Dreaming Gender: Kyōgoku School Japanese Women Poets (Re)Writing the Feminine Subject

Literary historians generally tell tales of a gradual decline in Japanese women’s writing after its great efflorescence in the mid- and late-Heian period (794–1185). Following the early important women poets Ono no Komachi (fl. mid-ninth c.) and Lady Ise (b. 875-d. after 938), these tales tell us that Japanese women writers also compiled poetry collections that included prose and wrote what might loosely be termed literary diaries (nikki bungaku) and tales (monogatari) that defined new genres and otherwise fundamentally shaped Japanese court literature. The great masterpiece of this women-centered tradition is The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu (b. 978-d. 1016?), a sophisticated psychological novel of over one thousand pages in translation that some critics see as the first full-length novel in world literature.

The enormous importance of this writing by women in Japan for later generations of writers and for world literary history may be recognized without assuming that the writing of these women that has come to be known as joryū bungaku, or “women’s literature,” held little importance for writing by men in the Japanese language. The dominance of women in tenth-century court writing in Japanese is generally contrasted with men’s court writing in the lingua franca Chinese. Yet women proved so accomplished and interesting in their literary production that men began a backlash by attempting to reclaim Japanese language writing for male courtiers, a premodern backlash comparable to that of our own day as discussed below. One famous example of male writers trying to compose literature in Japanese can be seen in the early memoir, the Tosa Diary (ca. 935), in a feminine voice by the influential male courtier Ki no Tsurayuki. After this backlash both men and women came to write in the voice of either masculine or feminine poetic subjects, depending on their interests. As we shall see shortly, in love poetry they wrote in the voice of whichever subject was at the center of the conventional phase of the love affair.

Rather than discussing this early high point of Japanese women’s writing, I examine here two important women writers from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. My goal is to take a step towards reevaluating women’s writing from a later and often overlooked period of the premodern and to question the dismissal of Japanese women’s writing after the Heian period. One of the most important and innovative schools of Japanese court poetry from this period is the Kyōgoku school, generally presumed by literary historians to be named after the male aristocrat Kyōgoku Tamekane (also Kyōgoku Tamekanu, b. 1254-d. 1332) even though the school was dominated by women poets. Here I will examine the writings of two major women poets from this school: the relatively unknown Kyōgoku Tameko (also Junii Tameko, b. 1250/1252 to d. after 1315), Tamekane’s older sister, and the better known Retired Empress Eifuku (or Eifuku Mon’in, also Yōfuku Mon’in, or Saionji Kyoko, b. 1271-d. 1342).¹ This essay explores constructions of gender subjectivities in love poetry, which engages with such theoretical issues as the nature of the subject and women’s agency in shaping reality. My study of this love poetry will lay the groundwork for an examination of Kyōgoku Tameko and Retired Empress Eifuku’s reinscriptions of feminine subjectivity; while androcentric conventions in court love poetry demanded that feminine subjects resign themselves, in love affairs, to a course of events that gave agency to male subjects, we will see that the feminine subjects constructed by these two women poets refuse such resignation.

Kyōgoku school women writers certainly composed conventional works demonstrating their mastery of courtly assumptions about the course of love affairs, as they were expected to do by their contemporaries. Yet Tameko and Retired Empress Eifuku also wrote poems that rejected the conventional sorrowful longing of a woman whose male lover loses interest as the affair’s end approaches. Thus some of their feminine personae take up an angry bitterness at the...