Research & Writing

My first book, Yosano Akiko and The Tale of Genji, was a study of the relationship between a great writer and a great book. Genji had a profound influence not only on the work Akiko did during her life—but also on the life that she lived. I wondered if there had been other women whose lives had been changed by their reading of Genji—and found that there were many, beginning most famously with Sugawara no Takasue’s daughter, who in 1021 was thrilled to receive a copy of the tale from her aunt: “Now I had the whole Genji to read from the very first volume,” she recalled. “When I lay down alone behind my screens and took it out to read it, I would not have changed places even with the Empress. All day and as far into the night as I could keep my eyes open I read with the lamp close by me.”

It is these earlier women readers of Genji I find most fascinating. Recently I’ve been working on the noblewomen Kaoku Gyokuei (1526-after 1602), who compiled the first commentaries on Genji by a woman; Nakanoin Nakako (1590?-1671), an imperial concubine who carried Genji-related manuscripts with her when in 1609 she was sent into exile following a scandal at court; and Ōgimachi Machiko (1679-1724), the aristocratic concubine of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, adjutant to the fifth Tokugawa Shogun. Machiko’s narrativization of Yoshiyasu’s life à la Genji in her Matsukage nikki (In the Shelter of the Pine, c. 1710-1712) vividly illustrates the way that a knowledge of Genji continued over the centuries to provide noblewomen with materials for their own artistic and literary productions. An essay about aristocratic women readers of Genji will appear in The Female as Subject: Reading and Writing in Early Modern Japan, a collection edited by Peter Kornicki, Mara Patessio, and me that is forthcoming from the Center for Japanese Studies of the University of Michigan.

I’m also interested in the lives of women who lived outside the confines—and security—of marriage: concubines, geisha, nuns, and prostitutes. A former hot spring geisha, Masuda Sayo, generously allowed me to translate her story, and Autobiography of a Geisha (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003; London: Vintage, 2004) was the result.

My current project is a book about the life of Nakanoin Nakako, a concubine of Emperor GoYōzei. In 1609, Nakako was caught up in a sex scandal at court and sent into exile. Research in aristocratic family archives, village storehouses, and imperial convents makes it possible to chart the course of her extraordinary life.