The Beau and the Bodhisattva: Desire, Gender, and the Sacred in Medieval Illustrated Scrolls

This paper examines Aki no yo no naga monogatari (“A Long Tale for an Autumn Night”), a late medieval narrative that recounts the tragic relationship between a Tendai monk and a youthful monastic acolyte (chigo). Despite it’s the sophistication and complex visual program in the illustrated scrolls preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the work has received limited attention. The paper argues that the work deploys the body of the chigo as a medium through which notions of gender, desire, and religious meaning are articulated. The chigo is a liminal figure whose feminized beauty—marked through tonsorial, sartorial, and physical semiotics—renders his body both an object of attraction and a divine presence. The narrative further associates him with the natural envinronment, and with Ishiyama Kannon, an androgynous being. The paper will show that Aki no yo is important for understanding conceptions of the body in medieval Japanese religion.