Title: The Pillow Book (Makura no Soshi) Author: Sei Shonagon Creation Date: c. 1002 CE Location: Japan
Summary
The Pillow Book is a gloriously opinionated, witty, and intimate collection of observations, anecdotes, lists, and reflections by Sei Shonagon, a lady-in-waiting to Empress Teishi at the Heian court around the year 1000. Its most famous passages are the lists: "Hateful Things," "Elegant Things," "Things That Make One's Heart Beat Faster," "Embarrassing Things." Between the lists come vivid sketches of court life — a poetry contest judged by moonlight, a mortifying encounter with a lover at dawn, snow falling on the palace rooftops — all rendered with a sharp eye and a sharper tongue. Sei Shonagon celebrates beauty and intelligence and is merciless toward dullness, bad taste, and social ineptitude.
Why This Book Matters
The Pillow Book is the formative classic of the Japanese literary mode later called zuihitsu ("following the brush") — a genre of associative, fragmentary personal writing that would become one of the most distinctive forms in Japanese literature. Together with The Tale of Genji, it defines the aesthetic world of the Heian period and demonstrates the extraordinary literary achievements of court women writing in the Japanese vernacular. But where Murasaki Shikibu is melancholy and profound, Sei Shonagon is electric and immediate. Her work is a celebration of the examined life — the idea that paying fierce attention to the world, and judging it with precision, is itself a form of art.
Historical Context
Sei Shonagon served Empress Teishi, the consort of Emperor Ichijo, during a period of intense political rivalry between competing Fujiwara factions at court. Murasaki Shikibu served the rival Empress Shoshi, and the two women almost certainly knew of each other — Murasaki's diary contains a famously catty assessment of Sei Shonagon's character. The Pillow Book captures a world of extreme aesthetic refinement where one's reputation could be destroyed by choosing the wrong shade of layered silk robes or composing a mediocre poem.
Literary Significance
Sei Shonagon's prose style — crisp, confident, endlessly surprising — is one of the marvels of world literature. Her lists, in particular, achieve something remarkable: they transform subjective taste into a literary form, making the act of noticing and categorising the world into art. Her influence extends far beyond Japan; writers from Borges to contemporary essayists have drawn on her example. The Pillow Book is also one of the earliest and greatest examples of what we might now call creative nonfiction or the personal essay.
Research Notes
Meredith McKinney's Penguin translation is lively, accurate, and well-annotated. Ivan Morris's older translation ("The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon," 1967) has superb footnotes on court customs. The work exists in multiple manuscript traditions with different orderings of the entries, which makes the "correct" sequence a scholarly question. This is an ideal companion piece to The Tale of Genji — reading both gives a stereoscopic view of Heian court culture.
The Reading
In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful. As the light creeps over the hills, their outlines are dyed a faint red, and wisps of purplish cloud trail over them.
In summer the nights. Not only when the moon shines, but on dark nights too, as the fireflies flit to and fro, and even when it rains — how beautiful it is.
In autumn the evenings, when the glittering sun sinks close to the edge of the hills and the crows fly back to their nests in threes and fours and twos; more charming still is a file of wild geese, like specks in the distant sky. When the sun has set, one's heart is moved by the sound of the wind and the hum of insects.
In winter the early mornings. It is beautiful indeed when snow has fallen during the night, but splendid too when the ground is white with frost; or even when there is no snow or frost, but it is simply very cold, and the maids hurry to light the fires, bringing charcoal through the corridors. As noon approaches, however, and the cold wears off, no one bothers to keep the braziers alight, and the fire dies to white ashes. How dreary.
I begin with this because I cannot remember when I began it. The Empress — my mistress Teishi, consort to His Majesty the Emperor Ichijō, daughter of the late Regent Fujiwara no Michitaka — had been sent a great bundle of fresh paper, and she turned it in her hands and asked what one might possibly do with so much. "His Majesty," she said, "has been copying out the Records of the Historian." I replied that I should very much like to use it for a pillow. By which I meant — for such was the word we used among ourselves — a stack of paper to keep beside one at night, into which to put down whatever crossed the mind. She gave it to me on the spot. I carried it back to my own quarters, and I have been writing in it ever since.
I should warn the reader, if there is to be a reader (which I did not intend, and shall presently regret), that nothing in this collection is arranged. I have set down what came to me as it came: the lists I am fond of, the things that vex me, the small scenes from this Palace of which I cannot bear to lose the memory, certain remarks of Her Majesty's that ought not to be forgotten by the world. If anyone finds in this an order, the order is the order of a mind that was tossing things into a box for ten years, and not the order of a learned compilation.
Hateful Things
A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything.
An admirer has come on a clandestine visit, but a dog discovers him and starts barking. One could kill the creature.
One is just about to be told some interesting piece of news when a baby starts to cry.
A gentleman has visited one secretly. Though he is wearing a tall, lacquered hat of the sort that should not be seen at such an hour, he nevertheless wishes to attract no notice. He is in such a flurry, in fact, that as he leaves he bangs his hat against something and gives himself away with a great clatter. Inexcusable.
A guest who arrives when one has a most pressing engagement and stays talking for hours. If it is a person of no importance, one could send him away; with someone of consequence one cannot, and the longer one's polite face is held up the heavier it becomes.
A man with whom one has had to do, and who in the morning is in no hurry to leave, taking his time over his clothes, pulling his hunting cloak over his shoulders inch by inch, tying the cords of his trousers, opening the lattice and the shutters himself, beginning a long story he might have told at any other time. One thinks: surely he can see that the night is gone and the cocks have crowed and the maids will be passing in the corridor. Surely he can see.
A flea, which has got under one's robes and begins jumping about. The dog that suddenly catches sight of someone and barks at the moment one's heart is most at ease.
I could go on. The world is full of things one cannot abide, and to enumerate them is itself a small revenge.
Elegant Things
A white coat worn over a violet waistcoat.
Duck eggs.
Shaved ice mixed with liana syrup and put into a new silver bowl.
A rosary of rock crystal.
Snow on wisteria, or on plum blossoms.
A pretty child eating strawberries.
There is nothing more to say. One either feels the rightness of these, set thus together, or one does not. If one does not, one is past helping, and may put down the book.
Things That Make One's Heart Beat Faster
Sparrows feeding their young.
To pass a place where small babies are playing.
To sleep in a room where some fine incense has been burnt.
To notice that one's elegant Chinese mirror has become a little cloudy.
To see a gentleman stop his carriage before one's gate and instruct his attendants to announce his arrival.
To wash one's hair, make one's toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul will see one, one still feels a sense of inner pleasure.
It is the night of an expected visitor. The sound of the rain and of the wind blowing things about makes one suddenly start.
Embarrassing Things
While entertaining a visitor, one hears some servants chatting without any restraint in one of the back rooms. It is dreadful to know that one's visitor can hear them.
To have spoken about someone, not realising that he is overhearing.
A man whom one loves whose praises are sung to one by a person who knows nothing of the matter — and one's own face, in spite of oneself, beginning to show what it should not.
Rare Things
A son-in-law who is praised by his father-in-law. Likewise, a daughter-in-law who is loved by her mother-in-law.
A woman who is truly loved by her husband.
A pair of silver tweezers that can actually pull out hairs properly.
A servant who does not speak badly of his master.
A person of altogether no defects. A person who is entirely beautiful, entirely well-mannered, of admirable character — who passes through life without ever giving anyone cause for the smallest criticism. No such person exists, and yet one keeps looking.
That last entry on the silver tweezers is, I admit, not in the same key as the others, and yet it belongs there. The objects one expects to function never do. The people one expects to behave well do not. Each, in its own small way, betrays the standard the world holds it to. To notice this is not to be a cynic; it is to be awake.
The Snow on Xiang Lu Peak
One snowy day Her Majesty was in residence and we ladies were gathered about her. She sat with the brazier-stand drawn close and the snow falling in heavy flakes outside. There was a brisk pause in the conversation, and then she turned to me and asked: "Shōnagon, how is the snow on Xiang Lu peak?"
I rose without speaking and went and raised the bamboo blind, and stood aside.
Now I should explain, since the reader of a later age may not know it, that there is a poem by Po Chü-i of the T'ang in which the poet, lying in his hermitage on Hsiang-lu, the Incense-Burner peak, pushes aside the pillow and the screen to look at the snow on the mountain. Every lady of the court knew this poem; it was the sort of thing one learned in girlhood from one's nurse. Her Majesty's question was a riddle, and the answer to the riddle was not a translation but an action: to lift the blind without being told. I lifted it.
Her Majesty laughed. The other ladies applauded. One of them said afterwards that she had known the poem perfectly well and yet had not seen what she ought to do with it, and that I had stolen the moment from her, and we were friends again by the following day. I shall not pretend I was not pleased. I was pleased. I am pleased even now to set it down. If I am to be charged with vanity for recording such things, I plead guilty in advance, and remind the court that one cannot record the brilliance of one's mistress without occasionally recording the answer one gave her.
Things I Have Noticed of Late
On the day after a fierce autumn wind, everything is indescribably lovely — the garden tangled and disrupted, great branches of trees lying broken on the ground. It is moving beyond words to see the fine threads of spider web strung with innumerable dewdrops, white as pearls.
I love the sight of the great tangled hedgerows by moonlight, with the moon shining down through the dense thicket of intertwined branches. Wonderful.
Nothing is more depressing than a dog howling in the daytime. There it is.
I notice these things and I write them down. Whether they belong together or do not belong together I cannot say. Beauty does not arrange itself for one's convenience. A fine sight gives way to a tedious sound which gives way to a clever remark from one of the maids and one is on to the next thing before one's brush has caught up. So be it. I am not a chronicler. I am a woman with a stack of paper, the inkstone within reach of my elbow, a brazier at my knee in winter and a moth at the lamp in summer, and the leisure — which I do not pretend to have earned — to put down what passes before me. If that is a vanity, I shall keep it. There are many worse, and most of the people at this court are practising them with less skill and more solemnity than I bring to mine.
Of Men, Generally
A lover who is leaving at dawn announces that he has to find his fan and his paper. "I know I put them somewhere last night," he says, fumbling about in the dark. "How dreadful!" one cries, pulling the bedclothes over one's face while one's lover, terrified of being seen by the watchmen in the corridor, crawls about the room bumping into things and muttering to himself. There is in this scene a kind of homely intimacy that does not occur in poems; and yet I should rather have a man who can find his fan in the dark.
A man who leaves at dawn and does not send the morning letter is no man. A man whose letter, when it at last arrives, is feeble — written in a slovenly hand on cheap paper, the poem clumsy, the allusion missed — is worse than no man at all. A man who falls asleep at once. A man who talks of his other women. A man who, having stepped on something painful in the dark, lets out an undignified cry. I make no defence of being severe in these matters. The whole of courtship rests upon a willingness to behave well at moments when one would much rather not, and a man who cannot manage that is not behaving badly; he is, more fundamentally, not behaving at all.
I notice these failures and I record them as faithfully as I record the more elegant business of the autumn-wind morning and the silver bowl. To my mind, the failures are aesthetic, not moral. To send a slovenly poem is not wicked. It is graceless, which is worse — for the wicked may at least be interesting, while the graceless are merely insupportable.
Of Her Majesty
I cannot write of Her Majesty without my brush growing unsteady, and I shall therefore say very little. Her father the Regent died young, and the men of the rival house — the family of His Excellency Michinaga, who is now the great man at court — gathered everything to themselves, and Her Majesty's position grew always less and not more. I shall not write what is felt by everyone in our wing and need not be put down. I shall say only that her wit never deserted her, that on the morning of the snow she was as quick as she had ever been, and that even in the worst years there were afternoons in her apartments when one would not have known by anything in her manner that the wind had so changed. I record her at her brightest. The rest the world may record without me.
There is, I am told, in the rival establishment, a lady — Murasaki by name — who keeps a quite different sort of journal, in which she sets down her impressions of those of us who are not in her service. I have not seen what she has written. I am told it is unflattering, which does not surprise me. We are not of the same temper. She is one for the depths and I am one for the surfaces, and I would not have it otherwise. The surface is what one can be sure of. The depths are a matter on which I prefer not to give an opinion, since I have not been there and do not intend to go.
Postscript
I have written, then, of the things that delighted me and the things that vexed me, of the small triumphs in Her Majesty's apartments and the dawn fumbling about for a fan, of dewdrops on spider web and dogs that howl when one would prefer them to be silent. I have not written of my own troubles, or of doubts, or of what I think of when I cannot sleep. There is, in my view, no need. The world is more interesting than one's own interior, and the brush should not be wasted.
I never meant any of this to be read. It was a pillow. It was placed beside the mat, and the brush was taken up only when the mood was on me. How it came to be passed from hand to hand by my women, and copied, and copied again, until even the courtiers I had been least disposed to flatter were sending for copies, I cannot now say. Whatever people may think of my work, I have written it only for my own amusement.
That, at any rate, was true on the day I began. Perhaps, after so many years, the brush has come to write a little for the reader as well as for me. If so, I trust the reader will forgive me, and turn the page, and look.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
Two translations stand out for The Pillow Book. Meredith McKinney's Penguin Classics version (2006) is lively, accurate, and well-annotated — the best modern introduction. Ivan Morris's Columbia University Press translation (1967) is older but comes with extraordinarily detailed footnotes on every aspect of Heian court life, making it invaluable for readers who want to understand the cultural context.
Translated by Meredith McKinney. The best modern translation — lively, accurate, and well-annotated.
Translated by Ivan Morris. The classic scholarly translation with superb footnotes on Heian court customs.
Disclaimer: some links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
