This book considers how music, musicality, and ideologies of musicality are working within the specific construction ofwakaon the theme ofmale lovein Kitamura Kigin'sIwatsutsuji (1676) and Ihara Saikaku'sNanshoku Åkagami(1687) by using a modified generative theory of music. This modified theory seeks to get at the interdependent meanings that may exist among the music, image, and the text of thewakain question. In all, this study guides the reader through fivewakaon the theme ofmale loveand demonstrates not only how eachwakais inherently musical but how the image and text may interdependently relate to the ways in which premodern Japanese song poets may not only have thought in and with sound but may have also utilized a diverse array of musical gestures to construct new objects of knowledge. In the case of this study, these new objects of knowledge seem to have aided in situating a changing musicopoetics that aligned with changing constructions of male desire.