The seeds of this book were planted when I was working on my first book, Writing Margins. I found that I was repeatedly encountering texts that rendered states of wandering as a marginalizing feature for figures such as late Heian professional female entertainers, even when other texts suggested that such women may not have wandered much at all. This ascribed identity between marginality and movement led me to think about the ways in which motion should be understood less as a descrip- tive state of being than as an explicit, purposeful trope.