This article closely examines a famous literary depiction of the sexual exploitation of one of the main characters of The Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki, to determine whether certain courtly sexual practices in classical Japan can be described as rape. Contrary to the prevalent scholarly view (which cautions against projecting twenty-first century mores onto premodern hearts and minds), close textual analysis reveals a subtle but powerful moral condemnation of the practice of older men forcibly turning girls of thirteen into wives. The author of the tale offers insight into Murasaki’s feelings of violation, thereby awakening readers to the possibility that, even though it may narratively have been the logical next step in the relationship between Genji and Murasaki, it was also morally transgressive. Thus, simply because a custom was (believed to be) inevitable does not in and of itself mean everyone accepted this sexual role willingly or was unable or unwilling to see it as morally wrong.

Although the organization of the licensed quarters in the course of the early Edo period gave rise to a remarkably rich fictional and nonfictional body of literature concerning the many and varied pleasures and perils of these places, most of the works in question unfortunately persist in depicting the licensed sex workers themselves as one-dimensional wicked harpies preying on hapless men. The author of the three works presented here, however, goes the opposite route, insisting that the women active in the licensed quarters are real human beings who think and feel, and that their willingness to provide their (often foolish or brutal) clients with what they want is at least as much due to their innate kindness as to an understandable desire for money to pay off their debts to their employers. This article seeks to present this highly unusual text to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

folding screen paintings (byōbu 屏風) known today as the Azuchi Screens. 2 The screens had been commissioned and given to the Jesuits by the warlord Oda Nobunaga 織田信長 (1534-1582), the first of the so-called three great unifiers of Japan. They depicted a panoramic, bird's-eye view of Azuchi Castle-Nobunaga's newly-constructed, palatial, mountain fortress homeas well as its surrounding town and adjacent ports. According to a compiled account of the day's events, Gregory XIII seems to have immediately recognized the importance of the gift. After receiving them, he "ordered that the paintings on which Azuchi was depicted were to be displayed in that well-adorned SPRING 2024

SCHWEMMERtext non-sequentially in any given vernacular (kanbun kundoku 漢文訓読), 1 we must do so with characters that are at least as abbreviated as your average kana (mu 武→む, etc.).Sinitic verbal prefixes, which become verbal suffixes when read as Japanese, as well as sentence-ending graphs and honorifics, are reduced to simple, schematic brushstrokes attached to the top, bottom, or corners of the character for a verb or noun, so that the resulting writing system may have more in common with the radically agglutinative and non-sequential Aztec hieroglyphs, or some early cuneiform inscriptions, than with Chinese writing. 2 For example, a conglomeration looking something like し 成 〻 is read from center, to top, to lower left: na-sare sōrō 被 ㇾ 成 候.