This is true of Japan, though not of Judaeo-Christian and Islamic cultures, whose one God, the Cr... Japan's love affairs w

Their first offspring were islands; then came a profusion of gods and goddesses, one of whom was Amaterasu, the sun goddess. At one point, outraged by the depredations of her unruly brother the storm god, Amaterasu withdrew to "the rock cave of heaven." Darkness descended -- and might have proved everlasting, had a deity called the Dread Female of Heaven not had a saving inspiration. Reciting prayers, she danced a lewd dance, causing such rollicking laughter among the assembled gods and goddesses that Amaterasu could not resist peeking from her cave to see what was going on. Seized and hauled out, she shone once more upon the world, reanimating it and becoming, in the fullness of time, the ancestress of Japan's Imperial family. As for the storm god, his punishment was fitting: he was banished to the Land of Darkness.

Some say the court lady Murasaki Shikibu (973?-1025?) was thinking of Narihira when she conceived the hero of her "Tale of Genji." The world's first great novel explores literature's greatest theme -- love; but what are we to make of the erotic world it opens to our astonished gaze?

Sheer revulsion has been one response down the ages -- from a fragmentary 13th-century Japanese Buddhist text maliciously picturing the author suffering in hell "for leading people's hearts astray," to the 1949 fulminations of Scottish historian James Murdoch, damning the aristocracy of Heian Japan (794-1185) as "an ever-pullulating brood of greedy, needy, frivolous dilettanti -- as often as not foully licentious, utterly effeminate . . . but withal the polished exponents of high breeding and correct 'form' . . . "

"Foully licentious?" That draws smiles today when, sexually speaking, pretty much anything goes, and certainly so crude a description does scant justice to one of world history's most aesthetic civilizations -- and yet so utterly different is the Heian setting, so foreign to us are its standards of good and bad behavior, that Murdoch's distaste, though comic, is not altogether incomprehensible.

Genji's first true love is his stepmother. It is her alleged resemblance to the mother he lost in infancy that draws him so irresistibly. Their union produces a child who in later years, as the presumed son and heir of Genji's imperial father, ascends the throne. Physical resemblance, and the replacement of one love object by another based on it, are recurring themes throughout the tale, suggesting that our own views regarding the unique and immutable individuality of each person are not to be taken for granted.

Is sexual morality so indeterminate? Our own age says yes and behaves accordingly, disparaging restraint and, for the most part, withholding judgment. But one would think at least that the purely physical parameters of intimacy would be, however variegated, at least finite.

Heian mores challenge that assumption too. Sometimes, in "The Tale of Genji" and other literature of the period, the sexual preliminaries are so bewilderingly different from anything we know, that we can't help wondering if they lead to the familiar culmination. If Murdoch read Murasaki Shikibu's diary, the one passage in it that might have shocked him, at least in the sense of giving him pause, is the very opposite of foully licentious. "Unforgettably horrible," she writes, "is the naked body. It really does not have the slightest charm."

Nakedness never appears, nor is it even hinted at, in her tale. Clothing is voluminous, the women swathed in layer upon layer -- up to 12 -- of heavy, color-coordinated silk kimono robes. Add to that the unlighted gloom of even daytime indoor settings, the thick curtains screening (until breached) a maiden from her wooer, the absolute lack of personal privacy, the conventional restraints upon women's movement beyond the four walls of home ("Ghosts and girls are best unseen," went a popular proverb of the day), and you have an erotic picture strangely lacking in something so natural to us that its absence seems unnatural: visual stimulation.

Lovers are aroused instead by an exchange of vaguely suggestive poetry, the sight through a gap in the curtains of a disembodied kimono sleeve, a nuanced stroke of calligraphy on well-chosen, perfumed paper attached to an appropriate blossom -- in short, by provocations that would be utterly lost on most of us today. Not copulation but the subsequent sight, permissible at last, of the face of one's beloved is the climax of Heian courtship. A premature or illicit glimpse prefigures disaster, the cosmos turned upside down.

"Seeing," says Cambridge University Japan studies professor Richard Bowring in his study of the tale, "in Heian literature is always a form of possession" -- of the demonic variety.

"Sexual activity between couples," he wrote, "is part of yin and yang harmony, which is the primordial and sustaining energy of the cosmos." Moreover, "Man and woman make a pair; there are no grades of high and low." Sex is sacred. Lovers re-enact the divine creativity of Izanagi and Izanami. The act of love celebrates Japan's sexual origins.

Masuho's "mirror" reflected, of course, the mythical past, not the actual present. Men, women and the nation itself had long since fallen from the grace of innocent, unspoiled love. Foreign doctrines -- Chinese Confucianism, Indian Buddhism -- had come between the people and their native gods, with results that were plain for all to see. The natural equality of men and women had splintered. Confucian hierarchy identified man with heaven, woman with earth. Man ruled, woman obeyed. Sexual pleasure vacated the marriage bed for the government-licensed pleasure quarters.

"Women are messengers from hell," said a Buddhist sutra. Perhaps so -- but in the "floating world" of the pleasure quarters, if not at home, men were too dazzled and distracted to care.

The first licensed quarter was the Shimabara in Kyoto, built in 1589 on orders from Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the ruling warlord of the day. It became the model for the "politically backed institutional segregation of nonreproductive sex," as University of Kansas religious studies professor William Lindsey puts it. The Tokugawa shoguns of the Edo Period (1603-1867) designated 24 quarters throughout the country -- walled, moated, "glittering island[s] of style and panache," says Lindsey, "in the dreary, gray seas of Confucian social order."

"Once upon a time a hitherto unknown itch attacked Hyotaro, the Gourd Boy, and he began frequenting the pleasure houses of Shimabara." So we read in "Tales of the Floating World," written in 1666 by a samurai-turned-priest named Asai Ryoi. In the arms of courtesans, Hyotaro "became so intoxicated with joy as to think less of his own life than of dirt. And all the while he was being fawned on and flattered by the hired jesters . . . "

His elder brothers took him to task; he was squandering the family fortune. They gave him a stern talking-to: "By her nature, a courtesan is a woman who attends herself well, dresses up and adorns herself, and so is quite alluring . . . Her charming willowy tresses, her face lovely as a cherry blossom . . . And how lovely when she moves, swaying back and forth; truly she could easily be mistaken for the living incarnation of Amida Buddha! . . . And the thankfulness you feel just to hear the sound of her voice! What great priest could bestow on you words of enlightenment equal to this? . . . When compared with this creature, a man's wife can hardly seem more than a salted fish long past its prime!"

In 1872 there occurred an incident that profoundly embarrassed the new modernizing Meiji government. A Peruvian ship landed at Yokohama with 230 Chinese indentured laborers. When one of the laborers staged a dramatic escape bid, the government -- "eager," as Princeton University modern Japanese history professor Sheldon Garon remarks, "to demonstrate Japan's 'civilized' status to the Western powers, . . . detained the ship and ordered that the hapless passengers be returned to China. Peru's savvy minister to Japan protested. Because Japanese law permitted the sale of women and children into prostitution, he observed, traffic in human beings was perfectly legal. The Japanese court dismissed his claim, but the embarrassing nature of the incident persuaded an influential group of self-described 'enlightened' bureaucrats that the entire system of regulated prostitution should be eliminated."

That was not to happen until 1946. The number of licensed prostitutes peaked in 1916 at 54,049, Garon's research indicates, and remained, even as proliferating factories offered alternative employment, at around 50,000 well into the 1930s.

The system had energetic defenders. "To Japanese officials, "says Garon, "tightly regulated and segregated vice districts served as a 'breakwater' or 'public latrine,' protecting society and the 'daughters of good families' from foulness."

He quotes Prime Minister Hirobumi Ito explaining to an English reporter in 1896 that the Japanese prostitute (unlike, presumably, her Western counterpart) was motivated by the most exalted Confucian sentiment of all, filial piety -- "a lofty desire to help her poor parents or relations." In fact, no other motive would do for the Home Ministry, whose "standardized registration procedures," says Garon, "effectively screened out any woman who personally desired to be a prostitute."

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