The history of Japanese memoir literature began over a thousand years ago, its greatest practitioners being women of the -middle ranks- whose literary talents won many of them positions as ladies-in-waiting at the Heian imperial court. As female writers they both inhabited and helped create a discursive world obsessed with the arts of concealment and self-display, the perils and possibilities--erotic, political, and literary--of real and metaphorical peepholes. As memoirists they were virtuosos in the exacting art of feminine self-representation. Fictions of Femininity explores the...