The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon: The Diary of a Courtesan in Tenth Century Japan Read online

  By the last quarter of the tenth century, the growing sophistication of writing in prose reached another important stage, because many works began to explicitly wrestle with the question of the trustworthiness of narratives, of how faithfully words could depict the world. By the time Shōnagon wrote The Pillow Book, it had become almost conventional to point out the inherently contrived nature of prose literature— as if by doing so an author gained credibility and authority. Waley stresses the sheer factuality of The Pillow Book as one of its most valuable features (he seems to denigrate The Tale of Genji on this score since it is a work of fiction). Nowhere is this concern with truthfulness more apparent than in the emergence of the diary (nikki) as a dominant form of writing. For example, the Kagerō nikki, by the Mother of Michitsuna, had an enormous impact on Shōnagon’s generation of writers. The narrative voice of the diary is almost obsessively concerned with how her life will be perceived, and so she wishes to displace what she sees as the fabrications of earlier romances—stories that are distasteful to her precisely because they are fictional—with an account of her life that justifies her actions and expresses all that is real to her, including the mental suffering caused by her unhappy marriage. Similarly, the Izumi Shikibu nikki is a diary marked by a tension between the formal, conventional demands of prose narratives and the desire for truthfulness. In this case, however, the author strives to make the account of her real-life love affair conform to the idealized literary expectations created by the structure of romance narratives as told in poetic anthologies. In both these examples, what makes the handling of plot and character seem so compelling is that the authors do not take the truthfulness of words simply at face value, but assume that the sense of immediacy or reality that prose literature can create is the product of a heightened literary sensibility.

  The close relationship between poetry and prose, the critical awareness of how historical and cultural differences are reflected in genres and formal conventions, and the emphasis placed on trustworthiness and affective realism are a few examples of literary practices and concepts that reveal the sophistication of the tradition that Shōnagon was drawing upon. Her use of these disparate practices and ideas are reflected in the zuihitsu model she constructs. We are given examples of diary literature in those passages that chronicle the events of the court calendar, the ceremonies and celebrations specific to Teishi’s court, and the vignettes that provide brilliantly drawn glimpses into the manners and foibles of the aristocracy. These are unquestionably among her most memorable sustained pieces, and it is understandable that Waley is especially drawn to this kind of material. However, Shōnagon also creates a vivid narrative voice in essays that present her views on many different topics dealing with proper etiquette, literary taste, or the ideal courtier. Her essays are powerfully prescriptive and reveal a classical, conservative mind behind the self-confident arbiter of courtly tastes.

  Perhaps the most distinctive form of writing in The Pillow Book is the list or catalog of items, people, languages, customs or behaviors that exemplify a particular mood or value. These lists, which also include simple enumerations of the names of rivers or mountains (lists that seem at a cursory glance to be rather cryptic and of little value), may well have been the oldest materials, serving as cues or source works to aid poetic composition, a skill that Empress Teishi would have had to use on an almost daily basis. Such lists had a long history, and many courtiers, men and women, kept notes on poetry, ceremony, manners and customs not merely for the love of aesthetics, but because the political culture demanded such knowledge as a practical aspect of court life. Court intrigues and rivalries may have been expressed in part through art, music and literature, but the aestheticism of aristocratic culture was grounded in ruthless political and economic calculations.

  By taking a broader view of the historical context of composition—both the political economy of the court and the tradition of literary practices that Sei Shōnagon was able to draw upon to create her art—the unusual forms and seemingly aleatory structure of The Pillow Book makes sense and should be engaged and enjoyed on its own terms. Of course the work is most celebrated in Japan for its great stylistic beauty; and since it is a miscellany, it is meant to be read in bits and pieces. On that basis, Waley was justified in taking the approach he did; he produced a work that is true to the original by treating it as a miscellany, and by capturing the beauty of its prose and the vitality of the narrative voice in English. Still, by not translating the entire work he distorts the view of tenth-century Japan as a culture wholly aesthetic and absorbed in the present. He claims, rightly, that works like The Pillow Book provide an insight into the values and customs of a society distant in time and place, but by not engaging Sei Shōnagon on her terms, by selecting what he likes, or what he thinks his readers will like, his translation is self-reflective, telling us as much about his aesthetics as it does about Shōnagon’s.

  Waley’s approach to translating was guided by tastes shaped for the most part by European literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and thus he read The Pillow Book as the product of a society interested in aesthetic rather than intellectual pursuits. Waley worked for the most part in isolation from Japanese scholars and writers, but the lack of direct connection with modern Japan did not seem to bother him much. Perhaps this was an outgrowth of his view that translation, in narrowly artistic terms, was a means for self-expression. After all, his fascination with Heian culture was of a piece with the Japonisme that had such a profound effect on European art during his lifetime. It was a kind of exoticism that further emphasized the universalized aesthetic superiority of the West over the particularized local cultures of the East. For readers of his generation the distortion produced by this particular emphasis was not an especially urgent problem. The notion that a translation could actually improve on the original was not uncommon, if the reception of the work of other important translators during the period is any indication. Assuming that the literary value of a translation may be judged on its own merits apart from the original, it follows that a translation may potentially be the superior work of art.

  The reputation of Waley as a translator remains high, but now the praise is more often qualified. His version of The Pillow Book may be criticized for being anachronistic, for playing too fast and loose with the original, for displaying a cavalier attitude toward historical accuracy; and it has long since been displaced as the standard English-language version by full-length translations by Ivan Morris and Meredith McKinney, both of which are sensitive, careful renderings. Yet despite the criticisms that may be made of his work, despite his limitations and flaws, Waley continues to be revered and his work still read, and deservedly so – not simply because of his historical importance or because he challenges the reader to think seriously about translation as an art form in and of itself, but because the beauty of his prose captures the artistic spirit of a brilliant and fascinating woman of Heian Japan.

  Dennis Washburn

  Dartmouth College

  Translator’s Notes

  Ihave here translated about a quarter of the Pillow Book.* Omissions have been made only where the original was dull, unintelligible, repetitive, or so packed with allusion that it required an impracticable amount of commentary.

  Short extracts from the Pillow Book will be found in Aston’s Japanese Literature (1899), Florenz’s Geschichte der Jap. Litteratur (1906), and Revon’s Anthologie de la Littérature Japonaise (1910). Save for a line or two here and there, and two anecdotes (pp. 67 and 93), parts of which are translated by Aston and Revon, I have avoided what has been translated before, not on principle, but because it seemed to me that, on the whole, the least interesting passages had been chosen.†

  The text I have used is that of the Makura no Sōshi Hyōshaku (first published, 1924; 2nd edition in one volume, 1926), by Kaneko Moto-omi, to whose commentary I am greatly indebted. The proofs have been read by Miss Sybil Pye and Mr. Tadao Doi, to both of whom I am very gratefu
l.

  Footnotes

  * Makura no Sōshi, this being a name given at the time to notebooks in which stray impressions were recorded.

  † Since this was written there has appeared Les Notes de l’Oreiller, by K. Matsuo and Steinilber-Oberlin, containing extracts which amount, like mine, to about a quarter of the original. My selection was, however, made from a very different point of view and coincides with theirs only to the extent of a few pages. The two books are therefore complementary.

  Japan in the Tenth Century

  WHEN the first volume of The Tale of Genji appeared in English, the prevailing comment of critics was that the book revealed a subtle and highly developed civilization, the very existence of which had hitherto remained un-suspected. It was guessed that so curious a state of society, with its rampant æstheticism and sophisticated unmorality, its dread of the explicit, the emphatic, must have behind it a protracted history of undisturbed development, or (as others put it) must be the climax of an age-long decadence.

  And it is indeed true that the unique civilization portrayed in The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon corresponds to a unique record of isolation and tranquillity. The position of Japan, lying on the edge of the Oriental world, has been compared to that of England always in full communion with Europe, yet exempt from the worst perils of contiguity—in fact, ideally “semi-detached.”

  But the comparison has little force. Japan is eight times farther from the mainland than we from France. One cannot swim across the Straits of Tsushima. Yet phase after phase of civilization—agriculture, tools, domestic animals at an age long before history, then later, the Chinese ideograms, Indian religion, Persian textiles—managed to filter across the Straits; while invasion, save for an occasional raid of pirates from China, not merely during those early years, but until the abortive Mongol descent in the thirteenth century, was almost unknown. In Europe and on the continent of Asia no single strip of land has ever enjoyed a like immunity. Across France, Hungary, Poland, Turkestan, how many armies marched during the long centuries of Japan’s absolute security! Thus arose a culture that, among other peculiarities, had that of not being cosmopolitan. Rome, Byzantium, Ctesiphon, even Ch’ang-an were international cities. In the streets of Kyōto a stray Korean or Chinaman was, as specimens of the exotic, the best that could be hoped for. The world, to a Japanese of the tenth century, meant Japan and China. India was semi-mythical, and Persia uncertainly poised somewhere between China and Japan.

  Thus, since the establishment of the capital at Heian* in 794, had grown up a highly specialized, intense and uniform civilization, dominated by one family, the Fujiwara; a state of society in which the stock of knowledge, the experience, the prejudices of all individuals were so similar that the grosser forms of communication seemed no longer necessary. A phrase, a clouded hint, an allusion half-expressed, a gesture imperceptible to common eyes, moved this courtly herd with a facility as magic as those silent messages that in the prairie ripple from beast to beast.

  It was a purely æsthetic and, above all, a literary civilization. Never, among people of exquisite cultivation and lively intelligence, have purely intellectual pursuits played so small a part. What strikes us most is that the past was almost a blank; not least so the history of Japan, extending even in mythological theory only to the seventh century B.C. and remaining fabulous for fifteen hundred years.

  It is indeed our intense curiosity about the past that most sharply distinguishes us from the ancient Japanese. Here every educated person is interested in some form or another of history. The busiest merchant is an authority upon snuff-boxes, Tudor London, or Chinese jade. The remotest country clergyman reads papers on eoliths; his daughters revive forgotten folk-dances. But to the Japanese of the tenth century, “old” meant fusty, uncouth, disagreeable. To be “worth looking at” a thing must be imamekashi, “now-ish,” up-to-date. By Shōnagon and Murasaki the great collection of early poetry (the Manyōshū), on the rare occasions when they quote it, is always referred to in an apologetic way, as something that, despite its solid merits, will necessarily offend the modern eye. Nor did they feel that the future—with us an increasing preoccupation— in any way concerned them.

  Their absorption in the present, the fact that with them “modern” was invariably a term of praise, differentiates them from us in a way that is immediately obvious. The other aspects of their intellectual passivity—the absence of mathematics, science, philosophy (even such amateur speculation as amused the Romans was entirely unknown)—may not seem at first sight to constitute an important difference. Scientists and philosophers, it is true, exist in modern Europe. But to most of us their pronouncements are as unintelligible as the incantations of a Lama; we are mere drones, slumbering amid the clatter of thoughts and contrivances that we do not understand and could still less ever have created. If the existence of contemporary research had no influence except upon those capable of understanding it, we should indeed be in much the same position as the people of Heian. But, strangely enough, something straggles through; ideas that we do not completely understand modify our perceptions and hence refashion our thoughts to such an extent that the society lady who said, “Einstein means so much to me” was expressing a profound truth.

  It is, then, not only their complete absorption in the passing moment, but more generally the entire absence of intellectual background that makes the ancient Japanese so different from us, and gives even to the purely æsthetic sides of their culture a curious quality of patchiness. At any moment these men and women, to all appearances so infinitely urbane and sophisticated, may surprise us, even where matters of taste rather than intellect are concerned, by lapsing into a niaiserie far surpassing the silliness of our own Middle Ages. It is this insecurity which gives to the Heian period that oddly evasive and, as it were, two-dimensional quality, its figures and appurtenances seeming to us sometimes all to be cut out of thin, transparent paper.

  Religious ceremonies were much in vogue, but were viewed chiefly from an æsthetic standpoint. The recitation of sacred texts was an art practiced by the laity as well as the clergy. An exacting standard of connoisseurship prevailed, and if Buddhist services were packed to overflowing, it was upon appraising the merits of the performers rather than upon his own spiritual improvement that a Heian worshipper was bent.

  Mimes, pageants, processions filled the Court calendar. Those organized by the Church had a certain tinge of exotic solemnity; for until the tenth century, Indian Buddhism continued to send out fresh waves of influence, which now reached China (and hence Japan) less circuitously than in former days.

  But it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the real religion of Heian was the cult of calligraphy. Certainly writing was the form of conduct that was scrutinized most severely. We find beauty of penmanship not merely counting for almost as much as beauty of person, but spoken of rather as a virtue than as a talent, and the epithet “good,” when applied to an individual, frequently refers not to conduct but to handwriting. Often in Japanese romances it is with some chance view of the heroine’s writing that a love-affair begins; and if the hero happens to fall in love with a lady before he has seen her script, he awaits the first “traces of her hand” with the same anxiety as that which afflicted a Victorian gentleman before he had ascertained his fiancée’s religious views. It was as indispensable that a Japanese mistress should write beautifully as that Mrs. Gladstone should be sound about the episcopal succession.

  Again, a considerable place in the lives of the ancient Japanese was given to arts the very existence of which the West has barely recognized. For example, the art of blending perfumes, regarded by us as a mere trade, ranked in ancient Japan as the equal of music and poetry.

  These things, however, are only differences of emphasis. Calligraphy has perhaps nowhere else so nearly achieved the status of a religion; but it has been practiced as an art throughout the East, and was esteemed at certain moments even in Europe. So recently as the beg
inning of the present century, a small school, led by Dr. Bridges, gave it a considerable prominence in one part of England. And even the burning of perfumes, though on the whole neglected in this country, has always been practiced here and there, experimentally, in corners that some chance has screened from the censure of Nordic virility.

  Again, the purely æsthetic approach to religion, which was the rule in Heian, has often been fostered in Europe by cliques of exceptional people. At first sight, indeed, Buddhism (with its rosaries, baptism, tonsured monks, and nuns; its Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell) appears to have many points of resemblance to Catholic Christianity. But I fancy, all the same, that the most fundamental difference between the Japanese (or, for that matter, any Far Eastern nation) and us is the fact, obvious indeed yet constantly overlooked, that they were not Christians.