combative spirit, her writing is free of the whining, querulous tone that often marks the work of her female contemporaries when they describe their relations with men.
In a section of The Pillow Book that can be dated about 994 Shōnagon writes:
One day Lord Korechika, the Minister of the Centre, brought the Empress a bundle of notebooks. ‘What shall we do with them?’ Her Majesty asked me. ‘The Emperor has already made arrangements for copying the “Records of the Historian”.’
‘Let me make them into a pillow,’ I said.
‘Very well,’ said Her Majesty. ‘You may have them.’
I now had a vast quantity of paper at my disposal, and I set about filling the notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material. On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects.
It is uncertain whether this passage is authentic; yet no doubt Shōnagon started her book while still serving in the Court whose life she describes with such minute detail. We know that some of the sections were written many years later than the events they record, and the work was not completed until well after Shōnagon’s retirement following the Empress’s death in 1000.
Though this is the only collection of its type to have survived from the Heian period, it is possible that many others were written. Of the dozen or so works of prose fiction she lists in her book only one has come down to us; Heian miscellanies like The Pillow Book may have had an equally poor rate of survival. The title, Makura no Sōshi (‘notes of the pillow’), whether or not Shōnagon actually used it herself, was probably a generic term to describe a type of informal book of notes which men and women composed when they retired to their rooms in the evening and which they kept near their sleeping place, possibly in the drawers of their wooden pillows, so that they might record stray impressions. This form of belles-lettres appears to have been indigenous to Japan. The Pillow Book is the precursor of a typically Japanese genre known as zuihitsu (‘occasional writings’, ‘random notes’) which has lasted until the present day and which includes some of the most valued works in the country’s literature.
Apart from the 164 lists, which are perhaps its most striking feature, Shōnagon’s collection contains nature descriptions, diary entries, character sketches, and anecdotes, and provides such a detailed picture of upper-class Heian life that Arthur Waley has described it as ‘the most important document of the period that we possess’. Its title, suggesting something rather light and casual, belies the length and variety of the book. The main edition that I have followed has 1,098 closely printed pages; admittedly much of it consists of annotation and commentary, but even the less encumbered texts consist of several hundred pages.
The arrangement of the book in the main versions that we know is desultory and confusing. The datable sections are not in chronological order, and the lists have been placed with little attempt at logical sequence. It is of course possible that the book Shōnagon actually wrote may have been organized in an entirely different way from the existing texts. The earliest extant manuscripts of The Pillow Book were produced some 500 years after she wrote, and there was no printed version until the seventeenth century. During the hundreds of intervening years scholars and scribes freely edited the manuscripts that came into their hands, often moving passages from one part of the book to another, incorporating glosses into the body of the text, omitting words or sentences they believed to be spurious; and they made mistakes in copying. All this has led to considerable differences among the texts, sometimes involving an almost total rearrangement of the sections.
The eminent classicist, Professor Ikeda Kikan, established four main textual traditions: (i) Den Nōin Hōski Shojihon (the earliest extant copy is the sixteenth-century Sanjōnishikebon); the Shunsho Shōhon version, on which Kaneko Motoomi’s monumental text is based, was produced by Kitamura Kigin in 1674, (ii) Antei Ninen Okugakibon (usually known as the Sankanbon; the earliest extant copy is dated 1475), (iii) Maedabon (this is the oldest extant version of The Pillow Book, the earliest manuscript dating from the mid thirteenth century), (iv) Sakaibon (earliest copy: 1570). Of these traditions (i) and (ii) are usually described as zassanteki (‘miscellaneous’, ‘mixed’), (iii) and (iv) as bunruiteki (‘classified’, ‘grouped’). My own translation is based on (i) and (ii); in (iii) and (iv) Shōnagon’s sections on nature, people, things, etc. are rearranged under topic headings.
The original text of The Pillow Book had disappeared well before the end of the Heian period, and by the beginning of the Kamakura period (twelfth century) numerous variants were already in circulation. Except in the unlikely event that a Heian manuscript of The Pillow Book is discovered, we shall never be sure which version is closest to the original My own impression is that the book actually written by Shōnagon was at least as unsystematic and disordered as the Shunsho Shōhon and Sangenbon texts. Much depends on whether Shōnagon was, as she protests, writing only for herself, or whether she had other readers in mind. It is possible that The Pillow Book was begun casually as a sort of private notebook cum diary (the numerous lists of place-names can hardly have been intended for anyone but herself); according to this theory, it was only after 996, when its existence became known at Court, that it developed into a more deliberate and literary work. In this case Shōnagon may herself have rearranged some of the sections in her book in order to make it more coherent and readable.
The structural confusion of The Pillow Book is generally regarded as its main stylistic weakness; yet surely part of its charm lies precisely in its rather bizarre, haphazard arrangement in which a list of ‘awkward things’, for example, is followed by an account of the Emperor’s return from a shrine, after which comes a totally unrelated incident about the Chancellor that occurred a year, or two earlier and then a short, lyrical description of the dew on a clear autumn morning.
About the extraordinary beauty and evocative power of Shōnagon’s language Japanese readers have always agreed. School-children are still introduced to The Pillow Book as a model of linguistic purity; for, apart from proper names, titles, and quotations, there is hardly a single Chinese word or locution in the entire book. The language, rhythmic, quick-moving, varied, and compressed, is far clearer than that of The Tale of Genji with its long sentences and huge networks of dependent clauses; for this reason many Japanese consider Shōnagon’s book to be a greater work of literature. In his scintillating volume, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, which contains translated extracts totalling about a quarter of the original work, Arthur Waley says:
As a writer she is incomparably the best poet of her time, a fact which is apparent only in her prose and not at all in the conventional uta [31-syllable poems] for which she is also famous. Passages such as that about the stormy lake or the few lines about crossing a moonlit river show a beauty of phrasing that Murasaki, a much more deliberate writer, certainly never surpassed.
It is true that Shōnagon revels in repeating certain words and phrases. Adjectives like okashi (‘charming’) and medetashi (‘splendid’) recur in nearly every sentence, almost invariably accompanied by the ubiquitous and virtually meaningless adverb ito (‘very’); and often a single word will reappear in a sentence with a somewhat different meaning. This love of repetition, which most Western readers are bound to find tiresome, cannot simply be explained by the paucity of adjectives and adverbs in classical Japanese. In both Chinese and Japanese literature repetition was a deliberate stylistic device; and even as careful a craftsman as Murasaki Shikibu uses the same adjective again and again in consecutive sentences. In the writing of Sei Shōnagon the reiteration of a word like okashi or a phrase like ito medetashi often serves as a sort of poetic refrain, giving a particular rhythm or mood to a passage rather than contributing
