Perfumed Sleeves and Tangled Hair: Body, Woman, and Desire in Medieval Japanese Narratives

Perfumed Sleeves and Tangled Hair explores the possibilities and limits of terms such as "body," "woman," "gender," and "agency"―categories that emerged within the context of western philosophical, religious, and feminist debates―to analyze texts that come out of altogether different temporal and cultural contexts. Through close textual readings of a wide range of classical and medieval narratives, from well-known works such as the Tale of Genji to popular Buddhist tales, Rajyashree Pandey offers new ways of understanding such terms within the context of medieval Buddhist knowledge.