The Pillow Book

This is really quite unlike anything I've read before and gives one an intimate but entertaining insight into the Heian court of Japan, circa 1007 AD. The Heian period, by the way, is a much less talked about historical period of Japan, compared to the Edo period. This was many centuries before the Japanese started wearing kimonos, and was a time when they were still strongly influenced by Chinese culture but were also developing the foundations of what we now would associate with Japanese culture.

Sei Shonagon is one of the Empress's gentlewomen and she ostensibly writes a “Pillow Book”, a sort of private and personal diary/notebook, that not just records down the gossip and scandals happening in court, but also serves almost as a scrapbook for her. There is, however, scholarly evidence to show that Shonagon had, in fact, deliberately put the Pillow Book in circulation amongst the other artistocratic members of the court, despite her protestations to the contrary.

When going into this book, it is strongly recommended to start off reading the Introduction - basically, the beginning parts written by the translator that you probably always skip. McKinney provides some enlightening insights into the world in which Shonagon lived, and these brief explorations into the upper-class Heian world was just as entertaining as the rest of the book was. Furthermore, McKinney's introduction helps one make sense of the world that Shonagon writes about, and which she obviously wouldn't have spent much time dissecting or explaining to the reader - pretty sure she never expected this to be read more than a millenia after she wrote it!

The book has its share of gossip column stories that she writes about various other members at court, but what I really thoroughly enjoyed in this book were the random lists of scenarios and things that she wrote down, which I felt painted such a beautiful but oh so relatable picture of human nature and life, even when we're separated from Shonagon by the span of a millenia.

[25] Infuriating things - A guest who arrives when you have something urgent to do, and stays talking for ages. [...]I also really hate the way some people go about envying others, bemoaning their own lot in life, demanding to be let in on every trivial little thing, being venomous about someone who won't tell them what they want to know, and passing on their own dramatized version of some snippet of rumour they've heard, while making out that they knew it all along. [...]It's also ridiculous the way people will push open a wooden sliding door so roughly. Surely it wouldn't make that clatter if they'd life it a little as they push. [...]People who go about in a carriage with squeaky wheels are very irritating. It makes you wonder irately if they're deaf. And if you find yourself riding in one you've borrowed from someone, you even begin to loathe its owner.Someone who butts in when you're talking and smugly provides the ending herself. Indeed anyone who butts in, be they child or adult, is most infuriating.

[60] I do wish men, when they're taking their leave from a lady at dawn, wouldn't insist on adjusting their clothes to a nicety... After all, who would laugh at a man or criticize him if they happened to catch sight of him on his way home from an assignation in fearful disarray, with his cloak or hunting costume all awry? One does want a lovers' dawn departure to be tasteful.