Back to the Future
Sei Shonagon (966-1025) was the gentlewoman and attendant to the Empress Teishi in the Heian (Kyoto) court. She has been overshadowed by the fellow gentlewoman and rival, Murasaki Shikibu, who served the successive Empress. Murasaki wrote what is acclaimed as the first novel, The Tale of Genji, and is admired for her melancholic style.
Critics praise Murasaki’s work and other Heian woman writers who express mono no aware, an aesthetic sensibility in which one responds to phenomena knowing they won’t last. While Sei Shonagon’s work is not devoid of that other traditional Japanese aesthetic, her experimental memoir The Pillow Book astounds in its spontaneity, its psychological clarity, and lack of plot. The Pillow Book is more valuable as a harbinger for modern and contemporary work in its colloquial tone, its appearance of a lack of artifice, and its sincere invitation to experience this other, strange, world, a courtly life more than a thousand years ago.
Back in the 990s, there was the following distinction: men typically wrote for the historical record and traditional courtly poetry in Chinese ideograms; women wrote romantic tales and diary (nikki) as a psychological record of experience. While many women in the court knew how to write in Chinese ideograms, the so-called “women’s writing” used the native Japanese hiragana syllabary.
In the long run, Japanese literature has favored the “feminine” personal, colloquial, and pleasing rather the “masculine” detailed, erudite, and artificial. It appears that in The Pillow Book, there was an attempt to make a romantic tale like Genji, but the author abandoned it. Like the twentieth century literary critics defending the shishosetsu (Japanese autobiographical fiction) as a sincere account of lived experience and attacking foreign novels as artificial constructions, Sei Shonagon favored an account of life and letting the reader enter that world through her words.
A Matter of Tone
Like many Japanese works, The Pillow Book has no plot. It belongs to the genre of zuihitsu, or random jottings, and is a mix of asides, diary entries, extended accounts, short stories, and essays. Furthermore, The Pillow Book deliberately excludes important information that could be used to construct a cohesive plot. A plot may have lost this book’s charm and shifting tone (from the petty to the ecumenical). But the power plays around the wife of the emperor by factions of the all-powerful Fujiwara clan and the fallout in terms of the individual lives (Empress Teishi and Sei Shonagon herself) would have made for high drama.
Instead of that grand narrative, Sei Shonagon’s concern is with the okashi, the startling, delightful, odd, lovely, and curious. Okashi is used to express wonder at what one encounters in the everyday. While using the romance, the boredom, the charm, and refinement of her position and the court as material, Sei Shonagon’s spontaneous use of allusion, darting from subject to subject, and keen senses, want us to view the marvels of her life in the light of a present encounter without a trailing recognition of its end.
One story has it that a careless attendant for the emperor’s cat tried to scare the cat from basking vulgarly in the sun by yelling at the cat and calling along the dog to scare the cat inside. The cat ran away terrified. The emperor found out and banished the dog to Dog Island and guards drove the poor animal out. They all heard howling throughout the night and thought they had found the dog dead. But then the next day, Sei Shonagon found the emperor’s dog who was alive and in court. The dog responded to her recognition with a bow and recalcitrant weeping. The emperor duly pardoned the dog and all was well after. The point of wonder at the end, and to which the story was leading, was: do dogs cry when shown such sympathy?
Sei Shonagon’s observational style appears in slice-of-life television shows, diaries, memoirs, and journalism. In favoring the personal and direct experience conveyed in the art of sincerity, she is not only like the writers of pure autobiographical literature, but like many Japanese authors and readers.