Women in Classical Japanese literature: literary learning in Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book

Jennifer Guest, University of Oxford

-What kind of textual world can we glimpse in the Pillow Book – what kinds of

attitudes toward reading, writing, literary knowledge, and the material objects of

texts themselves?

-Within this setting, what kinds of possibilities are open to women in terms of

education and access to texts? In particular, what about the idea that classical

Chinese texts and related styles of writing were off-limits to women?

-What kind of identity does the Pillow Book imagine for a woman writer? How

does it work with or against ideas about gendered literary performance?

Joyful things (#258):You read the first part of a tale you haven’t read yet, and are filled with intense curiosity – and then you discover the rest. (True, there are also times when that happens and you’re disappointed.)

You pick up and look at a letter that someone else has torn up and tossed away, and you’re able to read many lines of the same passage….

A poem from some formal occasion, or perhaps one exchanged in conversation, becomes widely known and gets jotted down in people’s notes. Although I haven’t ever experienced this myself, I can still imagine it!

It also makes you glad when you hear some old quotation, one you don’t know, uttered by someone you look up to. Afterwards, when you happen on it somewhere, it’s utterly delightful – as you realize ‘aha, that was it!’, you find the person who said it truly charming.

When you’ve gotten some good paper, Michinoku or even the ordinary kind.

Tale of Genji picture scroll, 12th c. (Tokugawa Art Museum)

Tale of Genji picture scroll, 12th c. (Tokugawa Art Museum)

Joyful things:When some daunting person is quizzing you on the beginnings and endings of poems, and you suddenly remember one – even just on your own account, you do feel glad. So often even with the things you usually remember, when someone asks you just forget them completely.

Enviable things (#152):You set out to learn a sutra, and recite the same bit over and over, uncertain and tending to forget – when people just reel it off smoothly (priests, of course, but ordinary men and women too), you can’t help thinking ‘in what age of the world could this happen for me?’

Kokin wakashū (12th c. Gen’ei MS, Tokyo National Museum)

Placing a bound volume of the Kokinshū before her, Her Majesty read out the first lines of the poems and asked us, ‘How does this one end?’

There were some we’d learned by heart day and night, but we couldn’t manage to utter a word – how could this be?

(#21)

Poetry anthologies, sutras:

- ‘closed’ texts with titles and fixed contents that can be memorized

→joy of social recognition

→anxiety about failure of memory and its social implications

Tales, letters, primers and private notes:

- open-ended texts with variable contents

→joy of discovery

→anxiety about material loss

Poems and other quotations; recognizable anecdotes

- Readily move between text and conversation; key source for literary creativity and play

From the courtiers’ antechamber, someone sent over a branch of plum whose blossoms had already scattered, and asked, “What can you say about this?” When I simply answered, “Fallen so soon…,” a great number of senior courtiers sitting in the north hallway began chanting the corresponding poem. Hearing this, His Majesty declared, “Rather than composing the usual sort of poem and sending that, this kind of reply is much better. Well answered!” (#101)

Ashide-e Wakan rōeishū, 12th c., Kyoto National Museum

Couplet by Ōe no Koretoki, collected in the Japanese and Chinese-style Chanting Collection (Wakan rōeishū):

“The plum blossom on Dayu Peak has fallen so soon; who will mistake it for face powder?” (大庚嶺之梅早落、誰問粉粧)

From Secretary Controller Yukinari, a palace affairs official brought over something that

looked like a picture, wrapped in a white poem-sheet and attached to some plum blossom

in splendid bloom. Thinking it must be a picture, I hurried to take it – but when I looked,

it was a pair of those things called “heidan” lined up and wrapped together. In the formal

letter attached, it said, in the manner of an official report,

Respectfully presented:

One package of heidan.

Presented in accordance with precedent, as above.

To: Superintendent of the Household, the lord Minor Counsellor.

(進上 餅餤一包 仍例進上如件 別当少納言殿)

And then the month and date, and name “Mimana no Nariyuki”, and at the bottom, “This

humble servant would have attended himself, but it seems he hasn’t come because his

appearance is so poor in the light of day.” He wrote it most delightfully.

What should I do about the response? For bringing these “heidan”, would the messenger

usually receive anything in particular? How I wished for someone who would know

these things! Her Majesty heard me talking about this, and said “There’s the sound of

Korenaka’s voice. Call him over and ask him.”

When I went out on the veranda and had a servant summon him, saying “I have a matter

to discuss with the Grand Controller of the Left!”, he appeared in very proper dress. ‘Not

like that – this is a private matter,’ I told him. ‘Supposing there was a servant who

brought this sort of thing to present to a Controller like you, or a Lesser Captain – would

you do anything in particular?”

“There’s nothing in particular, no. I’d just accept the gifts and eat them. Why do you

ask? I don’t suppose you’ve received some from the Office of State?”

“How could that be?” I responded, and in reply to the letter, I wrote on delicate paper of

a bold crimson hue, “It seems a servant who does not bring these in person will show

himself very cold and distant (reitan),” and attached it to a fine branch of red plum.

(#127)

Murasaki Shikibu reading Bai Juyi’s poetry to Empress Shōshi(Diary of Murasaki Shikibu picture scroll, 13th c.)

-The lady-in-waiting and the scholar-official: two contested identities

-Knowledge of Chinese-style writing vs its display

-Literacy as knowledge about the proper handling of texts, including social context

→Why so few scenes of reading or study in the Pillow Book?