This is almost our only information about Sei Shōnagon except what is revealed by The Pillow Book itself. A vast collection of personal notes, her book covers the ten-odd years during which she served at Court, and reveals a complicated, intelligent, well-informed woman who was quick, impatient, keenly observant of detail, high-spirited, witty, emulative, sensitive to the charms and beauties of the world and to the pathos of things, yet intolerant and callous about people whom she regarded as her social or intellectual inferiors.
Shōnagon wrote during the great mid-Heian period of feminine vernacular literature that produced not only the world’s first psychological novel, The Tale of Genji, but vast quantities of poetry and a series of diaries, mostly by Court ladies, which enable us to imagine what life was like for upper-class Japanese women a thousand years ago. In many ways, such as her love of pageantry and colour, her delight in poetry, her mixture of naivety and sophistication, she resembled the other women writers we know. But The Pillow Book also suggests some notable differences. Shōnagon’s scorn for the lower orders, which has moved one indignant Japanese critic to describe her as a ‘spiritual cripple’, and her adoration of the Imperial family were so pronounced as to seem almost pathological. Her attitude to men, even to those of a somewhat higher class than hers, was competitive to the point of overt hostility. And, partly owing to this 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:
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.
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 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.
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 specifically to its sense.
As usual in translation, one must compromise between the two extremes. When in doubt, I have tended to be ‘free’. This is partly because the language of The Pillow Book, in which the most laconic phrasing is often combined with seeming redundancy, is peculiarly resistant to literalism. Any ‘accurate’ translation would impose terrible ordeals on all but the most determined. Since Shōnagon’s book is noted for the limpid beauty of its language, a translation that adhered to the exact wording of the original, faithfully reproducing each particle, each repetition, each apparent ambiguity, would from a literary point of view be totally inaccurate. A language that afforded as little pleasure to the Japanese as the following passage does to English readers would hardly have preserved The Pillow Book from oblivion for a thousand years:
the manner in which [they] did such things as deliver [honourable] letters and move about and behave was not awkward-seeming and [they] conversed and laughed[.] even wondering indeed when in the world [I] would mix thus was awkward[.]
In translating the quoted and original poems from The Pillow Book, I have abandoned all attempts to be literal and have tried instead to give their general meaning and to suggest a certain poetic rhythm. I have not preserved the line or word patterns of the poems unless they seemed to lend themselves naturally to those forms in English. There can be no literature in the world less suited to translation than classic Japanese poetry; and it is only because verse is such an integral part of The Pillow Book that I have ventured on an undertaking that is unlikely ever to succeed. Docteur Beaujard has provided ad verbum, prosaic versions, arranging them all, line by line, in the forms of the original poems.
My complete translation (Oxford University Press and Columbia University Press, 1967) is based primarily on the Shunsho Shōhon version as edited by Kaneko Motoomi in 1927 and on the Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei edition of the Sankanbon version edited by Ikeda Kikan and Kishigami Shinji in 1953. Publication in a single volume necessitated certain cuts. As a devotee of Sei Shōnagon I found it hard to excise passages of her book; but in the hope that this new edition would make her work available to many more readers I removed the necessary number of pages from my original translation and from the accompanying notes. Most of the cuts are lists, especially lists of place names, words, titles, and the like that are interesting mainly to the specialist. Though Sei Shōnagon would certainly have disapproved of such tampering with her text, which she might well have included in her list of Presumptuous Things, I am confident that I have not jettisoned a single passage of outstanding interest or beauty.
I have headed each of the sections with a title. In the lists these are the first words given by Shōnagon herself (e.g. ‘Hateful Things’); in the other sections they are the first words of my translation (e.g. ‘Once during a Long Spell of Rainy Weather’). I have also added my own numbers for each section. I have not indicated these various additions by square brackets; if brackets were used consistently, that is, if they enclosed every single word and punctuation mark not in the original, almost each sentence would have a dozen or more pairs and to read the text would be a suffering for all but the most resolute students.
In addition to the scholars already mentioned, I should like to thank my friends in England, America, Japan, and Norway for all their help and encouragement during the five years spent with The Pillow Book. I am also most grateful to Professor Hans Bielenstein and to Fang Chao-ying for checking the Chinese quotations and references, to Dr Hakeda Yoshito for his advice on Sanskrit terms, and to Mrs Shirley Bridgwater and Mrs Karen Brazell for proof-reading a most complicated manuscript. Finally I am indebted to Professor Edwin Cranston for the many valuable suggestions and corrections contained in his review article on my Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon published by the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. xxix, 1969.