The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon is a fascinating collection of little chapters - thoughts and ideas and strings of categorised words;observations and jokes, poems and lists - written by a person believed to be called Sei Shonagon around the year 990. She served the Empress Teishi at the time as a gentlewoman in Japan.
The book doesn't have a strict narrative - instead it drifts in and out of dates and times and situations as though in a dream (this is in now way related to book's title, by the way) - at one point the author even tries to start a novel, but this is quickly abandoned. Aside from the historical interest - as you can imagine, the book is a rich source of utterly absorbing information on medieval Japan, and there are all sorts of controversies pertaining the authenticity of certain chapters etc., what with there being so many different versions of the book - what this book does for me is reinforce the belief and confidence in humanity. It's 1000 years old, yet the writing is punchy, witty and modern. This isn't due to the translation; Sei Shonagon wrote light-years head of her contemporaries. She reaches across time and holds your hand because she is just the same as we are now. She laughs at others' misfortune in unbelievably cruel ways, and in the next sentence she writes about a peasant she saw with an aching sense of empathy. One passage that sticks in my mind especially is of her description of a pretty young girl's hair sticking to her contoured face from the tears produced by the agony of toothache. All at once you are swept 1000 years into the past in complete heartbreak, the savage reality of that time almost making your own teeth sting.
Shonagon lived in a very different time, where class and social standing ruled the day, yet her humanity shines through this when her defences are down. She writes about the sound the lid of a kettle makes when it closes and at how she delights in the way a light tree branch springs upwards once the required amount of morning dew has burned away in the early afternoon sun. She writes about the expression in a man's eyes when he leaves her bed in the morning and she knows she won't see him again. She writes about how young adults are ruining the language by dropping certain letters. She discusses her fears at her new job and, eventually, how she quickly settled in. She is introverted and extroverted at the same time, confused, happy and sad. She is completely real and it's very easy to forget just how old this text is.
Another thing that strikes is the description of the clothes. I think that we're used to food being a huge indicator of culture and time. In Japan it was clothes, and Shonagon takes a lot of time to describe the colours, shapes and patterns on clothes. She writes with complete passion about how it's unseemly to wear certain shades of autumn green at certain times of the day and the way a sleeve will roll up slightly, revealing a gorgeous colour of some sort. It's too early in the morning for me to think of any examples, but you can almost taste the colours as she writes about them. It's so charming to read somebody writing with such strength of passion - and of course her tastes just sound scrumptious.
Nobody knows what happened to her once she left service. Some say she went on to lead a life every bit as exciting as the one she details in the book, whereas one story speaks of her old and decrepit and bitter. I don't know which one is more romantic to me.
There were some problems with my translation, in that it suffered from the translator forgetting that she isn't some superwoman genius above the rest of us - a common problem I find with old Japanese fiction. I'll explain: the notes and appendices are extensive, but too much so; words that describe the shape of a roof or a certain cloth will be starred and noted, fine. Words like 'mat' and 'room' do not need to be explained to us. Russian books do not suffer from this patronising state - it's just Japanese fiction in my experience. A typical side-effect of the fanboyism an interest in that culture seems to fuel (and I write this as a bit of a J-dork)? I don't but it's annoying.
I challenge anybody to read this and not fall in love with Sei Shonagon.
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