From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sei Shōnagon in a later 17th century drawing

Sei Shōnagon, illustration from an issue of Hyakunin Isshu (Edo period)

Sei Shōnagon, drawing by Kikuchi Yosai (1788–1878)

Sei Shōnagon (清少納言), (c. 966-1017) was a Japanese author and a court lady who served the Empress Teishi/Empress Sadako around the year 1000 during the middle Heian Period, and is best known as the author of The Pillow Book (枕草子 makura no sōshi).

Sei Shōnagon's actual given name is not known. It was the custom among aristocrats in those days to call a court lady (女房nyōbō) by a combined appellative taken from a) her clan name and b) some court office belonging either to her or some close relative. Sei (清) thus derives from the Kiyohara (清原) clan, while Shōnagon was a government post. It is unknown which of her relatives held the post of shōnagon. Her actual name has been a topic of debate among scholars, who generally favor Kiyohara Nagiko (清原 諾子) as a likely possibility.

Little is known about her life except what is said in her writings. She was the daughter of Kiyohara no Motosuke, a scholar and famous waka poet. Her grandfather Kiyohara no Fukayabu was also a well-known waka poet. They were middle-ranking courtiers and had difficulties, since they were never granted a revenue-producing court office.

She married Tachibana Norimitsu at the age of 16, and gave birth to one son. Afterwards, she remarried to Fujiwara-Muneyo, and gave birth to a daughter. At age 27, when she began to serve the Empress Teishi, consort of Emperor Ichijō, she was supposedly divorced. She was fascinated by the young and beautiful Empress, who was only in her teens when they met.

Shōnagon achieved fame through her work The Pillow Book, a collection of lists, gossip, poetry, observations, complaints and anything else she found of interest during her years in the court. In The Pillow Book, Shōnagon reports the troubles which Empress Teishi had after her father died and when Regent Fujiwara no Michinaga made one of his daughters another consort of the Emperor Ichijō. Because of the risk of fire, the Imperial family did not, at that time, live in the Heian Palace. Empress Teishi resided in a part of Chūgushiki, the Bureau of Serving the (Middle) Empress. Sei refers to the death of her patroness, who died in childbirth in 1000, with refined lightheartedness and implies that doing so was not difficult for her. To have treated the subject in a more passionate way would have been considered unstylish. Her writing depicts the court of the young Empress as full of an elegant and merry atmosphere.

There are no details about Shōnagon's life after the death of the Empress, though The Pillow Book is thought to have been finished sometime between 1001 and 1010. One story has Shōnagon living out her twilight years in poverty, but this is probably a legend spread by those who disapproved of her alleged promiscuity.

Shōnagon is also known for her rivalry with her contemporary writer and court lady Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote The Tale of Genji and served the Empress Shoshi, second consort of the Emperor Ichijō. Murasaki Shikibu wrote about Shōnagon - somewhat scathingly, though conceding Shōnagon's literary gifts - in her diary, The Murasaki Shikibu Diary.

Notes

• This article incorporates text from OpenHistory.

See also

• The Pillow Book, a 1996 film by Peter Greenaway inspired by Shōnagon's work.

External links

• Media related to Sei Shōnagon at Wikimedia Commons
• Britannica | Sei Shonagon
• The Lists of a Lady-in-Waiting: A Portrait of the Author of The Pillow Book

From Wikiquote

Sei Shōnagon by Kikuchi Yosai

Sei Shōnagon (965-1010s?) was a Japanese author and a court lady who served the Empress Consort Teishi around the year 1000. She is known as the author of The Pillow Book (makura no sōshi).

Sourced

The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (1002)

Penguin Classics, 1971, translated by Ivan Morris, ISBN 0-14-044236-7

• A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything. (p. 44)

• One is telling a story about old times when someone breaks in with a little detail that he happens to know, implying that one's own version is inaccurate — disgusting behavior! (p. 46)

• Splendid Things
  Chinese brocade. A sword with a decorated scabbard. The grain of the wood in a Buddhist statue. Long flowering branches of beautifully coloured wistaria entwined about a pine tree. (p. 109)

• Things That Lose by Being Painted
  Pinks, cherry blossoms, yellow roses. Men or women who are praised in romances as being beautiful.

  Things That Gain by Being Painted
  Pines. Autumn fields. Mountain villages and paths. Cranes and deer. A very cold winter scene; an unspeakably hot summer scene. (p. 138)

About Sei Shōnagon

• Sei Shonagon feels modern, almost a proto-feminist in such a paternalistic age that women at court stayed, for the most part, silent and still and available indoors all their lives. She said much, and she said two electrifying things from the still darkness of her domestic prisons. She said them of course very much in her own way, but she said there were two things in life that were absolutely essential, and life would be unbearable without them: the sensuous body and literature. My crude summation would be sex and text. Both have the X factor. She said them with longing and her longing stayed with me.
  • Peter Greenaway in "105 Years of Illustrated Text" in the Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 5 No. 1.

• It is a loose book, impressionistic, hardly coherent as a continuous narrative. It is full of descriptions of court life, and the retelling of court gossip and descriptions of fashionable shrines and how to get there by the most elegant means. It is a piece of writing replete with those typical Japanese wistful and melancholic evocations of ephemerality. It was written a thousand years ago almost exactly to the year the film was made, and it was written by a woman. To be literate a thousand years ago in the West was pretty uncommon; to be literate and a woman, very unlikely; to be literate, female, and quite brilliant, a well-nigh Western impossibility.
  • Peter Greenaway on The Pillow Book in "105 Years of Illustrated Text" in the Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 5 No. 1.

External links

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Sei Shōnagon