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Dreaming Gender: Kyōgoku School Japanese Women Poets (Re)Writing the Feminine Subject

Literary historians generally tell tales of a gradual decline in Japanese women's writing after its great efflorescence in the midand late-Heian period (794-1185). Following the early important women poets Ono no Komachi (fl. mid-ninth c.) and Lady Ise (b. 875-d. after 938), these tales tell us that Japanese women writers also compiled poetry collections that included prose and wrote what might loosely be termed literary diaries (nikki bungaku) and tales (monogatari) that defined new genres and oth erwise fundamentally shaped Japanese court literature. The great master piece of this women-centered tradition is The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu (b. 978-d. 1016?), a sophisticated psychological novel of over one thousand pages in translation that some critics see as the first full-length novel in world literature. The enormous importance of this writing by women in Japan for later generations of writers and for world literary history may be recognized without assuming that the writing of these women that has come to be known as jory? bungaku, or "women's literature," held little importance for writing by men in the Japanese language. The dominance of women in tenth-century court writing in Japanese is generally contrasted with men's court writing in the lingua franca Chinese. Yet women proved so accomplished and interesting in their literary production that men began a backlash by attempting to reclaim Japanese language writing for male courtiers, a premodern backlash comparable to that of our own day as discussed below. One famous example of male writers trying to compose literature in Japanese can be seen in the early memoir, the Tosa Diary (ca. 935), in a feminine voice by the influential male courtier Ki no Tsurayuki. After this backlash both men and women came to write in the voice of either masculine or feminine poetic subjects, depending on their interests. As we shall see shortly, in love poetry they wrote in the voice of whichever subject was at the center of the conventional phase of the love affair. Rather than discussing this early high point of Japanese women's writ ing, I examine here two important women writers from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. My goal is to take a step towards reevaluating