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 Heian memoirists' creations of themselves in four texts: "Kagero nikki" ("The Kagero Memoir," after 974), "Makura no soshi" ("The Pillow Book," after 994), "Sarashina nikki" ("The Sarashina Memoir," after 1058), and "Sanuki no suke nikki" ("The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid," after 1108). Essays on the individual memoirs pursue a dual interest, asking how each text works as a rhetorical construct and how it reflects the author's negotiations with Heian fictions about women and writing.
Letting the memoirs themselves set the terms for exploring gender constructions, "Fictions of Femininity" addresses a spectrum of related issues. The reading of "The Kagero Memoir" probes two traditional avenues of feminine expression: the writing of "waka" and the discourse of Buddhist nunhood. Two essays on "The Sarashina Memoir" reveal a fine weave of literary, religious, and autoerotic fantasies, highlighting the intellectual gifts of a memoirist long misread as naive and girlish.
The essay on "The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid" examines the use of spirit possession as metaphor for commemorative writing, tracing the balancing act its author performed in the midst of political intrigues at court. The relationship between the memoir and voyeurism takes center stage in the closing essay on "The Pillow Book," which compares its author's treatment of the thematics of "seeing and being seen" with that of her chief rival, Murasaki Shikibu, creator of "The Tale of Genji." Taken together, the essays in this book underscore the diversity of the Heian memoirists' responses to their roles as women and as writers in one of the most unusual epochs of Japanese history.

The Tale of Genji (ca. 1008), by noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, is known for its sophisticated renderings of fictional characters' minds and its critical perspectives on the lives of the aristocracy of eleventh-century Japan. Unreal Houses radically rethinks the Genji by focusing on the figure of the house. Edith Sarra examines the narrative's fictionalized images of aristocratic mansions and its representation of the people who inhabit them, exploring how key characters in the Genji think about houses in both the architectural and genealogical sense of the word. Through close readings of the Genji and other Heian narratives, Unreal Houses elucidates the literary fabrication of social, architectural, and affective spaces and shows how the figure of the house contributes to the structuring of narrative sequences and the expression of relational nuances among fictional characters. Combining literary analysis with the history of gender, marriage, and the built environment, Sarra opens new perspectives on the architectonics of the Genji and the feminine milieu that midwifed what some have called the world's first novel.

Over the last half century, historic preservation has been on the rise in American cities and towns, from urban renewal and gentrification projects to painstaking restoration of Victorian homes and architectural landmarks. In this book, Nancy R. Hiller brings together individuals with distinctive styles and perspectives, to talk about their passion for preservation. They consider the meaning of place and what motivates those who work to save and care for places; the role of place in the formation of identity; the roles of individuals and organizations in preserving homes, neighborhoods, and towns; and the spiritual as well as economic benefits of preservation. Richly illustrated, Historic Preservation in Indiana is an essential book for everyone who cares about preserving the past for future generations.