The Pillow-Book of Sei Shōnagon Read Free

established practices and in her confident aesthetic judgments. The result was not so much a “new” type of work, but one that is sui generis , at its best creating a fresh, vivid, and immediate narrative voice.
    The unusual structure of The Pillow Book derives from a number of factors that shaped Sh ō nagon’s conception of her writing. Over the course of the tenth century prose literature in Japan grew increasingly sophisticated as a medium capable of expressing a wide range of personal emotions and abstract ideas—indeed the difference in sophistication between prose literature in Japan and that in Europe during this period is striking. The increasing complexity of prose forms was in large part an extension of poetic practices. To take one example, the impact of poetry on prose forms is apparent in those sections of Tales of Ise where verses by the influential ninth-century poet Ariwara no Narihira are introduced and contextualized by short, disjointed prose accounts of his exploits as a lover (an editorial technique not at all dissimilar to what Waley uses in his version of The Pillow Book ). The prose elements of Tales of Ise , many of which are quite short and expository in nature, are secondary, or derivative in that their function is in a sense to translate the poems for the reader and give them clarity or deeper significance. Indeed, the impetus for writing in prose in this case stems in large part from the social nature of classical Japanese poetry, which was always composed with some context in mind—a pre-determined topic, an official occasion, a personal exchange—that made possible a poem’s emotional or intellectual effects.
    The demand for contextualization blurred the formal boundaries between prose and poetry in Heian literature, but that did not mean there was no conception of genre. Indeed, as sections of The Pillow Book itself make clear, distinctions between aesthetic values and forms clearly reveal awareness that literature, and culture more broadly, developed over time; and it is this awareness of change that belies Waley’s assertion that Heian culture lacked a strong historical consciousness. As the prefaces to Kojiki ( Chronicles of Ancient Matters , one of the earliest histories written in Japanese, compiled 712) and to Kokinwakash ū ( Collection of Ancient and New Poems , the first imperially sponsored anthology of poetry, c. 905) make clear, it was recognized early and often that Japanese literature had a history of its own. It wasn’t until the tenth century, however, that the consciousness that literary practices change over time began to have a major impact on the development of prose forms. Again, to point to a single example, the core element of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter is a folktale—the story of Kaguyahime, the princess from the moon who is reborn on earth in a stalk of bamboo. That core story is expanded with a quest narrative, as five courtly noblemen who wish to take Kaguyahime as a bride attempt to perform impossible tasks to win her. This expanded narrative is a conscious fusion of older forms of tale literature, and the relatively simpler values those forms represent, with contemporary court customs and values. Such a synthesis allows the narrator to satirically judge the actions and foibles of the characters, and the presence of an ironic, historical consciousness allows The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter to transcend the limits of it source works and provides evidence for how a heightened historical awareness of the tradition impacted narrative structure and rhetoric.
    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 Sh ō nagon wrote The Pillow Book , it had become almost conventional to point out the inherently contrived nature of prose