From at least the time of the 'Rainy Night Discussion' in the Tale of Genji, classical Japanese long court fiction or tsukuri monogatari has offered insightful and extended presentation of the dynamics of same-gender social groupings, especially regarding the discourse and practice of male-female romantic relationships. From the late Heian period, with Torikaebaya Monogatari this theme broadened to treat same-gender and same-sex romantic relationships, sometimes, but no means always further complicated by crossdressing, as in that work and the late twelfth-century Ariake no Wakare.
The Kamakura period tsukuri monogatari were disparaged for much of the twentieth century as thematically derivative and stylistically imitative, hence the use of the term giko monogatari in literary historiography and critical analysis. However, new manuscript discoveries and more favorable critical attention have gradually begun a process of recanonization of these works. An increasing salience of same-gender and same-sex social and sexual relation presented in these works makes them particularly amenable to analysis by the techniques of the theory of homosociality elaborated from the 1980s onward.
This paper will apply the theory of homosociality to some of the lesser- known long court fiction of the early Kamakura period which treat this theme, particularly the monogatari, be they complete or fragmentary, from which poems were culled for the Fûyôwakashû presented in 1271 and which is an indispensable work both as an index of canonization of these works in the thirteenth century, and for the fragmentary monogatari sometimes the only source for the extant fragments. Works examined will range from Ariake no Wakare through the later Wagami ni Tadoru Himegimi with its intense and fraught female same-sex relationships, to the Sumai Monogatari with its sumo-themed male same-sex romance.