Femmes galantes, femmes artistes dans le Japon ancien, XIe-XIIIe siècle (review)

In 1982 Jacqueline Pigeot published Michiyuki-bun (Maisonneuve et Larose), her exhaustive study of "the poetics of travel" in classical Japan. Pages 275-76 of that book, a chapter appendix entitled "Components for a History of Asobime," constitute a sketch of what a book-length cultural history of female entertainers in the Heian and early Kamakura periods might look like. The gestation period lasted twenty years, but those two pages have now materialized into an intriguing and equally exhaustive survey of the lives and cultural roles of the women known as asobi, yūjo, kugutsu, and shirabyōshi, as well as by some other names, throughout the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Pigeot's book takes the form of introductions to and discussions of a very substantial number of primary sources, many of which have been translated by the author, and which she has grouped thematically into five chapters.

Chapter 1 ("Life and Conditions of the Courtesans") discusses sources of the eleventh and twelfth centuries devoted to or featuring female entertainers. Anyone who has looked into the subject will know the main texts and will find that Pigeot has covered them all, and more. It is hard to imagine that any significant crumbs have been overlooked. The chapter covers topics such as different categories of women, their appellations (and possible connections between the two—the usual distinction between asobi as prostitute-entertainers who worked the waterfront and kugutsu as mostly itinerant and active along overland routes obviously oversimplifies things), customers, and devotional practices. After laying the ground, Pigeot ends with the question of the social status of these women. This topic she introduces with the observation that most texts of a seemingly documentary nature are in fact kanbun texts that adhere to literary standards. Their "evocations of the yūjo," she goes on to note, are "nothing less than prudish" (p. 58). That said, Heian society showed tolerance of a broad spectrum of sexual behavior, and "marriage" meant little more than a long-term relationship with a partner of the same class. In such a setting, the courtesans, as Pigeot usually calls them, were treated with respect and uniform courtesy ("un égale bonhomie," p. 59). Social and sexual codes differed from those in China or India and certainly from those of medieval Europe. This theme of unusual social acceptance of female entertainers persists in the next chapters. Warrior culture and the ensuing new ideal of womanhood (chaste wife and devoted mother) meant the end of this attitude towards female performers.

Chapters 2 ("The Courtesan as Literary Theme") and 3 ("The Art of the Courtesan") are devoted largely to literature; they deal with asobi and others as featured in poetry as well as religiously inspired tale literature, and with poems and songs by courtesans. The strongest part is probably that devoted to "edifying literature," largely because Pigeot makes amply clear that, by the thirteenth century, meetings of monks and courtesans had become a topos in short narrative literature. She goes a long way towards establishing that the stock image of courtesans, the quintessential representation of the "floating world," as regretting their "illusory lives," asking monks to pray on their behalf, or becoming nuns does not necessarily serve to confirm the inferiority of women, and particularly courtesans, to men. Rather, these stories should be read as depictions of women who actively search for, and obtain, salvation. It is an argument that has also been made by Rajyashree Pandey in an article in Acta Venetiana in 1998 (quoted by Pigeot), and it is strengthened by instances in religious literature in which monks exhort the women not to think less of themselves because of their profession. A variant topos, in which the asobi turns out to be a bodhisattva, emphasizes the same theme. In medieval tales the female performers could eventually become ideal Buddhist teachers, since they had "left the world" yet could easily entice men to listen to them.

Although a...