Rich historical records from pre-modern Japan allow us to imagine ‘sexuality’ despite the absence of an explicit lexicon referring to it. The chapter examines three systems of thought: the Kami (Deities) Way, Mahayana Buddhism, and Confucianism. The Kami Way was the native cult and the spiritual foundation for Japan’s first state. Inscribed in its texts such as the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters, 712 CE) are vivid descriptions of deities’ bodies and performances steeped in symbolic meanings. Buddhism’s treatment of sexuality varied as widely as its diverse offerings of doctrines and practices. At least for the priestly figures, however, it denounced desire for and intercourse with women but affirmed sex with men. Confucianism, which arrived from the continent alongside Buddhism, taught social order and disapproved of all human relations, including sexual ones, that threatened the stable moral order and the gender hierarchy. The three systems of thought operated symbiotically, and reflected and shaped social rules, norms, and power relations of a given historical moment. Mostly more celebratory than condemning of the sexual body, pre-modern sources have no vocabulary for virginity as a boundary to be guarded or conquered, nor a body-altering institution such as the castration of eunuchs.

Laura Perry argues that Plath’s concerns with purity and cleanliness take the form of a poetics of hygiene. This poetics engages in conversation with a transatlantic discourse evident in post-war advertisements and government publications that trafficked in mid-century anxieties about biological containment, sexual purity and interracial contact. Perry shows how Plath links hygiene to gender, geopolitics, and poetic form throughout her writings. She reframes Plath’s search for transcendental purity by showing how this purity is embodied and historically located.