Fictions of femininity

The history of Japanese memoir literature began over a thousand years ago, its greatest practitioners being women of the "middle ranks" whose literary talents won many of them positions as ladies-in-waiting at the Heian imperial court. As female writers they both inhabited and helped create a discursive world obsessed with the arts of concealment and self-display, the perils and possibilities - erotic, political, and literary - of real and metaphorical peepholes.

As memoirists they were virtuosos in the exacting art of feminine self-representation. Taken together, the essays in this book underscore the diversity of the Heian memoirists' responses to their roles as women and as writers in one of the most unusual epochs of Japanese history.