 243–45. A later example is (UkiyoGenji) Gojûyonjô浮世源氏五十四情, published probably in the early nineteenth century; the title,referring to fifty-four emotions, puns on the fifty-four chapters ( jô帖) of Genji; for safety’s sake,the publisher made the external title of Gojûyonjô the more innocuous 五十四帖; the only copyknown to me is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (Japonais 216).103 Screech 1999, pp. 200–205; Bowring 1992, pp. 479–80. The three works are Okashi otokoをかし男, Yoshiwara Ise monogatari 吉原伊勢物語, and Yarô Ise monogatari 野郎伊勢物語; forthis and other matters relating to Ise monogatari in the seventeenth century I am indebted toMostow 2003.104 Saikaku zenshû, vol. 1, p. 229.105 Some of the many examples that could be given are reproduced in Kikan ukiyo-e 43 (1970),

pp. 103, 119; 49 (1972), p. 59; 52 (1972), p. 13; 62 (1975), p. 90, etc.106 The only copy of this work I know of is in the Uezu-ke 上江洲家 archives in the Kumejima

Shizen Bunka Sentâ 久米島自然文化センター in Okinawa; the illustration referred to is on pp.7b–8a. I am grateful to Professor Toshio Yokoyama for having given me access to his photographsof this badly worm-eaten book. For more erotic parodies of moral literature for women, see Breaand Kondo 1980, pp. 127–30.

execution of amatory designs.”107 Dichotomy is perhaps not the right word, how-ever, for the amatory and courtly overlapped seamlessly in the elite parts of thepleasure quarters, and Timon Screech, who has written of the “sexualization ofGenji” and the “‘Genjization’ of sex,” seems closer to the mark.108 This pheno-menon is apparent in the appropriation of canonical texts to the world of the cour-tesan that was already well under way in the seventeenth century.

Abundant visual and textual references to courtesans reading Kogetsushôprovided vivid evidence of this development.109 Shikidô ôkagami 色道大鏡,Fujimoto Kizan’s 藤本箕山 encyclopedia of commercial sex (1678), noted that in1657 the courtesan Yachiyo 八千代 had somebody lecture her on Genji and the


107 Markus 1982, pp. 175, 182.108 Screech 1999, p. 243.109 See the works mentioned in note 12. There are many visual references, too; see the picture of

the Chôjiya 丁子屋 bordello in the 1776 series of paintings reproduced at the front of Ono 1977;the 1816 painting by Utagawa Toyokuni 歌川豊国 in Manno Bijutsukan万野美術館 (Osaka) inNikuhitsu, vol. 7, plate 44, illustration no. 8; and the early nineteenth-century painting in the BritishMuseum illustrated in Clark 1992, p. 142. G. G. Rowley, who also explores this question, citesanother early nineteenth-century example in Rowley 2000, p. 31.

Figure 4. Courtesans reading. Kikan ukiyo-e 57 (1974), p. 9. Courtesy ofGabundô. A courtesan with an apprentice; single-sheet print in the style ofOkumura Masanobu 奥村政信, c. 1703.

Kokinshû.110 And a guide to the writing of love letters, published in 1698 andprobably written for the benefit of courtesans, recommended the Man’yôshû andGenji as reference works for those needing to write such letters.111 Genji figuredin the world of courtesans in other ways as well. By ca. 1670 the practice ofGenji-na 源氏名, assigning nicknames derived from the chapters and charactersof Genji, had spread from courtly circles to courtesans, as a glance at any lateseventeenth-century courtesan critique will show, and one of those critiquesmade the connections explicit: in 1687 the famed haikai poet Kikaku 其角 pro-duced Yoshiwara Genji gojûshikun 吉原源氏五十四君, which provided a critiqueof fifty-four Yoshiwara courtesans to match the fifty-four chapters of Genji.112

Association with Genji was also, and perhaps more importantly, a matter ofimage. As Timothy Clark has put it:

The cult of the Yoshiwara courtesan in pictures and novels of the eighteenth cen-tury undoubtedly exploited such parallels with the past in stressing the cultiva-tion of the high-ranking women, portraying them in settings and engaged incultivated pastimes that, it was suggested, somehow put them on a par with LadySei [Shônagon] and Lady Murasaki [Shikibu].113

A rather more cynical observer of the power of an image was YanagisawaKien 柳沢淇園 (1704–1758), a samurai aesthete who excelled in Chinese verseand painting and who stated in 1724 that if courtesans did not have on displaythe twenty-one imperial anthologies of poetry, Kogetsushô, and other suchworks, they did not appear to be of the top rank.114 It is thus possible that amongcourtesans Kogetsushô functioned as little more than a token of courtly tastes,just as the French court poet Eustache Deschamps (1346–1406) consideredBooks of Hours in the hands of women as little more than a fashion accessory.115

But more was at work in the image of the reading courtesan than a display ofcultural knowledge. The association between reading and intimacy seen in fig-ure 2 suggests that such representations should be understood at least partly asconveying “absorption,” or psychological depth: the reading figure, the artistimplied, is not only literate but also cultured and capable of empathy.116 This“absorption” in books, moreover, was depicted as common to courtesans and tononcourtesans. This confusion of roles was clearly deliberate, as was also theblurring of the distinction between books as accompaniment/alternative to sexand books as elegant pastime or source of knowledge and culture. While it might


110 Noma 1961, p. 564.111 Ensho bunrei艶書文例 (1698); facsimile in Edo jidai josei bunko, vol. 89.112 Zoku enseki jisshu, vol. 2, pp. 70–95.113 Clark 1992, p. 22.114 Hitorineひとりね, in NKBT 96, p. 74.115 Penketh 1997, p. 269; on books as tokens, see Clunas 1988, p. 136.116 For the notion of “absorption,” see Fried 1980, pp. 8–13, 66. See also Bryson 2003, p. 106,

who notes the tendency to dismiss the appearance of books in European portraiture as “decora-tive tokens of learning or culture” and emphasizes instead the “genuine and fascinated absorptioninto the subjective space the book opens up.”

be objected that the confusion was deceptive and the scenes of books and read-ing in brothels the fake furniture of respectability, the reverse might equally betrue: some may well have seen the literate high-ranking courtesan as a model ofwomanhood for noncourtesans. Or it may simply be the case that we exagger-ate the distinctions between courtesans and “respectable” women.117

To what extent might all this have contributed to the sinologists’ unease aboutGenji in the hands of “respectable” young women? Nagata Zensai’s worries pre-dated both the earliest extant images of, or textual references to, courtesans read-ing Genji and the earliest erotic parodies, but that is far from conclusive giventhe poor survival rate of early seventeenth-century ephemera and erotica.Towards the end of the century, however, the centrality of Genji in the com-mercial worlds of sex and publishing must surely have heightened the anxietiesits contents and female authorship initially aroused in the minds of HayashiRazan and Nagata Zensai.

At the same time, however, we can also speak of a “Genjization” of etiquette,or rather, to substitute Toshio Yokoyama’s term for Screech’s, a “kugefication”of etiquette, a process whereby the perceived etiquette of the court aristocracy,or kuge, was presented as a model for women as a whole.118 Even in the first halfof the seventeenth century this trend had become apparent in didactic works forwomen, for, as Aoyama Tadakazu 青山忠一 has demonstrated, a number of themcommonly derived their ideal of womanhood from Genji monogatari and Isemonogatari.119 Take Jokunshô 女訓抄, which was first published in 1637 andthereafter constantly reissued in various editions up to the early eighteenth cen-tury. The anonymous author actually encouraged women to take an interest inwaka and familiarize themselves with these works.120 Similarly, the author ofOnnayô kinmô zui女用訓蒙図彙 (1687) not only chose a copy of Ise monogatarito illustrate the category “books” in the encyclopedia section, but also recom-mended reading such books, albeit with care:

Genji monogatari, Ise monogatari, and the like are for the amusement (mote-asobiもてあそび) of women, and even to people of the noblest birth nothing cansurpass them. . . . On the surface they deal with kôshoku things, so readers haveused them as guides to sexual matters and diverted themselves accordingly. Thisis quite wrong. . . . The object is to teach that things may flourish for a while butthen change; all is impermanence. . . . If these monogatari encouraged lewdness,then it would be best if they did not exist. It is precisely because fundamentally


117 See the discussion of similar problems in the context of ancient Greece in Davidson 1997,pp. 87–90, 126, 135. For the courtesan as a model for all women, see Saikaku’s description of awealthy merchant’s wife who makes herself like a courtesan to please her husband in Saikakuzenshû, vol. 7, p. 323; Cecilia Seigle claims that in the seventeenth century, “Yoshiwara courte-sans became trendsetters for much of urban society.” See Seigle 1993, p. 71.118 Yokoyama 1999, p. 200.119 Aoyama 1982, pp. 8–10.120 See the facsimile of the 1639 edition in Daitôkyû 1976, pp. 437ff, 446ff; Aoyama 1982, pp.

10–12, 62ff.

this is not what they do that Genji monogatari is unsurpassed among the trea-sures of our country, as people of old have said.121

The line of argument recalls that of Andô Tameakira quoted earlier, but herethe remarks are addressed not to men but to women. Even more outspoken wasOnna shikimoku 女式目, which survives in an undated seventeenth-century edi-tion. Apart from the usual moral exhortations, the anonymous author urges theimportance of reading and writing for all classes, both as a source of pleasureand to gain access to knowledge; he/she introduces Genji, Ise monogatari, andEiga monogatari and includes an illustration showing three women with scat-tered volumes of Genji all around them, with the caption “Scene of reading Genjimonogatari” (see figure 5).122

Gradually, then, it came to be seen as desirable for women to read these booksfor reasons to do with etiquette. As early as 1661 Asai Ryôi 浅井了意, a writerfor the popular market who had already published a commentary on Ise mono-gatari and another on the six additional chapters covering the death of Genji thatare now known to be spurious, produced a book of models of Japanese femi-ninity entitled Honchô jokan本朝女鑑. With the exception of a few nuns, all theillustrations presented courtly realizations of femininity, and the text insisted thatwomen should not only learn to read and write but should also study Ise mono-gatari, Genji, Sagoromo, Eiga monogatari, and the Kokinshû.123 The title of alater example, Onna Genji kyôkun kagami 女源氏教訓鑑 (1713), explicitly asso-ciated Genji with didactic instruction. Apart from valorizing female reading inan illustration showing a widow with a pile of books, this work included a digestof Genji together with information about waka composition, perfumes, and otherelegant pursuits.124 A guide to letter-writing for women published in 1690 incor-porated a sample letter requesting the loan of Genji, Sagoromo monogatari, Isemonogatari, Eiga monogatari, or Makura no sôshi.125

Parallels and ImplicationsAs I have attempted to show, many male writers in the seventeenth century eitherinveighed against the popularity of Genji monogatari and Ise monogatari amongwomen readers or expressed anxiety about how women might be reading suchworks. But while some saw these works as morally objectionable, others regarded


121 Tanaka 1970, pp. 12, 228–29, 284.122 In Emori 1993–1994, vol. 1, pp. 26–30. The 1702 edition of Onna chôhôki, vol. 1, p. 6a, also

urges women to acquaint themselves with Genji and Ise monogatari, Hyakunin isshu, theKokinshû, and the Man’yôshû.123 For the illustrations, see the complete facsimile in Honchô jokan; for the passage on wom-

en’s reading, see vol. 2, p. 304 of the facsimile, or p. 263 of the reprinted text in Nihon kyôikubunko, Kôgihen, ge孝義篇下. Ryôi is the presumed rather than stated author of this work; his com-mentaries are Ise monogatari jokai 伊勢物語抒海 (1655) and Genji kumogakureshô 源氏雲隠抄(1677, subsequently reprinted often).124 Facsimile in Edo jidai josei bunko, vol. 1. Although published in Osaka, the focus, as revealed

in the illustrations of places and festivals, is indubitably Kyoto.125 Edo jidai josei bunko, vol. 60, Kaidai, p. 16.

them as culturally or professionally indispensable. Since print had renderedHeian literature accessible and had suddenly enlarged its audience numericallyand socially, it is hardly surprising that, in consequence, texts such as Genji mono-gatari and Ise monogatari became the object of a plurality of reading strategies.

The worries about the effect of reading on women’s morals expressed byNagata Zensai, Yamaga Sokô, and others was not particular to Japan, for thephenomenon has much wider currency. Parallels may be found, for example, insixteenth-century English conduct-books and similar texts on the education ofwomen that warn against permitting young women access to secular literaturebecause of its power to excite and lead astray. Roger Ascham, who in 1570deplored the “fowlest adoulteries by sutlest shiftes” in Morte d’Arthur, mighthave made common cause with Yamaga Sokô; so, too, might have ThomasSalter, who was appalled by the “filthie love” and “abhominable fornications”in Greek and Latin literature. In the eyes of these writers it was the availability


Figure 5. Women reading as shown in the conduct book for women Onnashikimoku, seventeenth century. (Edo jidai) Josei seikatsu ezu daijiten, vol. 1,p. 28. Courtesy of Ôzorasha 大空社.

of such books in print that made the problem acute.126 “The anxieties,” argueCarol M. Meale and Julia Boffey, “suggest that women routinely took advan-tage of the available opportunities to read a wide variety of texts in both manu-script and print.”127 Similarly, in late fifteenth-century Italy, when printing wastransforming the availability of texts, women were advised to avoid secular lit-erature on account of its corrupting influence.128 Print made all this possible andurgent, and the anxieties expressed in Japan are likewise indicative of the trans-formations to which print gave rise. The target of those anxieties was not the cur-rent erotic fiction of the day, or even the works of Ihara Saikaku at the end ofthe century, but acknowledged classics, which only posed moral problems whenin the hands of women.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the tide was shifting, andit became a matter of course that women include Genji in their reading. Twomoral booklets for women published in the 1780s, for example, incorporated ina list of books that “might be read with profit” by women the following: moral-istic tracts such as Yamato shôgaku, Himekagami, and Kagamigusa; Honchôretsujoden (a Japanese version of the Chinese Biographies of Notable Women);and Genji, Ise monogatari, Hyakunin isshu, and other works from the literarycanon.129 Publishers, too, were not slow to recognize the changing climate. Sometime in the late eighteenth century the Osaka publisher Kashiwaraya Seiemon 柏原屋清右衛門 produced a catalogue of books that “it is beneficial for women toread”; this included ten editions of Hyakunin isshu, three of Ise monogatari, anda number of items claimed, in the accompanying blurbs, to be connected toGenji.130

The process by which Genji and Ise gradually came to be accepted as worksvaluable for women to read intersected with the larger sociological transforma-tion of court culture in the seventeenth century as it passed out of the control-ling hands of the aristocracy and ever more into the hands of those of lesser socialstatus, such as the commoner compilers of the Genji commentaries or the com-moner poets who challenged the aristocratic guardians of the waka tradition.131

As interpreted and diffused in various seventeenth-century texts, court culturerepresented an alternative, possibly the only credible native alternative, to the


126 Wright 1970, p. 231; on Salter, see Hull 1982, pp. 71–75.127 Meale and Boffey, 1999, p. 535.128 Plebani 2001, p. 40.129 Shinsen onna yamato daigaku新撰女倭大学 (1785), in Nihon kyôkasho taikei, vol. 15, p. 316

(partially cited in Umehara 1988, pp. 252–53); Onna kuku no koe 女九九の声 (1787), in Emori1993–1994, vol. 4, pp. 26–27. For illustrations in various didactic books for women showingwomen reading Genji, see Emori 1993–1994, vol. 8, pp. 252ff.130 “Jochû no mitamai eki aru shomotsu mokuroku” 女中の見給ひ益有書物目録, reproduced in

Asakura 1983, vol. 1, pp. 355–58. It is undated, but an example of it is bound at the end of thecopy of Onna daigaku takarabako女大学宝箱 (1772) in the Mikami-ke 三上家 archives (B-IV/2)in Kyôto Furitsu Tango Kyôdo Shiryôkan 京都府立丹後郷土資料館, Amanohashidate 天橋立, thusindicating that it dates from the late eighteenth century. A similar list of books recommended forwomen to read is reproduced and annotated in May 2003, pp. 134–35.131 On the waka poets, see Thomas 1991.

sinological culture recommended to women by the male moralists.132 NonakaEn, the woman doctor of Kôchi, had accepted the moral value of such Chinesetexts as the Classic of Filial Piety and the Biographies of Notable Women, whichNagata Zensai and the others had urged upon women readers, but she arguedthat the “gentle Japanese ways” of Genji were more suitable for Japanese women.Throughout the eighteenth century, this was a line constantly peddled by wom-en’s conduct books such as Onna teikin gosho bunko 女庭訓御所文庫 (1790),which explicitly offered “courtly” ways as a model of behavior for women.

These developments also had implications for authorship and education, forit was precisely in the context of a diffused court culture that women writers ofthe Edo period began to make a name for themselves. Among these was IsomeTsuna 居初津奈 (dates unknown). In addition to a number of texts on letter writ-ing and similar works, all of which were published commercially, she compiledOnna hyakunin isshu 女百人一首 (1688), an anthology of poems written bywomen from the Nara to Muromachi periods, mostly taken from the imperiallycommissioned anthologies. It consists simply of the poems, written in a wom-an’s hand, and illustrations of courtly women to provide a visualization of thewomen poets, but the compiler expressed the hope in her postface that it wouldbe of help to women commencing serious education.133

As the language used on both sides of the debate about women’s reading indi-cates, the consolidation of a market for women’s books bespeaks not only theevident but unquantifiable growth in female literacy and the expansion of thereading public to include women, but also new modes of reading. Let us finally,then, consider first the question of modes of reading and second that of women’sliteracy.

Like Yamaga Sokô and others, Moronobu uses words like nagusami andmoteasobu to refer specifically to female reading.134 How are we to understandthe use of distinct terms to refer to women’s reading that, at least in the seven-teenth century, seemed to connote “amusement” or “playing” with books? Thereare similarities here with seventeenth-century English discourse on women’sreading, where there is a tendency for it to be characterized as a diversion orform of amusement, a phenomenon that Heidi Brayman Hackel interprets as a“trivialization” of women’s reading.135 Since serious reading was in Englandequated with study and texts in classical languages that few women had accessto, women’s reading was certainly different in kind and was perceived to be lessdemanding than that of men. The vocabulary of women’s reading noted above


132 Cf. McMullen 1999, pp. 60, 452.133 Facsimile in Edo jidai josei bunko, vol. 90; for details of other similar anthologies, see also

Edo jidai josei bunko, vol. 60, Kaidai, pp. 1–19.134 Tenri 1983, p. 261; Matsudaira 1988, p. 35; Kiyomizu monogatari (1638), in Kanazôshi

shûsei, vol. 22, p. 292; Yamaga 1940–1942, vol. 6, p. 301; the 1659 postface of Jûni Genji sodekagami, in Yoshida 1987, vol. 1, pp. 293–98; the preface by Tsujihara Genpo 辻原元甫 to Onnashisho女四書 (1656), in Tôyô jokun sôsho, vol. 3, p. 42 (separately paginated).135 Hackel 2003, pp. 110–11.

might suggest that in Japan, too, we have a case of trivialization. But there isanother angle to this, and that is the rise of leisure reading. In the hands ofMoronobu, moteasobu does not appear to carry the opprobrium of an inferiormode of reading common to women. That we are talking of a different style ofreading is apparent, too, from the marked tendency in Moronobu and otherseventeenth-century artists to represent women reading in relaxed rather thanformal poses. These relaxed poses were by no means the monopoly of women,however. Particularly in settings associated with the pleasure quarters, we findmen, too, depicted as engaging in a similar form of relaxed reading.136

Onna shikimoku, an early conduct-book for women, provides a positive glossto reading as moteasobi. The anonymous author argued that it was important forwomen of all classes, explicitly including women of the merchant class, to beliterate so as to gain access to the pleasures that books provide as well as toknowledge.137 There are few signs, then, that (women’s) leisure reading wasbeing trivialized in seventeenth-century Japan; on the contrary, some writerssought to justify or champion it.

What does all this tell us about women’s literacy? It has been customary toassume high levels of female illiteracy at the end of the Tokugawa period to saynothing of the beginning, but even in the seventeenth century the literate womanwas not a rare exception. Women’s literacy was taken seriously by moralists,who were alarmed at how widespread it had become. By the end of the Tokugawaperiod women were not only participating in commoner (terakoya) educationboth as pupils and as teachers but were also to be counted among the followersof various Kokugaku teachers. A few achieved fame as painters or exponents ofChinese poetry; some played formative roles in mercantile enterprises; and itwas not unknown for a woman to take on a village headship.138 We are gradu-ally, therefore, realizing that literate spaces long thought of as exclusively malewere not so after all.

Furthermore, the reality of women’s urban employment even in seventeenth-century Japan sits uncomfortably, as Yokota Fuyuhiko 横田冬彦 has shown, withthe docile and domestic image purveyed by Onna daigaku that has for too longbeen taken as a guide to actualities. A wide variety of trades and professionswere practiced by women, he notes, from medicine to prostitution, and women’sdidactic works acknowledged this diversity, which is paraded, even celebrated,


136 E.g., Kikan ukiyo-e 42 (1970), p. 107; 47 (1972), p. 132; 49 (1972), p. 59; 81 (1980), p. 32;Tenri 1983, p. 34. For an example showing a woman reading to a man, both in relaxed poses, ona screen dating from the 1640s at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, see Calza 2004, pp. 54–55 (anda close-up on p. 51).137 Emori 1993-1994, vol. 1, pp. 26–29. For another instance, in Kyohakushû 挙白集 (1649), a

collection of poems and writings on poetry by Kinoshita Chôshôshi 木下長嘯子 (1569–1649), seeYoshida 1972, vol. 2, pp. 18–22; also Matsuda 1963, pp. 100–103; and Keene 1976, pp. 305–307.On Chôshôshi’s hedonism and nagusami, see Matsuda 1963, pp. 95–99.138 See the essays in the first part of Bernstein 1991; in Wakita, Bouchy, and Ueno 1999; and in

Onna to otoko no jikû, vols. 7 and 8. On women teachers, see Sugano 1997–1998. For a womanshôya庄屋 in 1638, see Kasaoka 2001, pp. 229–30.

in Nishikawa Sukenobu’s 西川祐信 compendium of one hundred types of beingfor women, Hyakunin jorô shinasadame 百人女郎品定 (1723). Sukenobu showsus not only an aristocratic lady and a daimyo’s daughter but also a woman haikaipoet, a hairdresser, a doctor, and a cook engaged in their several occupations.139

This sense of the variety of womanhood, consciously crossing the divisionsimposed by ascribed status, is found also in the work of Moronobu and in didac-tic literature for women, such as the illustrated 1702 edition of Onna chôhôki女重宝記, in which farmers’ wives, courtesans, and merchant wives are shownalongside women from the aristocracy or samurai class, with gender overridingthe status distinctions that divided male society.140 Central to many of the occu-pations women could pursue was literacy; this is obviously so in the case of thedoctor or the poet, but Sukenobu’s cook, for example, is using a book of recipes.

How did women acquire this literacy? Recent studies have sought to replaceearlier sketchy accounts of women’s education with some hard evidence fromdiaries, autobiographies, and the like, but most of this relates to the nineteenthcentury.141 Yet there is some hard evidence for the seventeenth century, too, asis evident from the pictorial and textual evidence discussed above. Indeed, thepremium on writing and the social expectations of literate women are evidentfrom the profusion of published handwriting and letter-writing manuals forwomen from the 1650s onwards, while the publication from 1637 of conduct-books for women bespeaks the emergence of a market, if not a public, of liter-ate women.142 There has obviously been a misprision of the social, cultural, andeconomic participation of women in the burgeoning urban and literate culturesof seventeenth-century Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo which have been hitherto cast asessentially male.

The extent and uses of female literacy in seventeenth-century Japan are ques-tions that will remain difficult to answer until personal letters and otherephemeral writings by women have been gathered more widely, to mention justtwo of the many kinds of evidence, hitherto for the most part undervalued andunused, that need to be drawn upon. This essay is simply a first step. It has soughtto address the context wherein women’s reading became a matter of debate inthe seventeenth century, when a number of writers became concerned about thetexts that women were reading as print made a multiplicity of texts readily avail-able. It has also sought to show that the transformative power of print impactedon women in various ways as they, too, became consumers in the marketplacefor books.

Print is, of course, not the only variable here, for the transformations createdby the rapid urbanization of the seventeenth century, particularly as they applied


139 Yokota 1995 and 1999. For Hyakunin jorô shinasadame, see Edo fûzoku zueshû.140 For Moronobu, see Wakoku hyakujo 和国百女, facsimile in Nihon fûzoku zue or in Nihon

fûzoku zueshû. Onna chôhôki, vol. 1, pp. 4–6.141 See Tocco 2003, pp. 193–218.142 For the manuals, see Koizumi 1998; for the early editions of Jokunshô, see Gotô 2003, pp.

60, 66, 80.

to the lives of women, cannot be overlooked. In late Ming China, too, the riseof urban literacy and the growth of employment outside the home created ten-sions between male expectations and female practice; as Handlin puts it, mencame to realize “not the equality of women but their comparability.”143 A simi-lar sense of comparability is discernible in Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris(1362) and is problematized in Christine de Pizan’s Le livre de la cité des dames(1405).144 In seventeenth-century Japan it is visible in Moronobu’s texts andillustrations; it is notable also in the acceptance even by hard-line sinologists ofwomen as readers, for the suggestion that women turn to Chinese classics brokedown one of the reading barriers between men and women. Print made some ofthese shifts possible, but so did a rising premium on education and literacy andthe incorporation of women into the market for cultural goods. As the editors ofWomen and Confucian Cultures argue, the “old stereotype [that] construes Asianwomen as victims of tradition, or Confucian patriarchy” is sorely in need of cor-rection not only in terms of female subjectivities but also of opportunities andcontexts.145 And this applies particularly forcefully to the question of literacyand readership. As the protests by Nagata Zensai and the others show, it is unde-niable that women were reading, that it was not their literacy that was problem-atic, and that they defied the constraints the “Confucians” attempted to put uponthem. Not, of course, all women by a long way, but enough to matter, even inthe seventeenth century.


143 Handlin 1975, p. 16.144 Brown 2000, e.g., p. 329; Richards 1982, pp. 153–54, 184–85, etc.145 Ko et al. 2003, pp. 1–3.

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Documents

Unsuitable Books for Women Genji Monogatari and Ise Monogatari in Late Seventeenth-Century Japan, Kornicki