I have of late been feeling the itch to revisit works of Japanese literature that I was supposed to have properly read as a student of Japanese Literature in college, but mostly just scanned—if I even did that much. I wanted to start off with one that I remember actually enjoying the parts of it that I did read, with the hope that perhaps with a revisit in my older and wiser state of mind it would spark my motivation to continue this endeavor and read more. So I have picked up and begun to go through The Pillow Book, by Sei Shōnagon.
Sei Shōnagon was a court lady in service to Japan’s Empress Teishi right around the end of the first millennium, during a period of the country’s history known as the Heian Period. The Heian Period was something of a renaissance era for Japan, when the country was largely at peace and the royal court flourished, giving rise to a wealth of scholarship and artistry among the upper class. It was also, in fact, the first era of Japanese history in which the capital was located in Kyoto—the Heian Era is defined as having begun when the Emperor Kammu relocated the imperial capital to Kyoto, which was then referred to as “Heian-Kyo,” from where it was previously, further to the South.
The Pillow Book itself is considered one of the most important works in the history of Japanese literature, along with the more well-known Tale of Genji (the author of which was, incidentally, a contemporary and a rival of sorts to Sei Shōnagon). Unlike Genji, though, The Pillow Book is not a work of fiction—at least, not so far as we know—but rather a journal of thoughts and anecdotes from the life and mind of Sei herself. She tells some narrative stories from her life as a member of the imperial court, she gives her opinion about various things (e.g. “A priest who gives a sermon should be handsome”), and most iconically: she presents lists on myriad topics ranging from the very straightforward (e.g. types of birds and trees, markets in the area, wind instruments) to the more abstract and sometimes weirdly specific (e.g. “Things that make the heart lurch with anxiety,” “Things that make you feel nostalgic”). Most often, actually, she will weave all of those together, starting perhaps with a list but then seamlessly launching into an anecdote which then leads her to make a point about a particular opinion she holds.
I indeed enjoyed reading the parts of The Pillow Book that I read when I was a student, but it certainly takes on a new meaning to me now. Not only am I just an older and more intellectually curious person now than I was at 20 years old, but here I am living in the very city that this book was written in, over 1000 years later. To read Sei Shōnagon’s words and realize that she walked (or more likely was carried) through the very streets that I’m walking, and experienced the same views of the sky and mountains as me is truly awe-inspiring. It’s as close as I will ever get to experiencing time travel.
What is also amazing about it is how strongly you get a sense of her personality when you read it. It’s so easy to think of historical figures as flat, 2-dimensional characters—and of classical literature, for that matter, as very stilted and impenetrable. The Pillow Book, however, is absolutely drenched with charisma. Take the example that I gave above of how a sermon-giving priest ought to be handsome, and follow where she goes with that idea:
“A priest who gives a sermon should be handsome. After all, you’re most aware of the profundity of his teaching if you’re gazing at his face as he speaks. If your eyes drift elsewhere you tend to forget what you’ve just heard, so an unattractive face has the effect of making you feel quite sinful. But I’ll write no further on this subject. I may have written glibly enough about sinful matters of this sort in my younger days, but at my age the idea of sin has become quite frightening.” (30)
And I love how unapologetically blunt she can be towards those she dislikes, like when she wrote: “It’s terribly depressing to discover some quite worthless person blithely reciting a poem that you yourself had particularly liked and carefully copied down in a notebook.” (289) Or how in her list of “Infuriating things,” she includes: “A very ordinary person, who beams inanely as she prattles on and on.” (25) With an attitude like that, you could easily imagine her as a sassy social media personality in the present day.
Of course, I realize that a certain degree of that is in thanks to the translation. Japanese students—all of whom must study The Pillow Book in high school—read it in its original text as part of their studies of Classical Japanese language. A comparison that often gets made is that it’s akin to reading Shakespeare for an American student, but I would argue that it’s actually a bit closer to trying to read Virgil’s “Aeneid” in its original Latin. Classical Japanese does share many similarities with the modern-day vernacular on the surface, but the grammar is so complex and wildly different from today’s usage that the two could easily be regarded as totally different languages. I actually had to study Classical Japanese as part of my major in university, and, well, let’s just say I wouldn’t recommend that course of study to anyone else.
That’s why I’m grateful to the work of the translator, and the particular version I am reading was translated by Meredith McKinney. McKinney wrote of The Pillow Book:
“Unlike many journals, and unlike the diaries of other court ladies of the period, Sei does not indulge in any soul-searching. It’s the world she’s interested in, and her focus is what does and doesn’t delight one about the world. The directness and intimacy of voice, the lack of a diarist’s self-absorption, and the assumption that the delight she speaks of will be understood and shared by an unspecified ‘you,’ move the work far in the direction of a kind of conversation with the reader. Journal writing can tend to a literary style and tone, but in most of The Pillow Book Sei is not attempting to be literary. She is engaging you, face to face across the centuries, assuming your familiarity with her and her world, compelling you to nod and smile. She is talking to you, with the full force of her forceful and engaging personality.” (Translating a Classic, Kyoto Journal, 2011)
McKinney’s choice to engage with that conversational style in her translation is what makes it feel so relevant and fresh. Japanese students usually end up hating The Pillow Book—or at best feeling indifferent towards it—because they associate it with the drudgery of studying Classical Japanese, but if they could read it the way I am, I bet more of them would grow to love it. Here’s another excerpt from The Pillow Book that feels like something Carrie Bradshaw would have written had she been alive a millennium ago:
“It’s delightful to see someone who’s a great ladies’ man, and is pursuing numerous love affairs, arriving home at dawn from who knows what night-time tryst. Sleepy though you can see he feels, he nevertheless sits down and draws the inkstone up to write his next-morning letter to her. See how carefully he grinds the ink to a fine consistency, and how tenderly he bends to the task of writing, not merely dashing off whatever springs to mind but putting himself heart and soul into what he writes.” (181)
This could just-as-easily be the transcript of a TikTok sketch in which we see someone doing the ‘walk of shame’ and then taking out their phone and wracking their brain to construct the perfect follow-up text message to the lover they just left.
Although McKinney wrote in the quote above that Sei is not attempting to be literary most of the time, she certainly was very well-educated, and thanks to that she could produce some movingly beautiful prose. The most famous passage for Japanese people, actually (again, because they all had to study this part), would be the opening section, in which Sei chooses the moments of a day that perfectly exemplify each season. It’s gorgeous, and something worth absorbing into the pores of your mind, so I will include it here in its entirety:
“In spring, the dawn—when the slowly paling mountain rim is tinged with red, and wisps of faintly crimson-purple cloud float in the sky.
In summer, the night—moonlit nights, of course, but also at the dark of the moon, it’s beautiful when fireflies are dancing everywhere in a mazy flight. And it’s delightful too to see just one or two fly through the darkness, glowing softly. Rain falling on a summer night is also lovely.
In autumn, the evening—the blazing sun has sunk very close to the mountain rim, and now even the crows, in threes and fours or twos and threes, hurrying to their roost, are a moving sight. Still more enchanting is the sight of a string of wild geese in the distant sky, very tiny. And oh how inexpressible, when the sun has sunk, to hear in the growing darkness the wind, and the song of autumn insects.
In winter, the early morning—if snow is falling, of course, it’s unutterably delightful, but it’s perfect too if there’s a pure white frost, or even just when it’s very cold, and they hasten to build up the fires in the braziers and carry in fresh charcoal. But it’s unpleasant, as the day draws on and the air grows warmer, how the brazier fire dies down to white ash.” (1)
If you’re curious, you can listen to a reading of the passage in its original Japanese on YouTube (here). Those with familiarity with the language might notice that one word appears multiple times throughout the passage: okashi (をかし). Like many Japanese words—especially ancient ones—okashi does not translate perfectly into a single definition in English. Even its modern-day derivative word, okashii, is one that has a vast range of meanings. A quick glance at my contemporary Japanese-English dictionary may be all the evidence you need; where most entries have just two to five lines to translate a word and give a usage example, okashii requires an entire table, followed by a huge range of usage examples that fill the entire following page.
So what does okashi mean, then, in the world of Sei Shōnagon? “Perhaps the best English translation is… ‘amusing’: that which entertains, intrigues, delights, pleases and beguiles,” writes the translator McKinney in her introduction.
“Since ‘amusing’ is now a rather chilly and old-fashioned word, however, I have chosen the more spirited ‘delightful’ in my translation. English will tolerate far less repetition than classical Japanese, so I have frequently substituted other words… But even so, the reader may notice that ‘delightful’ occurs with great regularity; this is deliberate, since it is important to convey something of the nature of this crucial word’s constant, central presence in the work.” (p. xxii)
Nor is it a coincidence that Sei herself used the word so frequently in the original text. Rather, okashi is a pillar of the core aesthetic and sensibility that permeates through the arts of the Heian Era. It’s such a central concept that the word even has its own Japanese Wikipedia page. McKinney continues in her introduction:
“There can be no question that when Sei Shōnagon declared an experience or thing to be okashi it was a response of genuine feeling, but she did so knowing that her readers would understand precisely what she meant, and smile in agreement… It is in essence a kind of aesthetic response, one that can be cultivated and honed, which delights itself by its awareness of the frisson of pleasure that an object or moment produces, and whose pleasure is compounded by the knowledge that it would be shared by others of cultured sensibility. Sei Shōnagon was writing not only for but, in an important sense, on behalf of her audience at court as she noted, described and discussed the myriad things that engaged her interest, and the okashi sensibility is the unifying theme behind her jumble of apparently random jottings. She does indeed epitomize the sensibility of Teishi’s court, and in documenting her own responses to the world she was producing a kind of exposition of that sensibility… Even where the word itself is absent from what she writes, we feel its presence as the constant tenor, as much in her discussion of what fails to delight as in the record of what does.” (pp. xxii-xxiii)
Knowing this and reading through Sei Shōnagon’s accounts of things that delight her, I can’t help but think back on one of my favorite reads from last year: The Book of Delights, by the poet Ross Gay, in which he set out to write about something delightful every day for a year. I wrote about the wonderfully life-affirming essays in this book once before, but for the sake of comparison here, I will offer this short excerpt:
“…one of life’s true delights is casting about in bed, drifting in and out of dream, as the warm hand of the sun falls through the blinds, moving ever so slowly across your body. Or, as someone else’s hand (or your own) moves ever so slowly (or quickly) across (or into) your body, the clouds drifting by in the puddles you have made for yourself, or your friend(s).” (43)
The more literature I read, the more I learn about what I like and don’t like. And I’m learning that it is these kinds of hyper-specific observations of shared universals that make for some of my favorite literature. I was talking with a friend about poetry a week ago, and he told me, “there’s a very important element of writing poetry that involves being aware of your own consciousness, which helps you focus in on the details of what you’re noticing. Allen Ginsberg said: ‘Observe what’s vivid, Notice what you notice.’” The truth is most of us are noticing the same things, but very few of us are paying attention, until our attention is brought to it.
That’s what I find so engrossing about The Pillow Book (I wonder if Ross Gay has read it). Sei Shōnagon’s observations show a keen attention to what is vivid, and she brings everything she notices to the forefront. And she notices a LOT! By describing it all so colorfully, she builds out her entire world on the page, to the point that while reading it I feel like I’m a part of it—a member of the Imperial Court, there in Heian-Kyo, over a thousand years ago, smiling with amusement as I read:
“It’s beautiful the way the water drops hang so thick and dripping on the garden plants after a night of rain in the ninth month, when the morning sun shines fresh and dazzling on them. Where the rain clings in the spider webs that hang in the open weave of a screening fence or draped on the eaves, it forms the most moving and beautiful strings of white pearly drops.
I also love the way, when the sun has risen higher, the bush clover, all bowed down beneath the weight of the drops, will shed its dew, and a branch will suddenly spring up though no hand has touched it. And I also find it fascinating that things like this can utterly fail to delight others.” (124)
How wonderfully ironic that her writing has proven her last statement there to be wholly untrue.