In the Heian period, poetry was a common form of communication–either on its own or attached to letters. High-ranking people were expected to memorize large numbers of poems, and were appraised for their ability to recognize and come up with poems on the spot, both in written and spoken conversation, formal and informal occasions. Skill in poetry could even translate into better political positions! Imagine that–or better yet, what if there was a society that did the same for drawing? If people memorized pictures as children and drew constantly through their lives, what kind of drawing skill would be created, uncovered? It's unfortunate drawing has never achieved the kind of widespread practice that language has, either in the aristocracy or among the masses.

Indeed, comparing drawing to language, which it was intimate with during the pictographic writing stage, or drawing to science, which it was close to during the Renaissance, one get the impression that drawing is lagging behind–or more kindly, that it's time possibly hasn't yet come. Now going back to the Heian period.

On the fiction front, in the latter half of the tenth century we see the development of prose in Japanese. Priorly, Japanese was written in poem form and any prose was written in Chinese, but this changed, notably with the development of the woman's diary. Coming, somewhat, out of the tradition of the man's diary, which mostly marked dates, weather and events in court, the woman's diary tradition eschewed that kind of content and focused strongly on the author's personal experience: her emotions, thoughts. Notably, the Kagerō diary provided a model for these diaries. It was written in the 970s as a response to fiction the author had read, and she complains about how stories had misrepresented how her life would turn out. The diary starts out mostly in poetry, but following the death of the author's mother, the author finds the limited syllable count and poetic language insufficient to express her feelings, and prose plays a larger and larger part.

Imagine a language that could only write in poetry: how constraining! Maybe that's the state drawing is currently stuck in. It's certain that this drawing is constrained.