The Confessions of the Lady Izumi

In the women’s quarters of Heian Japan, desire does not announce itself through scandal—it arrives through language. Here, intimacy unfolds in the charged space between a poem and its reply, in glances withheld, in silences held just long enough to be misread—and remembered.

The Confessions of the Lady Izumi is a fictionalized, erotic retelling of The Izumi Shikibu Court Diary, reimagined as a first-person literary memoir spoken by a poet whose words circulate long before her name does.

Poetry becomes both refuge and liability: a medium through which longing can be expressed precisely—and punished for its precision. As Izumi navigates lovers, rivals, and the unblinking gaze of court society, her voice sharpens into a tool of survival, even as it exposes her to judgment.

Drawing on the lyric intelligence and emotional acuity of Heian literature, The Confessions of the Lady Izumi explores sexuality under surveillance, the politics of attention, and the cost of being exact in a world that permits women’s brilliance only until it becomes inconvenient. Lush, intimate, and unsparing, this is a novel about how desire is made legible—and what it costs to be heard.

About the Series

Splendor and Longing at the Heian Court is a series of literary novellas that reimagine classical Japanese women’s writing as lived social experience. Drawing on diaries, poetry, and court narratives, the series explores desire under surveillance, intelligence under constraint, and the quiet strategies by which women endured worlds that remembered selectively.