Little Labors

When the empress moved

The passage in The Pillow Book titled “When the Empress Moved” tells of all the amusing and comic things that happen when the empress Teishi and her court (including Shonagon) are moved out of the main palace to another residence, one where the gate is not wide enough for the carriage to pass, where the master of the house doesn’t know the words for things, and where the court ladies are not given their proper privacy. In this passage, Shonagon does not mention that the empress Teishi is pregnant and ill, that another woman from another family was also recently named empress, that the move to a house far beneath her station was a political one, part of an attempt to shift power to a different family, and she also does not mention that the empress Teishi will soon die in childbirth, an event that has most likely already happened when the passage was written but which isn’t encompassed in the passage. Instead the writing is crowded over with laughter and “charm,” and scholars tell us that the passage has a special density of what in Japanese aesthetics is known as okashii—the amusing and the strange — and this high incidence of okashii (as opposed to aware, roughly translated to us as the pathos of things passing) often increases in The Pillow Book at moments when we might expect the opposite, at moments of distress and loss. (This is part of what makes me associate the book with what I think of as the “small” as opposed to the “minor.”)

Then the section that immediately follows that of “When the Empress Moved” (and though we can’t be certain of the original order of the passages, it is plausible that they were in this order) is one full of the touchingly named quality of aware. It tells of a once-favored palace dog who is punished by being cast out from the palace — sent to Dog Island! — and who eventually makes his way back, injured and emaciated. The returned dog pretends to be a different dog, but cries telling tears when his true name is mentioned. Eventually, the dog receives an imperial pardon — his offense had been to startle a beloved cat who wore an imperial headdress and was known as Lady Myobu, that was why he was banished — and he is thereafter, according to Shonagon, “returned to his former happy state.” She continues, “Yet even now, when I remember how he whimpered and trembled in response to our sympathy, it strikes me as a strange and moving scene; when people talk to me about it, I start crying myself.” It is the passage with the happy ending that closes in tears.

The Pillow Book is difficult to characterize. It’s not a novel and not a diary and not poems and not advice, but it has qualities of each, and it would have been understood at the time as a kind of miscellany, a familiar form. The book consists of 185 entries, many of them quite short, some of them anecdotes, some lists, some pronouncements. “Oxen should have very small foreheads with white hair,” one short section begins. “A preacher ought to be good-looking,” begins another, but the passage then bumps into, “But I really must stop writing this kind of thing. If I were still young enough, I might risk the consequence of putting down such impieties, but at my present stage of life I should be less flippant.”

Often Shonagon seems wildly petty about issues of “taste”—“Nothing can be worse than allowing the driver of one’s ox carriage to be poorly dressed”—and we have to remember that the writer of the passage, Shonagon, was a person whose very delimited power derived almost exclusively from her expert manipulation of the language of passing fashions. She knows the best way to starch cottons, what colors look best under what other colors, and just how to hold a fan; this arena of tiny decisions was a kind of politics, and the only kind available to her. In her list, “Things that have lost their power,” we find

a woman who has taken off her false locks to comb the short hair that remains… A large tree that has been blown down in a gale and lies on its side with its roots in the air… The retreating figure of a sumo wrestler who has been defeated in a match… A woman who is angry with her husband about some trifling matter, leaves home and goes somewhere to hide. She is certain that he will rush about looking for her; but he does nothing of the kind and shows the most infuriating indifference. Since she cannot stay away for ever, she swallows her pride and returns.

Scholars are not even sure of what Shonagon’s real name was, but it is known that her father was a poet, that she was not considered naturally beautiful, and that whether she died an impoverished nun in the countryside or in mild gentility with a second husband is not clear.

My very favorite entry in The Pillow Book is a not-so-simple story Shonagon tells about “the woman’s hand.” “The woman’s hand” is written in Japanese, rather than Chinese. The passage begins simply:

The Captain First Secretary, Tadanobu, having heard certain false rumors, began to speak about me in the most unpleasant terms. “How could I have thought of her as a human being?” was the sort of thing he used to say…

Not mentioned in the passage is that Tadanobu was formerly Shonagon’s lover, and he had recently been promoted to a high position in court. His new hatred of Shonagon is not just emotionally painful, but also a threat; Shonagon, like any court lady, was always at risk of being sent away from court, as soon as her presence was no longer considered charming, but this possibility is not emphasized in the telling; instead Shonagon tries to laugh off the problem. She then hears word that Tadanobu has admitted that life has “after all been a bit boring without” Shonagon. Shortly after, a messenger arrives for Shonagon with a letter from Tadanobu. She doesn’t want to be flustered when she reads it, so she tells the messenger to leave and that she’ll send a reply later; the messenger says no, that his master told him that if he didn’t get a reply right away he should take the letter back. Shonagon opens the letter, and finds the opening stanza of a Chinese poem:

With you it is flower time

As you sit in the Council Hall

‘Neath a curtain of brocade.

Beneath the verse, the powerful former lover has added: How does the stanza end?

The poem is one written by a revered poet, Po Chu-I, while he was in exile. Sending a Chinese poem to a woman should make no sense — a woman wasn’t supposed to know Chinese, the language of politics and high poetry. (The Pillow Book is written in Japanese, the common language.) Tadanobu has set a sort of trap for Shonagon. For her to demonstrate her knowledge of Chinese would be unfeminine. Either she can appear to be ignorant — and Tadanobu knows she takes pride in her intelligence — or she can respond, knowingly, in Chinese, which would reveal her at once to have a weak Chinese script and also to being vulgarly open about the fact that she was versed in Chinese at all.

Shonagon takes a piece of charcoal from the fire and uses it to write, in Japanese, in “the woman’s hand,” at the bottom of Tadanobu’s note:

Who would come to visit

This grass-thatched hut of mine?

The words are the closing lines from another poem written by another poet, also in exile, but it is a poem written in Japanese. In contrast to the Council Hall and brocade, the grass-thatched hut is a humble setting; Japanese, as opposed to Chinese, is the humble language; the charcoal is more humble than ink; the question is a more submissive form than the statement; the addressee shows herself to be none of the things the addresser suggests in the initial stanza, in fact the opposite; but the display of wit and learning, at once veiled and visible, is a display of the one kind of power Shonagon has; knowing how to obscure that power passably, in an elegant humility — is its own further show of virtuosity. Also the note, in content, is a simple invitation of love.

“How can one break from a woman like that?” a friend says to Tadanobu.

Within a day, all of the Emperor’s gentlemen have Shonagon’s response written on their fans. Shonagon becomes not only the confection of choice, but also a kind of legend at court. For her small witticism, her tiny act. But it’s along a web of such small elegances that Shonagon survives, since she is not beautiful, and not noble, and soon enough not young either. Every week she is more at risk of being sent away, and even her own intelligence, which is what saves her, also makes her vulnerable. She can’t stand the sight of her reflection, or the sight of other women in decline, and that revulsion also fuels her work. “I cannot stand a woman who wears sleeves of unequal width,” she says. And “When I make myself imagine what it is like to be one of those women who live at home… I am filled with scorn.” As a samurai’s judgment of a ronin makes psychological sense as someone catching sight of themselves in a lower state, Shonagon is never more rough than on figures who resemble her. In her list of “unsuitable things” she notes: “A woman who is well past her youth is pregnant and walks along panting.” Another passage describes a visit from a beggar nun who is asking for offerings from the altar — asking, basically, for food. Shonagon and the other court women are amused by the beggar nun, who dances and sings, but they are also repelled by her clothing and manners, which are repeatedly described as disgusting. The ladies prepare a package of food for the beggar nun, and then complain that she keeps coming around; we hear that the beggar’s voice is curiously refined; the fate of the beggar nun could easily be that of the women then at court, though this is never said. Instead, the beggar nun passage switches abruptly into a lengthy anecdote about all sorts of hopes and bets among the court ladies as to which mound of snow made in the castle courtyard will last the longest; none of the court ladies wins; Shonagon prepares a poem about the last of the snow; the empress has the snow swept away, ruining the game; Shonagon is more devastated by this than seems to make sense; but the empress has treated her court ladies in the same indulgent then indifferent way that the court ladies treated the beggar nun; Shonagon juxtaposes the scenes so that we see each person, even the empress, slipping in power, clinging to the tiny entertainments they can offer, their only currency. Taste culture helplessly tells another story.