Coercive Sex in the Medieval Japanese Court

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Un peu de graveleux ce matin...



Coercive Sex in the Medieval Japanese Court: Lady Nijô’s Memoir

By Hitomi Tonomura

Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 61:3 (2006)

Introduction: In 1271, the retired emperor Go-Fukakusa-in (1243-1304; r.1246– 1259) entered the room of Nijô (1258–after 1307), a female companion protégée who was then fourteen years old, and forced himself upon her. “He handled me so mercilessly that my thin gown was being badly torn, and soon I would be left with nothing in this world, not even my name, as dawn came upon my feelings of bitter despair,” wrote Nijô in her memoir, Towazugatari (Telling Without Being Asked), completed thirty-five years later. By thus exposing the circumstances of what were possibly her first sexual relations, Nijô left a record of coercive sex written from the “recipient’s” perspective, something rare among premodern Japanese literary works.

More than seven hundred years later, Nijô’s descrïption of the apparently violent act often prompts modern readers to debate if it should be called rape. Margaret H. Childs, who carefully assesses the aggressive behavior of earlier classical romantic heroes, such as Hikaru Genji in The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari), against the context of a social dynamic that placed a high value on women’s vulnerability and passivity, regards the incident involving Nijô as rape. Nishizawa Masashi also calls the act rape and exercises his own voyeurism in describing it: “The scene in which Nijô is forcibly stripped entirely naked and violated as in a rape (reipu/gôkan) [iu] a daring expression imbued with a typically medieval exhibitionism,” which, he holds, contrasts with the more tasteful writings of earlier times.

By focusing on this passage in Nijô’s memoir, which admittedly raises the lexical issue of the definition of “rape,” this article explores how a modern reader might attempt to do justice to Nijô’s authorship and subjectivity as situated in a particular set of social and political circumstances and beholden to certain literary conventions. The sexual incident, whether or not we call it rape, reveals the gender- and status-based relations of power that shaped Nijô’s world and defined the cultural parameters she came both to endorse and resist. Her story serves as a portal through which to understand the life choices of a medieval court woman as she navigated through masculinist prerogatives deeply embedded in the structure of imperial and bureaucratic authority.

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~cmedst/gmap/uplo ... Memoir.pdf

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Pour ceux que ça intéresserait, le Towazugatari a été publié en français sous le titre Splendeurs et misères d'une favorite, aux éditions Philippe Picquier.