About a thousand years ago, at a time when literary fashion in the courts of northern Europe had not progressed much beyond the coarse and bloody exploits of Beowulf, in another court a Japanese lady made notes for a startlingly different kind of book. Instead of mead halls and swashbuckling warriors, Sei Shōnagon focused upon such delicate things as the exact colour of a silk robe, the sound of raindrops at night when one is expecting a lover, the accuracy of a quotation from a poem – upon trivia, in fact. Yet the book she assembled from these scraps of sensibility is by any standards a triumph, as a vivid portrait of a person and of an almost unimaginably civilized society. It is also an unexpected pleasure to read.
Why this should be so is not immediately obvious. The Pillow Book is neither a novel nor a formally organized group of essays; it deals with palace life as narrowly constrained and remote to us as something out of science fiction; and many of the author’s basic attitudes can be understood only by recourse to footnotes. Relatively few readers, I’d guess, are dying to learn about Tendai Buddhism or the practice of tooth blackening. What’s amazing is that in spite of all this, it is impossible not to be caught up in the book’s charm and in the humour – sometimes unconscious, sometimes thoroughly black – that informs it. It is hard to think of anyone short of Proust or Montaigne who offers a more precise and entertaining picture of themselves.
Not a great deal is known about Sei Shōnagon, not even her name. Sei refers to her family; Shōnagon means simply ‘Minor Counsellor’ which was her title as one of the women-in-waiting to the Empress Sadako. She was born in about ad 965; she may have been briefly married; she may have had a son. Otherwise what we know is what she says about herself in The Pillow Book<
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Subscribe now or Sign inAbout a thousand years ago, at a time when literary fashion in the courts of northern Europe had not progressed much beyond the coarse and bloody exploits of Beowulf, in another court a Japanese lady made notes for a startlingly different kind of book. Instead of mead halls and swashbuckling warriors, Sei Shōnagon focused upon such delicate things as the exact colour of a silk robe, the sound of raindrops at night when one is expecting a lover, the accuracy of a quotation from a poem – upon trivia, in fact. Yet the book she assembled from these scraps of sensibility is by any standards a triumph, as a vivid portrait of a person and of an almost unimaginably civilized society. It is also an unexpected pleasure to read.
Why this should be so is not immediately obvious. The Pillow Book is neither a novel nor a formally organized group of essays; it deals with palace life as narrowly constrained and remote to us as something out of science fiction; and many of the author’s basic attitudes can be understood only by recourse to footnotes. Relatively few readers, I’d guess, are dying to learn about Tendai Buddhism or the practice of tooth blackening. What’s amazing is that in spite of all this, it is impossible not to be caught up in the book’s charm and in the humour – sometimes unconscious, sometimes thoroughly black – that informs it. It is hard to think of anyone short of Proust or Montaigne who offers a more precise and entertaining picture of themselves. Not a great deal is known about Sei Shōnagon, not even her name. Sei refers to her family; Shōnagon means simply ‘Minor Counsellor’ which was her title as one of the women-in-waiting to the Empress Sadako. She was born in about ad 965; she may have been briefly married; she may have had a son. Otherwise what we know is what she says about herself in The Pillow Book. Her contemporary and fellow writer Murasaki Shikibu, author of the huge (and wonderful) novel The Tale of Genji (see SF, No. 22), didn’t like her much, commenting on her ‘extraordinary air of self satisfaction’ and declaring that she wasn’t nearly as good at Chinese poetry as she claimed to be. Still, as Sei’s skilled translator Ivan Morris remarks, the two women were very different. Where Murasaki seems to have been timid and something of a prude, Sei was anything but. To judge from her own accounts of entertaining male visitors under potentially compromising conditions, she was about as near to being a free spirit as you could expect to find in such severely controlled circumstances. She delighted in repartee, in games and contests, in taking up challenges. She delighted in jokes, in beautiful men, in plants and birds and insects. Indeed, if there is any one aspect that makes The Pillow Book memorable, it is the author’s sense of delight. And it’s infectious. Sei explains that she got the idea for her book when one of the lords in the palace gave her a batch of empty notebooks and she set about filling them with ‘odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material’. The result may be shapeless – the book has no discernible structure – and from time to time her entries can be meaningless to anyone other than Sei herself (as when she lists the names of bridges, or villages, or wells). But far more often her emotional involvement is so strong and beautifully conveyed that what might in other hands be inconsequential explodes into a small epiphany. It is as if she found a way to show how trivia lies right at the heart of life, moving, funny, occasionally even wise. A favourite gambit is to compile Rorschach-like lists of things that amuse, pique or fascinate her. Admittedly a good many are, you might say, culture-bound (one entry in a list of Adorable Things is ‘an urn containing relics of some holy person’) but others are splendid: Frightening Things (‘A place where there has been a fire’); Things that Seem Better at Night than in the Daytime (‘The lustre of dark red, glossed silk, a woman who has a drawn forehead but beautiful hair, an ugly person with an agreeable nature, the sound of a waterfall’). There are dozens of these lists. My favourite is Things that Recall the Past but Serve No Useful Function. There is nothing particularly gentle or amiable about Sei Shōnagon. Her vignettes and anecdotes of court life make it abundantly clear that she was both tough as nails and a natural-born Tory who, like the rest of the aristocracy, had a hyper-developed sense of status and privilege. ‘Everything about well-born people delights me,’ she writes, and she lists ‘poor people, who have a vulgar side to their nature’ under the heading People Who Irritate Others. In The World of the Shining Prince, a kind of companion to The Tale of Genji and an enlightening background source for The Pillow Book too, Ivan Morris points out that aristocrats of the Heian period (782–1185) were radically disdainful of the labouring hordes who paid for their elegancies, regarding them as something less than human. Sei was no different. In one of the more shocking passages she describes handing a weeping illiterate beggar a poem instead of the money he expected, and laughing about it afterwards. To her, as to the few thousand other members of the upper classes, the one thing that mattered above all was good taste. Taste came into everything. With so little to do, the Heian court concentrated on getting matters exactly right – in dress, poetry, calligraphy and all the other arts. The tiniest error could bring obloquy, the neatest gesture in approved style admiration, praise or more. A gentleman might well decide against taking on a potential lover because her handwriting was not up to scratch; a fine hand, Morris remarks, ‘came close to being regarded as a moral virtue’. Sei frequently comments disparagingly on the lapses in taste of her fellow court inmates – the lady who chooses a slightly off shade for one of the twelve layers of silk in her robes, the gentleman who fails to send his morning-after letter promptly or, even worse, writes it on the wrong sort of paper. Several translations of The Pillow Book exist, including a relatively new one by Meredith McKinney published by Penguin, and a partial text translated by the great Orientalist Arthur Waley in 1928. For several reasons I prefer the version by Ivan Morris, first published with an accompanying volume of detailed notes in 1967. For one thing, I knew him in New York and published one of his books – a puzzle book, oddly enough. For another, I enjoy pedantry, and in this case Morris’s dazzlingly learned notes have the added charm of being extremely useful for an understanding of Heian life. Most of all, Morris is a fluent and witty writer who catches as well as anyone can the spirit of Sei’s style and character. Medieval Japanese must be one of the most challenging of all languages to translate, lacking as it does not only punctuation but often tenses, proper names, distinctions between affirmation and question, singular and plural, male and female. This hideous reluctance to be specific means that it is often left to the bewildered translator to paw through what Morris calls a ‘loose sequence of vague phrases’ before coming up finally with appropriate sentences in altogether too specific English. That Ivan Morris achieved this transition so successfully makes it all the sadder that he died in 1976 at the early age of 51, leaving behind not only Sei’s scrapbook for us to enjoy but also half a dozen other major works of scholarship and translation. I’m certain he would have given us many more.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 29 © Charles Elliott 2011
About the contributor
Charles Elliott is a retired senior editor for Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. with an interest in Chinese and Japanese as well as an unconscionable number of other things.