A traditional Japanese painting depicting two women in kimonos playing a board game, with one woman sitting on the floor and the other lying on a raised platform, surrounded by intricate decorated screens and furniture.

Writings on Pre-Feudal Japan

Pre-feudal Japan was a court was a world where power moved through proximity, desire through poetry, and reputation through rumor. Writing was not decorative but dangerous—a way to register intimacy, faith, and survival under constant observation. This page explores Heian literature as lived experience, returning to writers such as Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shōnagon, Izumi Shikibu, and the Sarashina diarist not as distant classics but as architects of a refined and unforgiving social world. Their texts do not simply record court life; they reveal how court life shaped attention, sexuality, faith, and the conditions under which a woman could speak. The Tale of Genji and Tale of Heiki is read not as romance but as an anatomy of power and impermanence, while the diaries are approached as acts of judgment and self-preservation, where poetry circulates as evidence, genius becomes a liability, and Buddhism functions as consolation and threat rather than doctrine.