Speaking Through Spirits
Gender, Religion, and Agency in Heian Japan
By Erick DuPree
In the Heian court, women did not speak freely. Words carried risk, attribution carried consequence, and emotional disruption was dangerous unless it could be displaced. Speaking Through Spirits examines how women in premodern Japan made themselves heard under these conditions—through illness, withdrawal, religious devotion, and spirit possession.
Focusing on the writings of Murasaki Shikibu and close readings of The Tale of Genji, this book reconsiders spirit possession not as pathology or metaphor, but as a socially authorized form of speech. Possession allowed suffering to surface while preserving courtly order by shifting responsibility away from the speaker and onto spirits, rituals, and religious specialists. Yet recognition came at a cost: women’s voices were acknowledged only through loss of control, bodily collapse, or removal from the social field.
Drawing on literary anthropology, religious history, and translation, Speaking Through Spirits shows how Heian religion functioned less to resolve conflict than to absorb it. Buddhism, indigenous ritual practices, and court ceremony did not repair disruption so much as contain it, transforming emotional and social risk into something that could be named, managed, and endured.
Speaking Through Spirits offers:
A rethinking of spirit possession as a sanctioned mode of speech rather than superstition or resistance
A deeply grounded account of gendered constraint in Heian court culture
Close, disciplined readings of The Tale of Genji as a diagnostic text of emotional and religious life
An archive-driven study of how women navigated power when direct agency was denied
Through careful attention to silence, ritual, and narrative restraint, Speaking Through Spirits presents a powerful new account of gender, agency, and endurance in one of the world’s most refined—and unforgiving—court cultures.
