Court Women, Intimacy, and Non-Sexual Affection

If we read Heian court literature looking for sex, we will often come away disappointed. If we read it looking for intimacy, we will find it everywhere.

The lives of court women unfolded in spaces of constant closeness. Screens divided rooms but did not seal them. Curtains were drawn and lifted with ease. Women slept side by side, shared clothing, attended to one another’s hair, bodies, and moods, and passed long hours together in semi-darkness. To modern eyes, the physical proximity alone can feel charged, suggestive, almost intimate by default. Yet to assume eroticism where the texts offer something else is to misunderstand both the architecture of court life and the emotional economy it sustained.

Heian women did not experience closeness as exceptional. It was the condition of their existence.

The women’s quarters were spaces of enforced stillness and prolonged waiting. Movement was limited. Visibility was constrained. Women were known more through their voices, their handwriting, and the texture of their attention than through their faces. Within this environment, bonds formed not through dramatic declaration but through duration. Who remained beside you through a long illness. Who shared your sleeping mat when nights stretched on. Who listened without interruption as a poem was composed, revised, and finally abandoned.

Touch in this context was neither rare nor transgressive. It was practical and sustaining. A sleeve adjusted. Hair smoothed. A body leaned against another for warmth. Sleep, too, was communal. Women slept together as a matter of course—companions, attendants, relatives—bodies aligned by necessity rather than choice. To read erotic intent into every instance of shared sleep is to mistake familiarity for desire and to overlook the forms of attachment that proximity itself generates.

The texts reflect this ordinariness. Diaries and memoirs written by court women describe nights spent together without comment, as though such arrangements required no explanation. When emotion surfaces, it is often not sexual longing but something quieter: comfort, reassurance, irritation, relief. The language is intimate without being erotic, affectionate without being possessive.

This does not mean desire was absent. It means desire was not the primary lens through which closeness was understood.

Much of modern queer historiography depends on the visibility of desire—on moments where attachment becomes legible as erotic or transgressive. But the Heian archive resists this demand. It offers instead a record of intimacy that does not insist on differentiation. Women’s bonds are rarely categorized, rarely named, and rarely isolated from the fabric of daily life. They are simply there, folded into the rhythm of court existence.

In the writings of Sei Shōnagon, for example, emotional intensity between women often appears as irritation or delight rather than longing. She records preferences, aversions, moments of shared laughter or shared disdain. The pleasure she takes in companionship is unmistakable, yet it is not eroticized. It belongs to taste, temperament, and recognition. One woman understands another’s sensibility; that understanding produces closeness. The bond requires no further justification.

Similarly, in the diary of Murasaki Shikibu, intimacy between women emerges most clearly in moments of vulnerability: illness, anxiety, exclusion, fatigue. When one woman falls out of favor or becomes isolated, another’s presence becomes emotionally consequential. Sitting together through long evenings, sharing lamplight, exchanging small confidences—these acts carry weight precisely because the world beyond the screens is unstable and watchful.

What we see, again and again, is intimacy as survival.

The court was a place of relentless evaluation. Women were judged on their comportment, their writing, their responsiveness, their ability to navigate attention without attracting too much of it. Emotional safety was scarce. Bonds between women provided something the court itself could not: continuity. A witness to one’s interior life. Someone who remembered how you had been before circumstances shifted.

These relationships were not structured around exclusivity. They did not demand declaration. They did not necessarily compete with heterosexual attachments. In many cases, they existed alongside romantic or sexual relationships with men without tension or contradiction. A woman could be emotionally anchored by another woman while remaining entangled in marriage politics, affairs, or courtship rituals elsewhere.

This coexistence troubles modern frameworks that assume intimacy must be categorized, prioritized, or made legible as either sexual or non-sexual. Heian women did not need such distinctions to understand their bonds. The emotional register was sufficient.

It is tempting, from a contemporary perspective, to search these texts for traces of lesbian desire—to look for moments where affection intensifies into something recognizably erotic. Occasionally, scholars have proposed such readings, often by isolating passages that describe closeness or admiration. But the difficulty lies not in proving or disproving the presence of erotic desire. It lies in recognizing that the texts themselves do not treat such distinctions as particularly urgent.

Desire, when it mattered, became visible through consequence. When it disrupted hierarchy, provoked jealousy, or altered social standing, it entered the record. Much intimacy between women never crossed that threshold. It remained socially neutral, emotionally sustaining, and therefore largely unremarked.

This is not a failure of the archive. It is a clue.

The silence surrounding women’s same-sex intimacy does not indicate repression so much as normalization. Touch, shared sleep, emotional reliance—these were not behaviors that required explanation or defense. They belonged to the ordinary management of life within confined spaces. To eroticize them retroactively risks obscuring the very thing that made them powerful: their unremarkableness.

At the same time, we should resist the impulse to flatten these relationships into mere friendship. The language of modern friendship often lacks the physical and emotional density that characterized Heian women’s bonds. These were relationships that engaged the body as well as the mind. They involved care, attention, and mutual presence over long stretches of time. They shaped how women experienced the court, how they endured it, and how they remembered themselves within it.

What the Heian record offers, then, is not evidence of lesbian identity in any modern sense, but something arguably more instructive: a model of intimacy that does not require sexual definition to be meaningful. Emotional bonds mattered because they stabilized lives lived under constant scrutiny. They mattered because they provided continuity in a world structured by impermanence.

If we allow these relationships to remain what the texts present them as—neither denied nor sensationalized—we gain access to a broader understanding of how intimacy functioned in pre-modern Japan. Not everything that touched the body was erotic. Not everything that sustained the self needed to be named.

In a court where women were often rendered visible only through fragments—poems, letters, reputation—the quiet presence of another woman could be the most enduring form of recognition. These bonds did not announce themselves. They did not need to. They existed in the shared darkness behind screens, in the press of bodies at rest, in the simple fact of not being alone.

And sometimes, that was enough.