The term “homosexuality” does not fit pre-modern worlds shaped by rank and relation rather than identity. This essay examines why the word is historically anachronistic, why scholars still use it, and how translation, legibility, and compromise shape the study of same-sex desire.

Why The Tale of Genji is not a romance. This essay examines power, consent, harm, and impermanence in Murasaki Shikibu’s novel, showing how desire operates through inequality and Buddhist impermanence, leaving women to bear the lasting consequences of attachment.

Court women in Heian Japan lived in constant proximity, forming bonds through shared space, touch, and sleep. This essay explores how emotional intimacy between women existed beyond erotic labels, revealing forms of attachment that were ordinary, sustaining, and largely invisible to the historical record.

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In medieval Japan, erotic intimacy between warriors reinforced loyalty rather than undermining it. This essay explores how love, attachment, and the constant presence of death shaped warrior ethics, binding fealty to emotional discipline, endurance, and the moral demands of service.

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This essay explores how sex between men functioned as moral training among samurai. Rather than indulgence or identity, erotic intimacy shaped loyalty, discipline, and character, binding younger warriors to seniors through obligation, restraint, and ethical formation within warrior culture.

A comparative essay on English translations of The Tale of Genji examines Suematsu, McCullough, Washburn, Seidensticker, Waley, and Tyler, showing how style, fidelity, and scholarly approach shape modern readings of Murasaki Shikibu’s classic, with a personal case for Washburn’s version.

Poetry provided a sanctioned way for desire to move without declaration. This essay examines how verse functioned as both confession and camouflage, allowing intimacy to circulate through allusion, timing, and silence, where longing could be recognized without being fixed, named, or exposed.

The Sarashina Diary traces a woman shaped by fantasy, exclusion, and time. This piece examines desire, aging, and class in Heian Japan, revealing how disappointment, memory, and religion reshape sexuality into a quiet, enduring form of authority.

Set in the shadowed world of Uji, Kaoru, Niou, and Ukifune enact a tragic cycle of desire, withdrawal, and uncertainty, transforming The Tale of Genji into a meditation on loss and irresolution.

Male intimacy in the Heian court rarely appeared directly in writing. This essay reads court diaries for what they reveal indirectly—through poetic exchange, euphemism, and strategic silence—showing how same-sex attachment became visible only when it disrupted rank, discretion, or social balance.

After Genji’s death, Prince Niou and Kaoru emerge as rivals. These transitional chapters reset the narrative through marriage politics, inheritance, and shifting power in the late Heian court.

Genji’s decline unfolds through betrayal, illness, and death. Murasaki’s passing marks a turning point where mourning, memory, and moral reckoning replace erotic and political mastery.

Through Tamakazura, art, spectacle, and court aesthetics, Genji turns beauty into currency. These chapters explore influence, cultivation, and the fragile limits of control within elite Heian culture.

Why poetry posed greater risk than sex at the Heian court. This essay explores reputation, circulation, and misinterpretation, showing how poems shaped social survival in classical Japan, especially for women, where language lingered and desire could not be undone.

At the height of Genji’s power, court politics, marriage alliances, and household management shape Heian society, as Murasaki, rivalry, and sacrifice reveal the emotional cost of refinement and control.

In the early chapters of The Tale of Genji, Genji’s beauty and ambition drive secret affairs, spirit possession, court intrigue, exile, and return, establishing desire, power, and impermanence in Heian Japan.

Why genius was a liability for women in Heian Japan. This essay explores brilliance, resentment, and gendered punishment through writers like Sei Shōnagon, Murasaki Shikibu, and Izumi Shikibu, revealing how female intelligence was cultivated, constrained, and socially penalized at court.

From Heian fluidity to samurai discipline, this essay traces how desire in Japan shifted from situational intimacy to structured roles. Exploring court culture, Genji, and feudal nanshoku, it shows how power reshaped sexuality into hierarchy, loyalty, and control.

In Heian Japan, Buddhism did not erase erotic desire but absorbed it. This essay explores how confession, prayer, and ritual reframed intimacy and transgression as ordinary attachments shaped by impermanence, allowing desire—same-sex and otherwise—to persist without moral panic or identity labels.

Same-sex desire in Heian Japan was shaped less by gender than by rank. This essay explores how intimacy moved through hierarchy, ritual, and social obligation at court, where desire survived by remaining legible, discreet, and properly placed rather than named or condemned.