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Reviewed by:
  • Perfumed Sleeves and Tangled Hair: Body, Woman, and Desire in Medieval Japanese Narratives by Rajyashree Pandey
  • Janet R. Goodwin (bio)
Perfumed Sleeves and Tangled Hair: Body, Woman, and Desire in Medieval Japanese Narratives. By Rajyashree Pandey. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2016. xii, 209 pages. $55.00, cloth; $28.00, paper.

This thoughtful, well-written book joins, and in many ways challenges, a growing collection of literature on the body in premodern Japan. Rajyashree Pandey’s primary concern is the role of the female body as an object of amorous desire. Her discussion focuses on courtly literature such as Genji monogatari and popular texts such as setsuwa, demonstrating that despite different approaches, both developed within a Buddhist framework. Pandey’s use of contrasting literary genres to make similar—but not identical—arguments makes these arguments broadly applicable to the Japanese medieval literary world as a whole.

Pandey maintains that categories such as gender, sexuality, the body, and desire are modern ones, based on the European experience, that cannot be used uncritically in the examination of earlier and distant cultures. While her examples are drawn from literature, this argument might apply to my own field of history as well. Even armed with a considerable body of textual evidence, it is difficult to discard our own preconceptions and imagine ourselves in the conceptual world of premodern Japan. Pandey makes an effort to do just that, however, and herein lie the strengths of her argument. [End Page 156]

The book treads largely familiar territory in an unfamiliar way. Since at least the early 1990s, scholars have been examining the depiction of the body in medieval Japanese literature; one seminal article is Hitomi Tonomura’s “Black Hair and Red Trousers: Gendering the Flesh in Medieval Japan” (American Historical Review, Vol. 99, No. 1 [1994]), which focuses on the way the female body was treated in the late Heian setsuwa collection Konjaku monogatarishū. More recently, we have a study of the grotesque body by Michelle Osterfield Li (Ambiguous Bodies: Reading the Grotesque in Japanese Setsuwa Tales [Stanford University Press, 2009]) and Charlotte Eubanks’s exploration of the embodiment of sacred texts, including religiously oriented setsuwa as well as sutras (Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan [University of California Press, 2011]). The figure Izumi Shikibu, also examined in Pandey’s book, was the central focus of R. Keller Kimbrough’s Preachers, Poets, Women and the Way: Izumi Shikibu and the Buddhist Literature of Medieval Japan (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2008). Pandey’s contribution to this corpus is to challenge, and even to redefine, the eroticized female body as depicted in medieval Japanese literature.

A short introduction and the first chapter lay out Pandey’s basic arguments: that categories such as body, woman, and sex were shaped by religious traditions that differ from those of the West, and that within Japanese literature itself there are different concepts of the body: aristocratic literature such as Genji imagines the body through “stylized performative modes” while setsuwa tales show bodies engaged in everyday life, including sexual activity. She argues that in neither case, however, can the body be seen as simply an anatomical object nor as a socially constructed one and that the nature-culture binary does not work in a context in which the body is seen as possessing psychological and social attributes along with physical ones.

In two chapters that focus on Genji, Pandey argues that in medieval Japanese literature, the female “body” is composed not so much of flesh as it is of features such as clothing and hair, which can demonstrate a person’s mental state and social position. In other words, she argues that male sexual desire is focused on characteristics that might be seen by modern observers as peripheral or even extraneous and that further, it is bodily performance—action—such as the movement of a hand or the concealment of a face, rather than the hand or the face in itself, that stirs a man’s desire. This is a well-stated argument, although I think she dismisses too easily the obvious explanation that until he managed to get behind her screen...

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