Review: The Pillow Book

The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I set to work with this boundless pile of paper to fill it to the last sheet with all manner of odd things, so no doubt there’s much in these pages that make no sense.

This is an utterly delightful book. Indeed, it is fair to say that this is a book about delight in all its manifold forms.

This is all the more remarkable given what we know about the author’s life. Sei Shōnagon was a kind of lady-in-waiting for the Empress Teishi. However, not long after her marriage, Teishi was supplanted by another Empress, Shōshi (whose own lady-in-waiting, Murasaki, wrote the classic Tale of Genji), and soon thereafter died in childbirth at the age of 23. Thus, Shōnagon’s life in the capital was tense, humiliating, and short-lived. It is not even rightly known what became of Shōnagon after Teishi’s death. Even the date of her death is in doubt.

One might expect the writings of such a person to be tinged by melancholy or motivated by revenge. What we have, instead, is an elegant series of reminiscences and observations about the beauty of her world. Shōnagon appears to have loved court life—the ceremony, the pomp, the artificiality, the formality, the refinement, the elegance—in short, everything. Her taste for her role in court is striking to the modern reader, as her life cannot but appear incredibly confined to us. She spends all her time literally cordoned off, separated from the men by a screen, and is constantly at the Empress’s beck and call. I would have lost my mind.

But Shōnagon wrings as many drops of aesthetic pleasure out of her circumstances as humanly possible. She is, for example, enchanted by the subtleties of dress—what ranks of court officials can wear which articles of clothing, what colors are appropriate for which season. The sounds of words delight her, as do the specific characters used to write them. Seasons, trees, flowers, birds, and insects all attract her attention.

These items are gathered together into lists, which comprise the bulk of this volume. Indeed, Shōnagon must be one of the all-time masters of the list, as she is inexhaustibly brilliant at thinking of categories. True, there are pedestrian ones such as bridges, mountains, ponds, and so forth. Some of these are so short and perfunctory that one wonders why Shōnagon thought it worthwhile to jot them down. But most lists are based, not on the thing itself, but on how it makes Shōnagon feel: dispiriting things, infuriating things, things that look enjoyable (but aren’t), splendid things, regrettable things, things that are distressing to see, things that are hard to say, common things that suddenly sound special, things that look ordinary but become extraordinary when written…

These lists were so quirky and, often, so hilarious that I was incongruously reminded of Wes Anderson’s films, which often feature odd lists. (Come to think of it, if anyone could turn this book into movie, it would have to be a pretentious aesthete like Anderson. He also shares Shōnagon’s love of colors.) But the list, in Shōnagon’s hands, becomes more than just a tool of organization. It reveals a kind of aesthetic philosophy—in part, that of the society she lived in, but to a great degree idiosyncratic—wherein the sensible qualities evoked by things are ultimately more important than the things themselves.

This is exemplified in what is arguably the dominant theme of this book: poetry. To an extent that is very difficult to imagine today, poetry pervaded court life in Heian Japan. Virtually everyone at the court, it seems, had memorized a great deal of poetry, and their conversations are littered with erudite references. (Unfortunately for me, most of this poetry relied on puns that are untranslatable, making it rather baffling in English.) Moreover, it was common to correspond via poetry, and the ability to compose on the fly was highly prized. Stories abound of someone (usually Shōnagon herself) finding the exact perfect reference or quote for an occasion, or completing the opening lines of a poem with brilliant aplomb. It is as if everyone at the White House were expected to freestyle.

It must be said, however, that despite Shōnagon’s attempt to reach a state of pure aesthetic appreciation, her strong and sharp personality very often breaks through. And good thing it does, for without it the book would not be even half as enjoyable as it is.

Admittedly, Shōnagon the person is, in many respects, unpleasant. She is snobby in the extreme and not a little vain. Her attitudes toward common folks is one of utmost condescension, and her need to be refined at all times sometimes verges into the ridiculous (in one section, she pretends not to know the word for “oar,” as it is too vulgar an object for her delicate vocabulary). Shōnagon is even capable of cruelty, which is exemplified in a section when a commoner comes in tears to report that his house burned down, and Shōnagon breaks into laughter and writes a satirical poem about his predicament. (The poor man, being illiterate, mistakes the poem for a promissory note.)

This opinion of Shōnagon was, apparently, shared by at least some of her contemporaries. Lady Murasaki, for example, found her to be “dreadfully conceited” and predicted: “Those who think of themselves as being superior to everyone else in this way will inevitably suffer and some to a bad end.” For my part, however, I think that the tension between Shōnagon’s very human shortcomings and her airy aesthetic focus creates a kind of dynamic tension that makes this book become fully alive as a human document.

I cannot finish a review of this book without mentioning its immense value simply as a window into another time. I was constantly thrown to the endnotes (which I wish had been footnotes) to understand some obscure reference or puzzling custom, and in the process inadvertently learned much about Heian Japan. Somehow, both Shōnagon’s numerous poetic references and her love of gossip combine to make her age come fully alive in these pages, in a way that few other books accomplish. In other words, this book is wholly delightful.



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