平安文學に見られる性

Abstract

This article focuses many different aspects of sexuality in Heian Period. The point is here that the literature in this period reveals the variety and modification in sexuality in view of restriction, deviation, taboo, and violation. It is the Heian literature that has certain sovereign powers, sexual taboo, shaman taboo, incest taboo, and so on, and this presents the human reality that cannot avoid from committing these taboos inevitably. Futhermore, this aspect of conflict is associated with the plot and the basic part of subject revealed in the works to create a core part in each work. The issue of sodomy was not openly mentioned in the works until the middle period of the Heian. "Torikaebaya Monogatari", written in the latter period of the Heian, depicts the world of the sexuality that complicates with human sexual desire through the description of women in men's attire, men in women's attire, homosexuality, and heterosexuality. Here we see that the works are trying to reveal the Heian literary proposition in terms of human agony and self-salvation based on the absurdity of human existence. The sexuality of the Heian period's literature has various aspects of the human reality reflecting many sides of social restriction and taboos according to their own literary and logical development.