枕草子 — Sei Shōnagon
You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title : The pillow-book of Sei Shōnagon Author : Sei Shōnagon Translator : Arthur Waley Release date : May 5, 2025 [eBook #76016] Language : English Original publication : London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1928 Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76016 Credits : Carla Foust, Robert Tonsing, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) *** START OF , WOKING FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1928 TO HAZEL CROMPTON PRELIMINARY NOTES 1. I have here translated about a quarter of the Pillow-Book . [1] Omissions have been made only where the original was dull, unintelligible, repetitive, or so packed with allusion that it required an impracticable amount of commentary. 2. Short extracts from the Pillow-Book will be found in Aston’s Japanese Literature (1899), Florenz’s Geschichte der Jap. Litteratur (1906), and Revon’s Anthologie de la Littérature Japonaise (1910). Save for a line or two here and there, and two anecdotes (pp. 78 and 113), parts of which are translated by Aston and Revon, I have avoided what has been translated before, not on principle, but because it seemed to me that, on the whole, the least interesting passages had been chosen. [2] 3. The text I have used is that of the Makura no Sōshi Hyōshaku (first published, 1924; 2nd edition in one volume, 1926), by Kaneko Moto-omi, to whose commentary I am greatly indebted. The proofs have been read by Miss Sybil Pye and Mr. Tadao Doi, to both of whom I am very grateful. THE PILLOW-BOOK OF SEI SHŌNAGON JAPAN IN THE TENTH CENTURY When the first volume of The Tale of Genji appeared in English, the prevailing comment of critics was that the book revealed a subtle and highly developed civilization, the very existence of which had hitherto remained unsuspected. It was guessed that so curious a state of society, with its rampant æstheticism and sophisticated unmorality, its dread of the explicit, the emphatic, must have behind it a protracted history of undisturbed development, or (as others put it) must be the climax of an age-long decadence. And it is indeed true that the unique civilization portrayed in the Tale of Genji and The Pillow-Book of Sei Shōnagon corresponds to a unique record of isolation and tranquillity. The position of Japan, lying on the edge of the Oriental world, has been compared to that of England always in full communion with Europe, yet exempt from the worst perils of contiguity—in fact, ideally ‘semi-detached.’ But the comparison has little force. Japan is eight times farther from the mainland than we from France. One cannot swim across the Straits of Tsushima. Yet phase after phase of civilization—agriculture, tools, domestic animals at an age long before history, then later, the Chinese ideograms, Indian religion, Persian textiles—managed to filter across the Straits; while invasion, save for an occasional raid of pirates from China, not merely during those early years, but until the abortive Mongol descent in the thirteenth century, was almost unknown. In Europe and on the continent of Asia no single strip of land has ever enjoyed a like immunity. Across France, Hungary, Poland, Turkestan, how many armies marched during the long centuries of Japan’s absolute security! Thus arose a culture that, among other peculiarities, had that of not being cosmopolitan. Rome, Byzantium, Ctesiphon, even Ch’ang-an were international cities. In the streets of Kyōto a stray Korean or Chinaman were, as specimens of the exotic, the best that could be hoped for. The world, to a Japanese of the tenth century, meant Japan and China. India was semi-mythical, and Persia uncertainly poised somewhere between China and Japan. Thus, since the establishment of the capital at Heian [3] in 794, had grown up a highly specialized, intense and uniform civilization, dominated by one family, the Fujiwara; a state of society in which the stock of knowledge, the experience, the prejudices of all individuals were so similar that the grosser forms of communication seemed no longer necessary. A phrase, a clouded hint, an allusion half-expressed, a gesture imperceptible to common eyes, moved this courtly herd with a facility as magic as those silent messages that in the prairie ripple from beast to beast. It was a purely æsthetic and, above all, a literary civilization. Never, among people of exquisite cultivation and lively intelligence, have purely intellectual pursuits played so small a part. What strikes us most is that the past was almost a blank; not least so the history of Japan, extending even in mythological theory only to the seventh century b.c. and remaining fabulous for fifteen hundred years. It is indeed our intense curiosity about the past that most sharply distinguishes us from the ancient Japanese. Here every educated person is interested in some form or another of history. The busiest merchant is an authority upon snuff-boxes, Tudor London, or Chinese jade. The remotest country clergyman reads papers on eoliths; his daughters revive forgotten folk-dances. But to the Japanese of the tenth century, ‘old’ meant fusty, uncouth, disagreeable. To be ‘worth looking at’ a thing must be imamekashi , ‘now-ish,’ up-to-date. By Shōnagon and Murasaki the great collection of early poetry (the Manyōshū ), on the rare occasions when they quote it, is always referred to in an apologetic way, as something which despite its solid merits will necessarily offend the modern eye. Nor did they feel that the future—with us an increasing preoccupation—in any way concerned them. Their absorption in the present, the fact that with them ‘modern’ was invariably a term of