About a collection of tales from ancient Japan – cats, dogs, and courtesans in the Heian period

Rivka Galchen, Shonagon is hot, London Review of Books, Vol. 42 No. 1 · 2 January 2020.

Shonagon is the author of The Pillow Book, which is about life in the court of Empress Teishi, from the Heian period (794-1186). The article is a review of a book about that book, Gergana Ivanova, The Unbinding ‘Pillow Book’: The Many Lives of a Japanese Classic, Columbia, 240 pp., £55, December 2018. For example:

One of my favourite passages is about a dog. But it begins with a powerful cat: ‘The cat who lived in the palace had been awarded the headdress of nobility and was called Lady Myobu.’ One day, Lady Myobu wanders onto the veranda when she is meant to stay inside; her attendant, Lady Uma, encourages the dog, Okinamaro, to go after the cat. Okinamaro does as he is told. The startled cat bolts inside and disturbs the emperor, who banishes Okinamaro for frightening his beloved cat. He also fires Lady Uma. A few days later, when the dog tries to return, he is beaten by two imperial administrators, and tossed beyond the palace gate. That evening, as the court ladies and the empress are lamenting Okinamaro’s demise, a trembling, swollen dog walks into the court. Could it be Okinamaro? He won’t eat or respond to his name. The ladies decide it’s not him. But the next morning, as Shonagon again bemoans Okinamaro’s fate, the injured dog starts ‘to shake and tremble’. He sheds ‘a flood of tears’. The ladies realise that it is Okinamaro after all: ‘On the previous night it was for fear of betraying himself that he had refused to answer to his name.’ The courtiers prepare him a great meal and soon he receives an imperial pardon.

There is so much to notice in the story of the insufficiently noble dog. He makes it back into the emperor’s graces, but the dismissed attendant does not. When the dog returns, and is recognised, he is treated terribly: only when he pretends to be other than himself can his redemption begin. While he is in exile, the court ladies remember that he was once adorned in peach and cherry blossoms: ‘How could the dog have imagined this would be his fate? We all felt very sorry for him.’ They are the dog, and the dog is them. This is never stated explicitly; as the story demonstrates, sincerity can be detrimental to survival. Shonagon’s text is like those satins whose vertical threads are of a different colour from the horizontal ones: in one light they look red; in another purple. In one light the dog story is movingly personal; in another it is a devastating portrait of power’s caprice.

Shonagon claims she started the book when the Empress gave her a cache of paper, which was a valuable commodity at the time, and she began jotting this that and the other about whatever. She wrote a private journal.

If it was a private journal, how did it come to be so widely read? Shonagon claims that the book began to make its way into the world after being discovered by a powerful visitor, a provincial governor. ‘I snatched at the book and made a desperate effort to get it back,’ she writes. But the governor ‘instantly took it off with him and did not return it until much later. I suppose it was from this time that my book began to be passed about at court.’ Scholars date the book’s initial circulation to around 995-96, a few years before Empress Teishi’s death in childbirth. It might seem strange that a text which lent prestige to a court out of political favour would be allowed to circulate at all. In Unbinding ‘The Pillow Book’, Gergana Ivanova gives an explanation: the celebrated work was considered a way to appease the angry ghosts of Teishi and her family. Cultural power is not only a weapon to be used against the weak, it is also a consolation prize offered by the strong.

Teishi may have been an empress, but she wasn't much of one. Truth be told, the title didn't mean much. She was one among a number of consorts at the emperor's court and her star was eclipsed by the time she was 20. Hence, there were ghosts to be placated.

So sad.

The road of a successful woman writer was not easy in ancient Japan:

In the Kamakura-Muromachi era (1186-1573), women writers of the Heian period came in for intense reprisals; they appear in the stories of the time as fallen women, ‘incessantly punished’ for their beauty, daring and erudition. In one such narrative, Shikibu comes to people in their dreams, begging them to destroy any copies of her immoral work so that she can be liberated from hell. Another Heian-era woman writer vows to sleep with a thousand men to save her parents from the torment to which her beauty and talent has condemned them. In Tales of the Past, a popular collection of stories published around 1215, Shonagon becomes a destitute old nun and is so far from her former beauty that she has to show her genitals to passing warriors to convince them she is a woman and her life should be spared. It was reassuring to imagine these successful women writers as miserable, hideous, homeless and old.

Attitudes changed in the Edo period (1603-1867), when Heian woman writers served a different fantasy. The pleasure quarters that were established throughout Japan at the beginning of the 17th century took inspiration from the Heian era’s sophisticated eroticism, and their ‘elaborate brothel etiquette’ was modelled on contemporary beliefs about Heian court society. Writers like Shonagon were reimagined as glamorous courtesans. One popular Edo book, The Twin Mounds of Conjugality, offered ‘sexually charged stories about 12 literary women from the Heian period’, and featured an illustration of Shonagon being taken from behind as she practised calligraphy in the lamplight, while her brother (yes, brother) looked on, masturbating.

Ewwwuu...gross.

That didn't last forever, obviously – nothing does.

In the Meiji period (1868-1912), the critical establishment found in Shonagon a way of demonstrating that Japan had ‘modern’ women long before the West. In 1902, the literary scholar Umezawa Waken published an influential monograph on Shonagon and Shikibu, which positioned Shonagon as a forerunner of Japan’s ‘new woman’: ‘single (dokushin), vagrant (horo), arrogant (kyokan), unrestrained (goto)’. Shonagon’s audacious personality was thought to be reflected in her experimental literary style. As early as 1806, critics had begun to classify Shonagon’s text as a zuihitsu – roughly, a miscellany. ‘A zuihitsu,’ one writer explained,

is something in which you write down things you have seen and heard, said or thought, the useless and the serious alike as they come to you. This includes matters in which one is quite well versed, as well as shallow musings that one simply feels it would be a shame to forget. Unable to capture things in a subtle and delicate style, one is likely to include awkward or tasteless things that make it disappointing. But because a zuihitsu is not embellished, character, ability, and learning show, making it all the more interesting.

The fragmentary form of The Pillow Book made Shonagon an anomaly among her Heian contemporaries, most of whom wrote courtly romances. But Ivanova argues that this ‘stereotypical view’ of The Pillow Book – one that emphasises only its random and spontaneous style – has led many people to consider it frivolous, despite the fact that the zuihitsu category postdates Shonagon’s work by centuries.

And then there's this:

Then, all of a sudden, the reader is presented with an (unmistakeably) personal recollection. ‘Equally disagreeable is the man who, when leaving in the middle of the night, takes care to fasten the cord of his headdress.’ Several paragraphs detail how one ought to leave and how one ought not to. ‘When he jumps out of bed, scurries about the room, tightly fastens his trouser-sash, rolls up the sleeves of his court cloak, over-robe, or hunting costume, stuffs his belongings into the breast of his robe and then secures the outer sash – one really begins to hate him.’

You are perhaps thinking you'd like to read this pillow book? Forget the Waley translation from 1928, as it omits much of the book. Instead:

The translations by Ivan Morris and Meredith McKinney are both excellent. Morris’s has unobtrusive endnotes and accompanying material. In one note, he explains that cats were particularly valued in Shonagon’s time because they were an import from China. He also tells us that the ‘dog island’ to which Okinamaro was briefly banished was a figure of speech, rather than a real place full of baying hounds.