UCLA

The large corpus of literature produced by Japanese aristocratic women from the ninth through fourteenth centuries—Japan’s classical or Heian Period (794–1185) and early medieval or Kamakura Period (1185–1333)—is an anomaly in world literature of the premodern period. Scholarship on the vernacular writings of Heian women aristocrats has shown that although women were for the most part excluded from the political realm of bureaucracy, they did play key, if usually unofficial, roles. For instance, their writings were central to the Heian court’s sense of itself, including the process of transmitting cultural memory. Even though aristocratic women continued to write throughout the early medieval period, scholars have tended to neglect their writings in favour of the new political protagonists of the age—the leaders of the warrior class—and have argued that aristocratic women did not write about political unrest. This dissertation combines close reading and archival research to argue that the writings of medieval aristocratic women did in fact play a central role in the process whereby the aristocracy made sense of the changing world and their own diminished place in it. This is not immediately apparent because the genres that medieval aristocratic women wrote in—waka poetry and vernacular diaries—tend not to be analyzed in terms of historical representation. And yet, as this dissertation shows, the story of the declining aristocracy, as told by the aristocratic women who experienced it firsthand and survived the tumultuous transition into Japan’s medieval age, offers insight into how medieval Japanese authors used poetry as a medium for historical narrative and how aspects of the medium of a poetic waka lens—such as embedded multiple overlapping temporalities—force conceptions of the past at odds with contemporary notions of linear historic time.