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Daily Life: Court
 Women Writers in the Heian period
The Heian period (794-1185 A.D.) is known as the golden age of Japanese art and high culture. It is an especially important period particularly for women of the court in present-day Kyoto. These women wrote novels, poetry, and diaries, including what is considered the world's first novel, The Tale of Genji. This novel was written in the 11th century by a woman named Murasaki Shikibu, and it follows the life and loves of a fictional Prince Genji. It continued to be a very popular subject in art for centuries and to this day remains one of the masterpieces of Japanese literature.
This print, created in 1896, is a scene from The Tale of Genji. It is not only a good visual representation of the novel, but it also shows what the style of dress was for women of the Heian court. They wore many layers of colorful kimono, sometimes as many as twelve at once. They also had long, straight hair, white-powdered faces, eyebrows plucked and then painted high on their foreheads, and blackened teeth.
The text from The Tale of Genji that goes along with the print is found below:
The moon turned the deepest recesses of the garden a gleaming white. The flower beds were wasted, the brook seemed to send up a strangled cry, and the lake was frozen and somehow terrible. Into this austere scene he [Genji] sent little maidservants, telling them that they must make snowmen. Their dress was bright and their hair shone in the moonlight. The older ones were especially pretty, their jackets and trousers and ribbons trailing off in many colors, and the fresh sheen of their hair black against the snow. The smaller ones quite lost themselves in the sport. They let their fans fall most immodestly from their faces. It was all very charming. Rather outdoing themselves, several of them found that they had a snowball, which they could not budge.
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