Prince Genji was apparently among the few to resist the charms of those bands of young women who made a living by offering themselves. Upon seeing such a group at Sumiyoshi Shrine, the hero of the "The Tale of Genji" agreed that there were a number of courtiers who might find them interesting but that he was after bigger game and saw no advantage "to getting oneself in a casual affair with someone a bit inconstant."
This inconstancy was, of course, one of the conditions of the women's profession, but Genji, it will be noticed, did not dramatize or justify his position by using such words as "prostitute" or "whore." His objection was merely that these girls shared their charms with many men. (A strange objection, to be sure, given Genji's deserved reputation for sexual infidelity.)
His tolerance, if that is the term, for professional erotic entertainers was typical of his age. In Genji's Japan we are still in the beginning stages of defining and dealing with sexual transgression and female sexuality. During the next 400 years, from the mid-10th to the mid-14th centuries, the Heian through the Kamakura periods, sexual norms would be much changed.