AUTHOR: SEI SHONAGON
DATE: C. 1002
The Pillow Book is a collection of writings by Sei Shonagon, a member of the court of Empress Consort Teishi at the end of the tenth and beginning of the eleventh centuries. Its mixture of diary-style entries, personal musings and observations, and numerous lists provide us with a unique insight into Japanese courtly life at the time. It is the original, and finest, example of a work in the so-called zuihitsu style – a genre in which informal and often unconnected literary fragments are brought together in an ad hoc fashion, usually inspired by the author’s personal experience and surroundings. But The Pillow Book has a perhaps even more important status for giving us a glimpse of the unguarded thoughts and feelings of a woman living in a period from which very few female voices reach us at all – let alone one expressed with such joyous freedom.
Of Sei Shonagon, we know very little – not even her real name. The moniker by which we know her would have been a courtly nickname. A shonagon was a relatively minor counsellor at the imperial palace, and her title suggests that she was probably married to such a figure. It is likely that she was married at least twice. She herself was born around 965 into a family of courtiers who never attained the highest level of importance and who often struggled with financial difficulties. However, they were seemingly renowned as a literary family, with Sei Shonagon’s purported father and her grandfather being famous poets.
According to court records and the few bits of biographical information that can be gleaned from her writings, Shonagon became a lady-in-waiting to Empress Sadako around 994. She seemingly felt self-conscious and out of place, choosing to hide herself and absorbing the goings-on of the court from a safe distance. ‘When I first went into waiting at Her Majesty’s Court,’ she wrote, ‘so many different things embarrassed me that I could not even reckon them up and I was always on the verge of tears. As a result I tried to avoid appearing before the Empress except at night, and even then I stayed hidden behind a three-foot curtain of state.’ But she nonetheless quickly won the favour of the empress, who apparently enjoyed her wit and wisdom. By Shonagon’s own estimation, she was good at gossip and chatter, all delivered in a pleasing voice. And it was not long before she was transferring her thoughts and observations to paper – an expensive resource supplied to her by the empress herself, who had come into possession of a bundle of notebooks that she didn’t know what to do with.
Not everyone was enamoured of her, however. Murasaki Shikibu was a rival at court, serving another Empress Consort, Shoshi (as well as being the author of The Tale of Genji, also featured in this book). She considered Shonagon as gifted but weighed down with self-satisfaction and a desire to set herself apart from others. She was, Shikibu also claimed, frivolous and given to allowing her emotions to get the better of her so that she was ‘bound to fall in people’s esteem’. When the emperor abdicated in 1011 and the empress lost some of her power, Shonagon certainly seems to have found herself well down the pecking order, with tradition suggesting she became a nun somewhere in the suburbs of the imperial city, seeing out her days in poverty.
Yet whatever the end of her life looked like, The Pillow Book has ensured her immortality. (A ‘pillow’ in this period was not the soft head-support that we think of today, but would have been a wooden construction, often equipped with a drawer in which a journal or other reading material could be stored.) In over three hundred or so entries of vastly different extent – some just a line, others running to several pages – Shonagon laid out a world, both external and internal, for her readers. We learn much, for instance, about the customs and mores of high society in the Heian age, the period that ran from 794 to 1185 and that saw the Japanese capital transfer from Tokyo to Kyoto. This was a golden age of indigenous Japanese culture, which was highly prized at court and reflected a waning of Chinese influence. The latter aspect particularly worked to Shonagon’s advantage. When she was writing, it was still customary for men to write using Chinese characters (signalling their high level of education), while women were free to write in their native Japanese (using a system called hiragana, in which symbols represented syllable sounds). Thus unshackled, female writers in Japan enjoyed a far greater freedom of expression and one that tended to attract a wider audience because of its better accessibility.
While Shonagon’s take on court life is fascinating, it is her personal reflections and her often highly entertaining lists that give the work a thoroughly modern feel. She always claimed that she had begun writing The Pillow Book for herself alone, and a sense of spontaneity and liberation shines through her prose. What she writes feels unencumbered by a need to please an audience, and the fact that she wrote to please herself in turn pleases us. At one point, for example, she ruminates about how a preacher ought to be good-looking, since he must keep his audience’s eyes focused on him as he speaks if they are properly to understand his worthy sentiments. Another time, she notes that ‘a good lover will behave as elegantly at dawn as at any other time’. Elsewhere, under the heading ‘Men Really Have Strange Emotions’, she decries those men who love ‘ugly’ women in a tone redolent of a modern-day internet chatroom.
In one memorable entry, she relates her fury when she made a pilgrimage to a Buddhist shrine, only to find a throng of ‘commoners’ had got there before her and were prostrating themselves. They looked like ‘basket worms … in their hideous clothes’, she vents, adding that she ‘really felt like pushing them all over sideways’. But she is not all vitriol. She tells, for example, the sad story of a dog almost beaten to death after attacking the empress’s cat, only to be allowed to return to the court where it received an imperial pardon and was rehabilitated by a group of sympathetic courtly ladies.
Despite her intended audience being herself, Shonagon’s writings soon found their way into wider circulation – even before the volume was complete. Writing near its end, she described how a court official had visited her at home one day before she had the chance to secrete the journal away. This man grabbed it, refusing to hand it back and taking it away with him, only returning it much later. ‘That, I imagine, is when it first began to circulate,’ she concludes. ‘As a matter of fact, I wrote down, in a spirit of fun and without help from anyone else, whatever happened to suggest itself to me.’ History can only be grateful that she did.
STILL MY BEATING HEART
There are well over a hundred and fifty of Shonagon’s famous lists in The Pillow Book, many of them idiosyncratic and enormous fun. Take, for example, ‘Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster’. These range from sparrows feeding their young, passing a place where babies are playing and sleeping in a room where fine incense has been burnt, to noticing that ‘one’s elegant Chinese mirror has become a little cloudy’ and seeing ‘a gentleman stop his carriage before one’s gate and instruct his attendants to announce his arrival’. Her romantic soul is evident too in the last entry on the list: ‘It is night and one is expecting a visitor. Suddenly one is startled by the sound of raindrops, which the wind blows against the shutters.’