Love, Sex and Romance at the Heian court

Since I’ve been talking about love poetry, I thought it would be a good wrap-up to say a little about love, sex and romance at the Heian court. Also, how those were handled is much different than our tradition does, so it might help to understand where these women were coming from.

Compared to our culture, both Heian men and women there were accorded a lot of latitude in their sexual affairs. For men, polygamy was the rule and among the aristocracy, a man was expected to have several wives, either living within his compound or elsewhere around the countryside, and as many official mistresses and unofficial lovers as would accommodate him.

For unmarried women, affairs were an accepted part of courtship and they often had multiple lovers, although with (usually) a greater degree of discretion than the men. Married women were expected to be faithful to their husbands, but we know this may often have been honored “more in the breach than in the observance.”

In Japan (as in China and other cultures of the Far East) love, sex and marriage were not linked like they are in our tradition. Sex was considered a natural need that it was unhealthy not to fulfill. Chinese Siu and T’ang medical treatises, which were known in Japan and followed by Heian court physicians, state that those who have sex to orgasm “scores of times” in one day will “cure all their ills and live to a great age.” The benefits were believed to increase by having sex with multiple women; one treatise recommends having sex with ten or more different women in a day! Although these texts focus on men, women’s sexual satisfaction is not neglected. So abstaining from sex was not seen as a virtue. In fact, in ancient Japan, a young woman who remained a virgin too long was actually suspected of being inhabited by a malignant spirit.

So as long as the needs of the family were met—the overriding responsibility—how people met their sexual needs was their own concern, and that they would do so outside of marriage, which was arranged for sociopolitical and economic reasons, not love, was expected.

However, marital infidelity could have repercussions, such as being divorced and disowned (as happened to Izumi Shikibu), and a poor reputation, spread by gossip, undermined the all-important networks created by politically arranged marriages. Family fortunes depended on these arrangements, so gossip was not a trivial matter. But even so, court women were not always meek about it, as the famous fan incident involving Izumi and Fujiwara no Michinaga demonstrates, and overall, the risks do not seem to have put much of a damper on hooking up. Scholars have even suggested a court lady was more likely to be looked down on for her attire being considered inappropriate than for having affairs. (Sei Shōnagon certainly seemed to be of this opinion and her calling out other court ladies for this would seem to be a case of “pot meet kettle,” if she did it. Happily, she appears to have refrained.)

Also, the fact that women could be financially independent in Heian Japan gave them considerable control over their romances, allowing them to reject suitors and divorce husbands if their marriage no longer suited them. This freedom would largely disappear in later times, as tends to be sadly typical. (I’ve read in some older books that ancient Japanese culture was matriarchal and this largely accounted for women’s relatively high status in Heian and pre-Heian times, and withered under the influence of China. I don’t know this idea is still embraced but there’s no doubt that Confucianism did Japanese women no favors.)

Relationships among Heian elite were conducted according to a basic protocol. Perhaps surprisingly to us, the protocol was largely the same whether it was an arranged marriage to a principle wife, a secondary wife, or a relationship with a formal concubine; only a few details differed. In all cases, the arrangement was consummated before being made “official”—quite the opposite of our tradition.

Interestingly, informal affairs followed the same basic pattern. In fact, one of the fascinating things is that even for an arranged marriage, the parents would set up meeting between the couple as if they were having an affair. On the appointed night, the groom would “sneak” into his intended bride’s room. The parents would then “turn their backs” while the couple spent the night having sex as if no one knew what was going on. Then the groom would “sneakily” leave at dawn. This would be repeated for three nights and if the results were deemed “satisfactory”—the couple didn’t seem have much to say about that—special cakes were baked and served and they were considered married. That was it.1

Marriage practices aside, what was the protocol? I’ll outline it for informal arrangements, since that tended to be the matter of greatest interest as far as the women’s lives were concerned (marriages happened whether they liked it or not and, often as not, were endured as a social duty, more than personal matter).

To initiate an affair, the woman would be sent a tanka poem expressing the petitioner’s desire. If she found the poem pleasing, the calligraphy acceptable, and the manner in which it was presented appropriate, she would reply in kind. Such affairs were supposed to be secret (whether they were or not) so this would lead by stages, all mediated by poetry, to a clandestine late-night visit.

The first night would be spent talking and making love until the first sign of dawn. Then her visitor would depart, lamenting the night’s brevity. Before noon, a further exchange of poems would assess how satisfactory the night had been and whether the visits would continue. If they did, it would still be “secret” until the affair was recognized by marriage, becoming a formal concubine or ended.

Some affairs were in fact secret. The affair between Izumi and Prince Atsumichi began in great secrecy and the prince seems to have kept it secret from his principle wife for a year. Then he installed her in his apartments as an official concubine, formalizing their relationship. The wife objected and moved back to her parents domicile, effectively signaling a divorce.

The reasons for keeping an affair secret weren’t related to our idea the couple were “cheating” because monogamy wasn’t the normal practice anyway. Instead it was more likely because a social gap or condition made the relationship “unsuitable.”

These nominally secret relationships were still, by their nature, nerve-wracking. While secrecy provided the couple a degree of protection from adverse opinion—and especially adverse comment—it also created doubts and anxieties. Once begun, there could be an ever-present worry of separation, as one person, generally the woman, awaited a message from her lover, heralding another nighttime visit.

All manner of circumstances might prevent a visit, and poetry—exchanged through discrete messengers, usually pages or servants, who were always available—was crucial to maintaining a relationship, especially since a public courtship was generally ruled out.2 Poetry also provided a means to privately explore the hopes, fears, uncertainties and all the myriad feelings that come with falling in love.

To our modern mind, such a highly refined, elegantly constrained fashion of going about love affairs may seem to lack authenticity—something scripted, as in an exquisitely acted play. But I hope the brief samples of these women’s poetry I’ve posted prove the inaccuracy of that notion.

I cannot put it better than Jane Hirshfield in her introduction to The Ink Dark Moon. These women poets of the Heian court, she rightly observes:

“illuminated certain areas of human experience with a beauty, truthfulness and compassion unsurpassed in the literature of any other age… Their brief poems serve as small but utterly clear windows into those concerns of heart and mind that persist unchanged from culture to culture and from millennium to millennium.”

As the old saying goes, truer words were never spoke.

To finish up, I’ve been talking only about love, sex and romance between women and men. The situation between two women was, of course, quite different. I mentioned that in a footnote to a previous post, but rather than send people off to read it, I’ll just repost it here, slightly edited.

Yes, women lived together at close quarters and they also often exchanged poetry containing expressions of love. Scholars say this was conventional at the time and shouldn’t be taken as a sign of romantic, sexual attachment. But did they love each other, romantically and sexually? Almost certainly. Scholars admit as much. That has a contradictory ring to it: it seems scholars are saying we shouldn’t read too much into the poetry woman exchanged, but then yes, maybe we should. However, both things can be true. The convention expressing what sounds like love and longing can just be like the salutation “Your obedient servant…” when you are anything but, or it could be sincere and the privacy gained was a valuable thing.

As I’ve just described. the conventions surrounding the love affairs between women and men all depended on (and reflected) the fact that men and women were kept segregated in their daily lives and interacted only at a distance or with some physical barrier behind them. (Usually a screen, sometimes translated as a “screen of state.”)

But since women all lived together, there was no need for “clandestine” coming and goings. So we can imagine that women’s love for each other was not bound by all the same societal rules that governed romance between women and men. How they handled them, only they know.

The main thing, however, is that the spirit of Sappho was not absent from the Heian imperial court. This another reason (as if another is needed) we should appreciate these women all the more!