Forgotten Women : The Writers (9781788401159) by Tsjeng Zing

Author:Tsjeng, Zing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group USA
Published: 2018-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

SEI SHŌNAGON

ometime around the year 1000 – about the same time that Murasaki Shikibu was writing The Tale of Genji – Sei Shōnagon (c. 966– c. 1017/25) was creating a very different literary work in the Japanese imperial court. It is now known as The Pillow Book, and its would-be author had modest aims: “I merely wrote for my personal amusement things that I myself have thought and felt, and I never intended that it should be placed alongside other books and judged on a par with them.”25

Murasaki, her fellow lady-in-waiting, sniffed that her rival was “dreadfully conceited”,26 adding that “people who have become so precious that they go out of their way to try and be sensitive in the most unpromising situations, trying to capture every moment of interest, however slight, are bound to look ridiculous and superficial.”27 True, The Pillow Book is a very different beast to The Tale of Genji. The work has been described as a pastiche, and it certainly is something of a delightful mess, with intimate diary entries and memories of courtly life veering off into charming lists of her likes and dislikes and opinions.

But it was in attempting to capture every fleeting detail of her era – from her stylish gentlemen callers right down to her everyday annoyances – that Sei Shōnagon hit on something true and eternal. It’s easy to feel like Heianera Japan is not so far away from our century’s own social foibles when Sei is tartly describing her list of “infuriating things”,28 such as “a guest who arrives when you have something urgent to do, and stays talking for ages” or “someone who butts in when you’re talking and smugly provides the ending herself”, or when she recounts the dispiriting nature of “those times when you send someone a poem you’re rather pleased with, and fail to receive one in reply”.29 (Ghosting, anyone?)

We know very little of Sei’s background. “Shōnagon” denotes the rank of junior councillor, while Sei is short for her family name of Kiyohara. As the daughter of a minor governor, Sei was already in her late twenties when she was yanked from the provinces to serve the Empress Teishi in 993, and she was a devoted lady-in-waiting up until the death of her mistress in childbirth in 1000. After that, there is precious little trace of Sei in official records. She was once married, but we do not know the name of her husband. She took several lovers at court, and The Pillow Book records her judgment on their hopeless bumbling: “I do wish men, when they’re taking their leave from a lady at dawn, wouldn’t insist on adjusting their clothes to a nicety, or fussily tying their lacquered cap securely into place,” she sighed. “One does want a lover’s dawn departure to be tasteful.”30

Sei also claimed that she began The Pillow Book by a sheer accident of fate. A palace minister had presented her Empress with a rare bundle of spare paper, which was in turn gifted to her.

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