54 pages • 1 hour read
Sei ShōnagonThe Pillow Book
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Art of Poetry
The art of poetry is one of Shonagon’s great fixations. “Tension” will be “thick in the air” when individuals or groups are challenged to compose poems for one another (103). Even in response to a private note, the pressure to compose a beautiful poem can be great. It can feel “impossible” to complete a poem, especially under such pressure (68). This is why Shonagon seems to prefer seeking sudden inspiration, often by reflecting upon nature.
Combining a beautiful landscape with excellent light can be one of the best ways to access the art of poetry. While Shonagon often meditates on the sound of words, thinking through the way that sound relates to meaning, she meditates even more on the way that humans connect to the earth around them. This is the fodder for poems, whereas gossip and even human relationships do not fuel her poems. When writing a note to a lover or a friend, she often uses natural metaphors in order to describe a less tangible emotional connection.
Shonagon is embarrassed to “hear someone proudly reciting to others a poem of theirs that really isn’t much good, or bragging about the praise they’ve received for it” (96). The art of poetry is one that not all can access, she insists, though she also stands by its superiority over other forms of communication. She even mocks, and cuts off ties with, Norimitsu because he cannot understand the art of poetry. Literacy is important (and she even mocks those without it to their faces), but beyond that a sense for the art of poetry is crucial in Shonagon’s eyes.
Okashi
Okashi is a Japanese word for “that which entertains, intrigues, delights, pleases, and beguiles” (Introduction). Shonagon’s interest in okashi appears throughout the text; indeed, The Pillow Book captures okashi through its lists, stories, anecdotes, and poems. Notably, this practice of collecting is separate from the art of poetry, which arranges and thus transforms such collections into objects.
Shonagon’s ultimate expression that she wrote about “the things that delight, or that people find impressive,” reflects the value and theme of okashi as it influences her work (255). This is also part of the reason that her fragments do not connect together: entertainment or delight are small and pleasing, rather than encompassing and grand. Her text’s intention is not to moralize, but to pull readers in on a small level and leave them with some kind of delight.
Thus, though Shonagon’s text includes some opinions, it is not pedagogical. Rather, it strives to connect to the pulse of life, which (possibly) against her will also connects with other individuals.
Historical Present / Fragmentation
Shonagon’s text is not intended “to prove the limits of [her] own sensibility” (255). Instead, it is intended to offer parts of life that can entertain. As a result, it becomes a collection of fragments, intentionally not listed in chronological order or leading to a particular message. Without an assumed reader, a text adopts a different shape.
When Shonagon imagines particular images, scenes, or circumstances, she often does so without placing a specific year or historical context around them. Rather, she often refers to events that could have happened at any time. She also refers to events that are perennial, like the time “around the time of the new moon at the end of the fourth month or early in the fifth” when “the sight of the orange tree’s very white blossoms set amongst the deep green of the leaves, seen in early morning rain, is extraordinarily moving” (40). For Shonagon, a vivid image is immortal, and it does not need to be historical even if it is something that she has seen, technically, in the past.
As a result, then, Shonagon’s text is both specific to her own lived experience and universal. She both intimately describes the world that she occupies and eschews it for an atemporal experience of a specific place. Part of this historical present is due to the constructions of medieval Japanese, which translate into English without a strong differentiation between past and present tenses. But the borders between Shonagon’s recent and far past, between her present and her imagination, blur throughout the text, causing readers to focus on the delights and entertainments that she describes rather than occupying themselves with the history, or chronology, of the events and images that she describes.
