The Pillow-Book of Sei Shōnagon

To Hazel Crompton

Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.

www.tuttlepublishing.com

Copyright © 2011 Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.

Credit
Images used with the permission of The Clark Center for Japanese Art & Culture
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sei Shonagon, b. ca. 967.
[Makura no soshi. English]
The pillow book of Sei Shonagon: The Diary of a Courtesan in Tenth Century Japan / translated by Arthur Waley; with a foreword by Dennis Washburn.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-4629-0088-6
1. Sei Shonagon, b. ca. 967. 2. Courtesans--Japan--Biography. 3. Japan--Court and courtiers--Biography. 4. Japan--Court and courtiers--History. 5. Japan--Social life and customs--794-1185. 6. Japan--History--Heian period, 794-1185. I. Waley, Arthur. II. Title.
PL788.6.M3E56 2011
895.6’8103--dc22
[B]
Library of Congress Control Number:
2010026057

ISBN 978-1-4629-0088-6

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Foreword

Arthur Waley’s translation of Sei Sh
ō
nagon’s
The Pillow Book
(
Makura no s
ō
shi
), which was first published in 1928, may strike contemporary readers as something of a literary curiosity. Waley informs us at the very beginning of his work that he has translated only about one-quarter of the original, omitting “only” those portions (i.e. a full three-quarters of the text) he found dull, unintelligible and repetitive, or that required too much explanation. Moreover, he does not provide a straightforward, stand-alone translation, but instead offers a mix of translated passages and commentary that contextualizes and explains the original text. These extraordinary decisions not only imply a rather severe critical judgment of the literary value of Sei Sh
ō
nagon’s work, but also suggests in a somewhat backhanded manner that his English-speaking readership had neither the patience nor the imagination to deal with the original in its entirety.

At first glance Waley’s approach seems to fly in the face of one of the most fundamental assumptions about translation, which is that it must somehow stay true to the original and preserve its integrity. To make radical cuts on the basis of practical considerations of length or intelligibility is an understandable though debatable proposition, but to select which passages to translate on the basis of subjective criteria (e.g. what makes one section dull and another interesting) is simply arbitrary. However, by the same token, to criticize Waley solely on the basis of the notion that the translator must preserve the integrity of a text, that he should essentially disappear from view so that the reader can engage the original without mediation, is also very much a debatable proposition, since determining what it means to stay true to an original almost always depends upon subjective criteria. In producing his version of
The Pillow Book,
Waley was certainly as much an editor as a translator, and as such his work challenges widely accepted notions of the role of the translator. In order to judge his work fairly, to account for its strengths and weaknesses, we need to consider the validity of the reasons behind his choices.

In 1928, Waley undertook his translation of
The Pillow Book
during a remarkably productive period of his life. He had begun his studies of Chinese and Japanese in 1913 after taking a position cataloguing the British Museum’s Oriental Prints and Manuscripts collection, and he started his career as a translator a few years later with a focus on Chinese poetry— a project that led to a brief professional association with Ezra Pound. Following on from his work with Chinese literature, he spent over a decade translating Murasaki Shikibu’s
The Tale of Genji
, eventually publishing his version in six volumes between 1921 and 1933. The acclaim he received secured his reputation as both a writer and a scholar, and established him as a seminal figure in the history of Japanese cultural studies in the West.

Given the demands placed on him by his other projects, Waley’s decision at that time to turn his attention to
The Pillow Book
seems extraordinarily ambitious. He certainly had personal reasons to undertake the project, since his success helped create a readership for translations from Asian literatures. There was, however, a compelling historical justification for the project as well. Sh
ō
nagon’s work has been considered canonical in Japan for a millennium, and it is usually placed alongside Murasaki’s masterpiece as one of the most of important achievements of the aristocratic culture of the Heian court. Taking that shared history into account, the value and appeal of translating
The Pillow Book
simultaneously with
The Tale of Genji
is apparent.

Comparisons between these works are sometimes a bit forced, since they are in fact quite different in form and conception. However, there was a long history in Japan of linking the works less on the basis of literary considerations than on the perception of a personal rivalry between the two authors—a rivalry occasionally expressed as a contrast between personalities, with Sh
ō
nagon being (supposedly) bright, perky, and audacious and Murasaki being dour, melancholy, and profound. While there is some textual basis for claiming this difference in temperament, any conclusions about the personal lives of these women remain speculative. What is not speculative is that they both employed their literary talents in the service of empresses who in fact were political rivals; and while Sh
ō
nagon and Murasaki may not have been in direct competition (though it is clear from Murasaki’s diary that they were aware of one another) their literary works were produced in a cultural milieu that privileged highly refined aesthetic sensibilities. In that respect their writings were shaped by and provide vivid insight into the values that governed taste and behavior in aristocratic society.

Waley makes it clear in his introductory essay that he believed the most important connection between
The Pillow Book
and
The Tale of Genji
was this shared aestheticism, and he makes a number of sweeping generalizations about Japanese court culture to support his claim. He argued that it was a culture that lacked any true historical awareness, that courtiers were so absorbed in the present that the term “modern” always denoted a positive value. As a result, he sees in mid-Heian court culture a kind of intellectual passivity and an obsession with proper form and ritual that led the aristocracy to place great emphasis on aesthetic pursuits.

The reader is likely to find in both
The Pillow Book
and
The Tale of Genji
much to justify Waley’s description of Japan in the tenth century. Artistic pursuits and the constant round of rituals, festivals and ceremonies set by the court calendar do seem to dominate the life of the nobility. Nonetheless, just as Waley argues that Murasaki’s fictional account of court life presented a view of the world as she wanted it to be, his account of tenth-century Japan has its own whiffof idealism. His emphasis on aestheticism as the dominant characteristic of the court reflects assumptions about art and literature that were invisible to him because of the age in which he lived and worked. The simple fact that he translated
The Pillow Book
as he did suggests that he shared, or at least was never bothered enough to question, his generation’s confidence in its cultural superiority and the universality of its standards of aesthetic tastes. He was apparently untroubled by the omissions in his translation, for in his view there was no point trying to read the original purely on its own terms.

The elite world Waley inhabited was not simply one of rarefied scholarship. His literary connections, especially with the Bloomsbury Group, put him in contact with a circle of writers who were on the cutting edge of literary Modernism. These interactions undoubtedly reinforced his already strong propensity to privilege a belief in the priority of genius and the individual talent in the creation of art. However, in occupying these two worlds Waley had to reconcile the perceived divide between the work of the scholar and that of the poet in order to treat translation as a form of art that attempts not only to capture the parochial qualities of the original that make it worthy of translation, but also to conform to broad contemporary literary standards. There is no question that he succeeded in many respects in producing works of considerable aesthetic appeal, but in terms of engaging the parochial qualities of a work like
The Pillow Book
, his achievement is much more uneven. It may seem paradoxical, but to give Waley the credit he is due we have to acknowledge the limitations and flaws created by assumptions that flowed from a narrow view of mid-Heian court society. Thus, it is important to briefly reconsider the historical context of the composition of
The Pillow Book
and some of the key literary practices of the period it exemplifies.

As Waley notes in his introduction, Sei Sh
ō
nagon was most likely born in the year 966. She was the daughter of Motosuke no Kiyohara, who worked as a provincial official, but became famous as a poet and scholar. Her family line can be traced back to the late seventh century, and it included many notable literary figures. We do not know her given name – like many other women authors from this period, we know her only by the name associated with her writings. Sei (
) is the Chinese-based pronunciation of the element
kiyo
in her family name (
). Sh
ō
nagon (
) is a government post (Lesser Counselor), and it was common for women who served at the palace or in the households of the nobility to take their name from an official title held by a male relative (usually the father, but not always). The scant archival record makes it difficult to say anything definitive about her personal life, and like many women writers of this period Sh
ō
nagon’s identity is partially hidden behind the anonymity of her literary name.

Motosuke seems to have desired a career at court for his daughter, partly as a means of promoting his family’s position, and so she was married to Tachibana Norimitsu when she was sixteen. She gave birth to a son and her husband’s career made a promising start, but he suffered a series of reversals and their marriage was on the point of annulment when Motosuke died in 990. In 993 she received her husband’s permission to separate in order to go into the service of Empress Teishi (Sadako), the oldest daughter of Fujiwara no Michitaka, who at that time held the powerful post of Kanpaku (Chancellor).

Sh
ō
nagon went into service at the palace for two main reasons. First, the separation from Norimitsu and the death of her father left her in a precarious social position. Serving in the salon of Empress Teishi thus provided some degree of financial security. Second, Michitaka was eager to spruce up the image of his daughter’s court. The system of “marriage politics” that the Fujiwara clan had practiced for more than a century as a way to gain control of the imperial household depended on Fujiwara daughters producing imperial princes who would be in the line of succession. Proximity to the Emperor was vital, and the rivalry among the consorts and concubines who made up what was in effect a harem was fueled by both sexual and political desires. The higher-ranking consorts established salons in their living quarters, and they strove to make them fascinating and enticing sites of culture where music, painting, incense, poetry and other arts would serve to attract the interest of the emperor. A woman like Sh
ō
nagon, who came from a long line of distinguished poets and scholars and who thus could be counted on to create a sophisticated, elegant atmosphere on both formal and informal occasions, was a valuable commodity to Michitaka.

Sh
ō
nagon became a central figure in Teishi’s salon, but unfortunately the young empress was star-crossed. Michitaka died in 995 and his rival, Fujiwara no Michinaga, became Kanpaku. Teishi’s brother Korechika was caught up in court intrigue and exiled in 997, at which point she withdrew from the palace. She failed to give Emperor Ichij
ō
a male heir, and so in 999 Michinaga’s young daughter Sh
ō
shi (Akiko) entered the palace as a consort (and later empress) to Ichij
ō
(Murasaki Shikibu entered service in Sh
ō
shi’s salon several years later, in 1006). Teishi died in 1000, at the age of 24, giving birth to another girl, and Sh
ō
nagon, who had become a close confidant to the empress, evidently left the court that year. It is reported that she married Fujiwara Muneyo and may have had a daughter with him, but little about her is known after she leaves the court, though it may be that she put together the manuscript of
The Pillow Book
during the first decade of the eleventh century. The last reference to her is dated 1017, but the precise date of her death is not known for certain.