Selling Songs and Smiles: The Sex Trade in Heian and Kamakura Japan (review)

As a work of Japanese historiography, Janet Goodwin's Selling Songs and Smiles makes an important contribution to our understanding of professional sexual entertainers and their trade in the mid-Heian through Kamakura periods, roughly the mid-tenth through the mid-fourteenth centuries. As Goodwin notes in her acknowledgements, the book is an expansion of her article "Shadows of Transgression: Heian and Kamakura Constructions of Prostitution," published in the Autumn 2000 issue of Monumenta Nipponica (55:3). Like "Shadows of Transgression," Selling Songs and Smiles explores the lives, occupations, and socially constructed identities of asobi, kugutsu, and shirabyōshi—three types of professional female purveyors of song, dance, and sex—as well as the political and socioeconomic factors related to broad transformations in the sexual entertainment trade over the course of some four hundred years. Though a slight book of approximately 208 pages (including glossary, bibliography, and index), Selling Songs and Smiles is a work of weight; it is concise, focused, meticulously researched, and written with nuance and aplomb.

In considering the sex trade in Heian and Kamakura Japan, Goodwin begins by grappling with the problem of definitions. She explores the norms of orthodox vs. heterodox sexual behavior as a means of formulating a concept of "prostitution" in a society in which marriage itself was weakly defined, and in which, in Goodwin's words, "the incomplete commercialization of the economy makes it hard to differentiate prostitutes who were paid from sexual partners who were given gifts" (p. 3). In chapter 1, "Delightful Sirens and Delighted Patrons," Goodwin examines mostly Heian-period accounts of asobi, kugutsu, and shirabyōshi, as well as modern scholars' speculations about the women and their origins, summarizing and effectively distinguishing between that which is known and that which is merely conjectured. In her second chapter, "Defining Transgression," Goodwin does just that, exploring Heian- and Kamakura-period social mores of marriage and extramarital sexual relations. Attuned to the pitfalls of anachronistic interpretation, she is especially careful in her use of terminology; on pages 73-74, for example, she provides a handy table of Heian- and Kamakura-period terms for adultery, incest, rape, and other transgressive sexual acts, along with the names and dates of the texts in which those terms appear. In chapter 3, "Sacred Sex or Sexual Pollution?" Goodwin addresses religious issues of ritual purity and defilement in relation to the sexual entertainment trade, including the applicability of present-day anthropological notions of the sacred, the ordinary, and the polluted (hare, ke, and kegare); possible connections between asobi and female shamans (miko or kamunagi); and the place of stories about sexual entertainers in early medieval Buddhist discourses on the power of the nenbutsu and the nature of nonduality. In her fourth and final chapter, "Constructing the Prostitute," Goodwin explores the increasing stigmatization of female sexual entertainers in the late Heian and Kamakura periods, as well as the late Kamakura-period formation of a distinct image of the prostitute as a "transgressor of social norms" (p. 151).

Methodologically speaking, Goodwin employs a diverse range of primary sources, including, most prominently, essays and diaries written by male court aristocrats; setsuwa tales, both secular and Buddhist didactic; imayō lyrics attributed to sexual entertainers; and, in the latter part of the book, Kamakura-period legal legislation and court-case decisions. Goodwin's treatment of these works is rigorously cautious: when citing a particular text or group of texts, she is careful to consider the implications of her decision and to articulate any reservations that she may have about it. Her conclusions thus tend to be conservative, and her analysis conveys a tone of unusually strong analytical integrity. Regarding the suitability of employing fictional setsuwa in a work of history, for example, which is a widespread practice among historians of pre-Tokugawa Japan, Goodwin writes that she agrees "to a certain extent" that setsuwa stories may "reflect actual social conditions...