A literary world is built of carefully wrought words and images. Each verbal image plays a more important role in the construction of a word-world in verse than in prose. This article will analyze the words of medieval popular songs in terms of literary, auditory, and visual images to show what made them fashionable and entertaining in popular culture.

Picture scrolls and illustrated books are a mixture of verbal and visual representations. Pictures and illustrations usually correspond with stories, but sometimes not. In some stories images are far more dominant than words, but in others the case is quite opposite. The editions of Saigyō-monogatari offer several patterns of such verbal and visual combinations. For example, some editions feature plenty of brightly colored images with a few brief passages. But there are few or no illustrations in other editions where visual images are often translated into words.

In medieval times there was a group of shrine shamans called “katabaya-miko” at Gion or Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto. The aim of this article is to reconstruct how they lived from illustrated historical documents. As the illustrations tell us vividly, the shamans, both female and male, were socially and economically independent because they earned good income from selling talismans and giving names to newborn babies.

Shinkei, a monk poet of the Muromachi Period, often used the forbidden word “aoshi” under the influence of Shōtetsu who experimented with taboo expressions. This article will outline the historical usage of forbidden words and then explore the poetical effect of “aoshi” in an opening stanza with the poet's own comment. In the comment the poet explains his attempt to depict a panoramic landscape with wind and water personified after the fashion of the Reizei School in the further refined style of the Kyōgoku School.

Shinzei or Fujiwara-no-Michinori was once engaged in training “gijo” female dancers at the “naikyō-bō” studio to revive feasts at court. Later he invited them to dance when he started a cult of Maitreya. The “naikyō-bō” dancers were often compared to nymphs dancing in paradise. So it is no coincidence that a similar image is found in the cult's mandala. Chōken, Shinzei's son, used the same image to describe the dancers of Itsukushima Shrine. Thus the figure of “gijo” performers as dancing nymphs came to be circulated among the aristocratic and religious spheres of medieval times.

There is an old script of the “shura” Noh play “Tomoakira” allegedly compiled by Zeami and his followers. It is not based on Genpei-seisui-ki, but it expands its side story into an adaptation of Heike-monogatari. As Zeami tells about the songs of Tomoakira, Tomomori, and his horse Inoueguro in Sarugaku-dangi, the mainstream Noh plays of the Heike Family are all based on Heike-monogatari. In this sense “Tomoakira” is a variant of this genre.