context: literature > Heian

Heian Literacy and Script

Literacy remained something largely confined to the aristocracy, expanding to the lower ranks of that class through Heian times, including provincial officials - also priests and monks. Later it reached the top of the emerging samurai class.

I guess literacy was never going to become widespread with the horribly long-winded approach of using Chinese characters to represent every syllable of Japanese. Somewhere in the 9th Century, hiragana and katakana were invented - this is sometimes credited to Kukai (aka Kobo Daisho, 774-834/5). He also wrote the first dictionary, the first book of literary theory (though actually there was a work called Kakyo Hyoshiki (Standard Poetic Forms) in 772 by Fujiwara no Hamanari, but this is very likely a copy of a Chinese original), as well as poetry and much more. Whether he invented kana is debatable, but he was a remarkable figure anyway.

The cursive hiragana was adopted by female aristocrats, and wrote stories. The first known fiction in kana is Taketori Monogatari, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, from c.900AD. It's also known as Princess of the Moon, and is science fiction with space travel. (It was made into a movie by Kon Ichikawa.) Stories stayed big: the Konjaku Monogatarishu, from the early 12th Century, contains over a thousand stories.

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