"Selling Songs and Smiles explores female sexual entertainment ("songs and smiles") during Japan's Heian and Kamakura periods, examining the gradual construction of a transgressive identity ("prostitute") for women engaged in the sex trade. Over some four hundred years, the character and public image of sexual entertainment was shaped by growing restrictions on female sexual activity and increasingly negative views of the female body - themselves the result of socioeconomic change in society at large. Using essays, diaries, legal documents, stories, and illustrated stories, this work unravels social attitudes toward female sexual entertainers and examines changes in their trade and the treatment they received at the hands of the court, the bakufu, and religious institutions."--BOOK JACKET.