Prose Narrative in the Heian Period (794 -1186)

In the year 794 the capital ( the residence and court of the emperor) moved away from the city of Nara to a newly designed city named Heian-kyo, the modern-day city of Kyoto. The reason for the move seems largely to have been the increased political influence of the Buddhist clergy who were headquartered and economically powerful in Nara. The empress favored a Buddhist priest named Dokyo, probably her lover, and under her patronage he rose to the highest ministerial offices. He eventually had designs on becoming emperor himself. Dokyo was a commoner, unrelated to the Imperial family. Had he succeeded in his quest for sovereign power, the unbroken line of succession claimed by the Imperial family would have been interrupted and the political compromises adhered to by the powerful nobility who surrounded and supported the Imperial family jeopardized. The Imperial family and the nobility became convinced that a separation of secular rule from religious influence was necessary. Furthermore, the location of Heian-kyo offered better access by land and water from other parts of the country where the rule of the governmental center was expanding and consolidating. The Dokyo affair also convinced Imperial family and their supporters that women should no longer rule as Sovereigns (what we might think of as female emperors). The line of Imperial succession was soon exclusively male.

It may be ironic then that it was in the the Heian period, when the exclusion of women from political power became institutionalized, that women had enormous cultural influence and achieved distinctions in literature that would not be equaled for almost a thousand years. [Text by Prof. Carole Cavenaugh]