AUTHOR'S NOTE
Sex and Sexuality
The Japanese attitude toward matters sexual was very different from that of the contemporary West. (It still is, to some extent.) One of the most obvious ways this difference is displayed is in the characters of Hosokawa Katsunata and his wakashū friend, Togashi Shokan. There was no prejudice against homosexuality or bisexuality in pre-modern Japan, and in some cases warrior men were encouraged to have affairs with younger companions. These affairs served a similar function that served by same-sex relations in classical Greece: the older man acted as a mentor—a very intimate mentor—to the younger. There wasn’t even much of a prejudice against those, like young Lord Hosokawa, who were exclusively homosexual. Heirs could be obtained through adoption, a practice followed by a good number of heterosexuals as well.
As for the wakashū, they occupied an interesting space between childhood and adulthood. Wakashū were not targets of only same-sex lovers; many women were drawn to their beauty as well. And relations between wakashū and their elders were not always about sex. Togashi Shokan stands out (as Hiroki notes) by virtue of his trying to hold onto his adolescent status even though he is in his early twenties. Eventually laws were passed to prevent this holding-on.
The role of prostitutes and courtesans wasn’t a lot different in pre-modern Japan than it was in, say, Classical Rome. Many poor parents sold their daughters into prostitution if the alternative was starvation. Some prostitutes became courtesans and attracted wealthier and more powerful clients; this is the path Katsumi has taken for herself. There was little stigma attached to patronizing prostitutes (and none at all to patronizing sophisticated courtesans) and little stigma attached to being one. Some women were trapped in their role and were desperate to escape, but I find it significant that the majority of stories I’ve read of these women were written by Western males who first encountered Japanese attitudes to sex in the late nineteenth century.
Women during this period actually had considerably more freedom and latitude than did their great-granddaughters a century later. Especially in the lower social orders, women ran businesses and ruled households (a number of Kyoto moneylenders were women). And farm women, of course, worked as hard as did their men. One thing I find remarkable is the role of women within the imperial household. Hiroki’s mother, Inaki Sakiko (Japanese women did not take their husbands’ family names) is representative of a great number of women who worked in the imperial administration. Granted, it seems these female administrators worked there because the imperial household was too poor to pay men to do the work, but still—these women had power over access to the imperial presence. (Lack of money also meant that there was no empress during this period; the emperors fathered their successors by having affairs with the aristocratic women working as administrators at the palace.)
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