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Writing Margins: The Textual Construction of Gender in Heian and Kamakura Japan. By TERRY KAWASHIMA. Harvard East Asian Monographs. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. 325 pp. $39.50 (cloth).
This book is obviously the fruit of painstaking research and the first work in English to demonstrate, on the basis of shifts in textual construction, a progressive marginalization of three female aspects of the Heian and medieval social and literary world. The three foci of Kawashima's study are female professional entertainers, the literary oeuvre and "life story" of the poet Ono no Komachi, and the legend of Uji no Hashihime.
There is no Japanese study that covers the same ground in one book. One of the strong points of Kawashima's book is her exhaustive study of Japanese scholarship in the topic areas which makes the bibliography of this book a valuable mine for researchers wanting to follow other veins of research ore in this rich field. Kawashima's work is synthetic, pulling together many different strands of historical, philological, and textual study done by Japanese scholars to create a comprehensive picture of a decline in the acceptance of both women's sexuality and their authority to transmit religious power.
The work contains generous amounts of translations of relatively rare primary texts such as Heian period kanshi written about female entertainers and medieval setsuwa. Kawashima not only provides translations of excerpts in the body of her text, but also complements this with translations of the entire pieces in an appendix. The irreducibility of primary texts and their potential for alternative interpretations makes it particularly valuable to have such a nice collection in this topic area.
Sarah Strong has worked on the second of Kawashima's topics, the construction of the Ono no Komachi life story. Her "The Making of a Femme Fatale: Ono no Komachi in the Early...