Desire Without Names: Homosexuality in Heian Japan and Its Afterlife

To speak of homosexuality in the Heian period is to begin with a problem of language.

The men and women of the tenth and eleventh centuries did not organize desire around fixed identities. There was no category equivalent to “gay” or “straight,” no sense that erotic preference defined the self in a permanent way. Desire was understood as situational, relational, and profoundly shaped by rank, ritual, and proximity. What mattered was not who one was, but how one behaved, with whom, and under what conditions.

This makes Heian sexuality at once elusive and remarkably fluid.

Court life brought men into constant intimacy with one another. Aristocratic males were educated together, served together, composed poetry together, slept in close quarters during ritual vigils and official duties. Physical closeness was ordinary. Emotional intimacy was cultivated. Erotic possibility followed naturally, without requiring explanation.

The Tale of Genji reflects this world with striking candor.

Although Genji’s relationships with women dominate the narrative, his most emotionally charged bonds are often with men. His early attachment to Koremitsu, his loyal confidant and intermediary, carries a depth of intimacy that exceeds simple service. Their physical closeness is unremarked upon, their emotional reliance taken for granted. Genji’s relationship with Tō no Chūjō is even more suggestive: rivalry, admiration, longing, and jealousy intertwine in ways that mirror romantic attachment. The language used to describe their encounters—lingering glances, nights spent together in shared space, emotional displacement when separated—does not sharply distinguish between homosocial and homoerotic feeling.

What is notable is not that same-sex desire appears, but that it does not require justification.

Heian literature rarely treats male–male intimacy as scandalous in itself. Anxiety arises instead around excess: attachment that disrupts hierarchy, desire that interferes with duty, emotion that refuses containment. Sexuality becomes problematic only when it destabilizes social order, not because of the gender of one’s partner.

This logic extends beyond men.

Women’s same-sex intimacy is harder to trace, largely because women’s lives were more spatially restricted and less directly recorded. Yet court diaries and tales suggest intense emotional and physical bonds between women, especially within shared quarters. These relationships, like those between men, were folded into a broader culture of closeness without being marked as deviant.

The key point is this: in Heian Japan, sexuality was not a moral identity. It was a behavior shaped by circumstance.

This stands in sharp contrast to what emerges in later, feudal Japan.

By the medieval and early modern periods, same-sex relations—particularly between men—become increasingly codified rather than fluid. The rise of the samurai class reshaped erotic life around hierarchy, loyalty, and martial masculinity. Nanshoku, the “male colors,” developed as a recognized practice, often structured around age difference, mentorship, and strict role expectations. Desire was still permitted, even celebrated, but it was now disciplined, ritualized, and named.

Where Heian intimacy was ambient, feudal sexuality became programmatic.

The warrior ethos transformed same-sex relations into a system of training and allegiance, binding eroticism to duty and death. Love between men was idealized not for its emotional subtlety, but for its capacity to reinforce loyalty and discipline. In contrast to the Heian court’s emphasis on aesthetic sensitivity and emotional responsiveness, feudal sexuality prized restraint, endurance, and hierarchy.

The difference is not simply one of tolerance versus repression.

Heian Japan allowed desire to circulate without definition. Feudal Japan required it to take form.

This shift had profound consequences. Once named and structured, same-sex desire became legible—and therefore regulatable. Roles hardened. Expectations narrowed. What had once been situational became symbolic. Erotic intimacy was no longer simply something that happened; it became something one entered into under known terms.

Seen from this perspective, The Tale of Genji preserves a world before taxonomy.

Genji’s emotional life moves freely across genders, attachments forming through proximity, beauty, and shared experience rather than declared preference. His desires are excessive, often destructive, but never categorized. The novel’s anxiety lies not in who is desired, but in how attachment reverberates through time—how love generates suffering regardless of its object.

This is why Genji remains so unsettling.

He belongs to a sexual order that resists modern classification. His world assumes that desire is unstable, responsive, and inherently dangerous—not because it violates identity, but because it binds people to one another in ways that impermanence will inevitably undo.

By the time Japan enters the feudal period, that uncertainty has narrowed.

Sexuality becomes something one can name, defend, discipline, even celebrate within prescribed forms. The cost of this clarity is flexibility. The gain is coherence. What is lost is the Heian sense that desire need not explain itself to exist.

To read Heian literature today is to encounter a sexual imagination less concerned with identity than with consequence.

It reminds us that homosexuality, as a category, is not timeless—even if same-sex desire is. The Heian period offers a vision of erotic life unburdened by definition, while feudal Japan offers a vision shaped by structure and power. Neither is simple. Neither is innocent.

But together, they show how profoundly cultures shape not only how people love, but how they understand what love means.