The Pillow-Book of Sei Shōnagon (13 page)

And what did become of her? There is a tradition (
Kojidan
, vol. ii) that when some courtiers were out one day they passed a dilapidated hovel. One of them mentioned a rumor that Sei Sh
ō
nagon, a wit of the last reign, was now living in this place. Whereupon an incredibly lean hag shot her head out of the door, crying: “Won’t you buy old bones?” Th is, if we are to accept the story, was the last of Sh
ō
nagon’s famous “literary allusions;” for there is here a reference to the story of Kuo Wei, who maintained that there were racehorses so precious that even their bones were worth procuring.

There is, too, in the
Zoku Senzaish
ū
(Book 18) a poem sent by Sh
ō
nagon “when she was old and living in retirement to someone who tried to visit her”:

The character of Sh
ō
nagon appears in her book as a series of contradictions. She is desperately anxious not merely to be liked, but to occupy the foremost place in the affections of all whom she knows. Yet her behavior, as she herself records it, seems consistently calculated to inspire fear rather than affection. Again, she seems at some moments wholly skeptical, at others profoundly religious; now unusually tender-hearted, now egotistical and cold. Yet all this does not imply that her character was in reality complicated to an unusual degree, but comes from the fact that she reveals herself to us entirely and, as it were, from every facet, whereas most writers of diaries and the like, however little conscious intention they may have of publishing their confessions, instinctively present themselves always in the same light. Her detachment about herself is paralleled by a curious, aloofness from all the associated emotions of a scene, so that she can describe a sick-bed as though it were a sunset, without the slightest attempt to arouse pity, or for that matter the least fear of provoking disgust.

Perhaps the strongest impression we get is of her extreme fastidiousness and irritability, which must have made her a formidable companion. She probably got on better with the Empress than with anyone else because her reverence for the Imperial Family compelled her in the August Presence to keep her nerves in check.

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
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. As for Sh
ō
nagon’s anecdotes, their vivacity is apparent even in translation. Neither in them nor in her more lyrical passages is there any hint of a search for literary effect. She gives back in her pages, with apparently as little effort of her own as a gong that sounds when it is struck, the whole warmth and glitter of the life that surrounded her; and the delicate precision of her perceptions makes diarists such as Lady Anne Clifford (whose name occurs to me at random) seem mere purblind Hottentots.

This gift manifests itself incidentally in her extraordinary power of conveying character. Yukinari, Masahiro and Narimasa, despite their uniform absurdity, live with extraordinary distinctness; as does the Empress herself, the only other woman whom the authoress allows to figure in her pages.

Her style is very much less “architected” than Murasaki’s; but there are moments when she begins building up a huge network of dependent clauses in a manner extremely close to
Genji
, and often one feels that the earlier book leads us, so to speak, to the brink of the other. Th is fits in with the presumed dates.
Genji
was probably begun in 1001, when Murasaki lost her husband, and
The Pillow Book
seems, with the possible exception of two or three entries, to have been written before the twelfth month of 1000, when the Empress Sadako died.

Sh
ō
nagon has often been spoken of as learned. Our only source of information on the subject is her own book. In it she shows signs of having read the
M
ē
ng-ch’iu
, a collection of edifying Chinese anecdotes, much studied by Japanese children from the ninth to the nineteenth century. She knows too some poems by Po Chü-i (the easiest of Chinese writers) and refers once to the Analects of Confucius. In Japanese literature she knows the usual round of poems from the
Kokinsh
ū
and
Gosensh
ū
. To speak, as European writers have done, of her vast acquaintance with Chinese literature, is an anachronism; for in her time only fragments of this literature had reached Japan. The great poets of the eighth century, for example, were entirely unknown. But the term “learned” is in any case a relative one. A modern lady-in-waiting who had read a little Greek (or even only a little Gilbert Murray) would certainly pass as learned in her own circle; while at Girton no one would be impressed. And it is likely enough that the attainments by which Sh
ō
nagon dazzled the Palace would at the Fujiwara Academy have passed quite unnoticed.

It is, in fact, her extreme readiness of wit rather than her erudition that makes Sh
ō
nagon remarkable. I have not been able in my extracts to do her full justice in this respect, because in order to appreciate her allusions and repartees one must be in a position to grasp them immediately. Wit, more often than not, evaporates in the process of explanation.

But the brilliance of an allusion such as that to the Analects
*
may perhaps be vaguely surmised. That anyone possessed of such a gift should enjoy using it seems natural enough. Almost every anecdote in her book centers round some clever repartee or happy quotation of her own. For this she has been reproached, and Murasaki has made her colleague’s
shitari-gao
(“have done it!” look,
i.e.
air of self-satisfaction) proverbial. In life Sh
ō
nagon may indeed have been as insupportable as Murasaki evidently found her; but in
The Pillow Book
her famous
shitari-gao
makes no disagreeable effect. We feel that Sh
ō
nagon displays her agile wits with the same delight as an athlete takes in running or leaping.

The Japanese excelled at portraiture. But the portraits that survive are those of statesmen and priests. The “Yoritomo,” by Takanobu (the obstinate-looking man in black triangular garments squatting with a white tablet hugged to his breast
*
), and the Sh
ō
ichi Kokushi (that old one-eyed priest spread out over a great armchair), by Ch
ō
Densu, are among the greatest products of Japanese art. But I recollect no portraits of women till a much later date. Murasaki and Sh
ō
nagon we know only as posterity imagined them—that is to say, as conventional Court beauties of the Heian period. One does not, however, in reading
The Pillow Book
, get the impression of a woman in whose life her own appearance figured in any very important way. Had she, on the other hand, been downright ugly, it would have been impossible to secure her a post as lady-in-waiting. We may suppose then that her looks were moderate. We certainly cannot accept the argument of M. Revon: ‘Si elle n’avait pas été distinguée de sa personne elle n’aurait pas raillé comme elle fait, les types vulgaires—reasoning which shows a fortunate unfamiliarity with the conversation of plain women. But we have no reason to doubt that Sh
ō
nagon had many lovers. Stress is usually laid on her affairs with Tadanobu, to which, however, she devotes only some few, rather insipid pages. I imagine that her real lovers were for the most part people of her own rank; whereas Tadanobu, rather circuitously (it was owing to his sister’s marriage with the Empress’s brother) soon became a
pezzo grosso
. But in the ‘eighties of the tenth century he was well within Sh
ō
nagon’s reach, and if they were ever lovers, it may have been before her arrival at Court.

Here is the longest passage that deals with their relationship: Tadanobu, having heard and believed some absurd rumor about me, began saying the most violent things—for example, that I wasn’t fit to be called a human being at all and he couldn’t imagine how he had been so foolish as to treat me like one. I was told that he was saying horrible things about me even in the Imperial apartments. I felt uncomfortable about it, but I only said, laughing: “If these reports are true, then that’s what I’m like and there is nothing more to be done. But if they are not true, he will eventually find out that he has been deceived. Let us leave it at that. . . .” Hence-forward, if he passed through the Black Door room and heard my voice from behind the screens he would bury his face in his sleeve, as though the merest glimpse of me would disgust him. I did not attempt to explain matters, but got in the habit of always looking in some other direction.

Two months later matters had advanced some way towards a reconciliation, for Sh
ō
nagon writes: He sent for me to come out to him, and (though I did not respond) we met later by accident. “Darling,” he said, “why have we given up being lovers? You know now that I have stopped believing those stories about you. I cannot conceive what is the obstacle. Are two people who have been friends for so many years really to drift apart in this way? As it is, my duties bring me constantly in and out of their Majesties’ apartments. But if that were to stop, our friendship would simply vanish, with nothing to show for all that has taken place between us.” “I have no objection to our coming together again,” I said. “In fact, there is only one thing I should be sorry for. If we were seeing one another in the way you mean, I should certainly stop praising you
*
—as I constantly do at present—in her Majesty’s hearing, with all the other gentlewomen sitting by. You won’t, I am sure, misunderstand me. One is embarrassed under such circumstances, something inside one sticks and one remains tonguetied.” He laughed. “Am I then never to be praised except by people who know nothing about me?” he asked. “You may be certain,” I said, “that if we become good friends again I shall never praise you. I cannot bear people, men or women, who are prejudiced in favor of someone they are intimate with or get into a rage if the mildest criticism of someone they are fond of is made in their presence.” “Oh, I can trust you not to do that!” he exclaimed.

I will end with a more general question. Women, it will have struck the reader, seem to play an inordinately large r
ô
le in the literary life of the Heian period. How came they here to secure a position that their sex has nowhere else been able to achieve?

As far as the production of literature went, women did not, in fact, enjoy so complete a monopoly as European accounts of the period would suggest. But convention obliged men to write in Chinese,
*
and not merely to use the Chinese language, but to compose essays and poems the whole attitude and content of which were derived from China. It may be objected that a potentially great writer would not have submitted to these restrictions—that he would have broken out into the vernacular, like Dante or Paracelsus. But this is to demand that a literary genius should also possess the many qualities essential to a successful reformer. The use of the native
kana
(the only form of character in which the Japanese language could be written with reasonable facility) was considered unmanly, and to use it would have made a writer as self-conscious as a London clubman would feel if he were to walk down Bond Street in skirts.

Women, anthropologists tell us, are often the repositories of a vanishing or discarded culture. And their conservatism becomes more marked where the mastering of a new script is involved; for women, though quick at acquiring spoken languages, have seldom shown much aptitude for the study of difficult scripts. To a minor degree, the same phenomenon was repeated in Japan a thousand years later. While the energy of male writers was largely absorbed in acquiring a foreign culture, and their output was still too completely derivative to be of much significance, there arose a woman
†
whose work, hitching straight on to the popular novelettes of the eighteenth century, has outlived the pseudo-European experimentations of her contemporaries. The fact that the men of the ‘nineties in Japan were absorbed in imitating Turgenev does not, however, explain the occurrence of such a prodigy as Ichiy
ō
(a working seamstress who in the years between nineteen and twenty-four produced twenty-five longish stories, forty volumes of diary, and six of critical essays); nor does the convention which obliged men to write in Chinese explain the appearance during the Heian period of such female geniuses as Ono no Komachi, Michitsuna’s mother, Izumi Shikibu, Sei Sh
ō
nagon, and Murasaki—a state of affairs all the more remarkable seeing that from the fourteenth to the end of the nineteenth century not a single woman writer of any note made her appearance in Japan.

Footnotes

*
Often referred to as Ky
ō
to,
i.e.
the Capital.

*
e.g.
Taira no Koremochi and Minamoto no Mitsunaka. But the point should not be pressed; for Eshin was also patronized by the Emperor’s mother, who was a Fujiwara.