The Pillow Book

Subtract and see: much can go, and the form invites it. A miscellany is open by design. A section on bridges or on islands that is little more than a run of names could be removed with the book’s knowledge almost unchanged, and the four textual lines show copyists rearranging and supplementing it for centuries without anyone feeling a whole broken. What resists removal is real. The opening seasonal section must stand where it does, because it sets the method, a category and a judgment in two words. The first reminiscence of coming to court is required: every later scene of wit is measured from the newcomer’s fear. The late reminiscences and the yamabuki petal carry the undertow. Held by the slack name-lists and by an order no author can be shown to have fixed.

Score: 7.2 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a self can be made of discriminations, and taste, exercised without apology on the smallest things, is a form of knowledge and of loyalty. “Hateful things” names, for the first time in this literature, the texture of ordinary irritation: the visitor who stays and talks, the lover who fumbles his leave-taking at dawn, the mosquito’s thin voice near the face. That frankness is a truth about feeling for which the tale and the waka had no place. The second disclosure is by omission. Written in part after the fall of the Empress’s house, the book keeps her court at its brightest, her laughing, never grieving, and the silence is fidelity. Held off the gate: much of what is disclosed is a mood, one woman’s, seen from one room and one rank.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The book rises often and never far. The opening four seasons are a height of their kind and have been learnt by heart for centuries: purple-tinged clouds trailing over the brightening ridge at dawn, fireflies in the summer dark, crows flying home at autumn dusk, frost and braziers in the winter morning. The newcomer’s first sight of the Empress’s hands in the lamplight, their colour against her sleeves, is a moment of transport. At Xianglu Peak wit and the white world meet in one gesture. Rain hangs on spider-webs like threaded white beads. The elevation is a miniaturist’s, frequent, exact and small in scale. The dreadful is all but absent and grandeur is refused by design, which holds the axis below the higher bands.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Little is built and some is evoked. Across the reminiscences the Empress becomes a figure larger than a person, the radiant sovereign lady whose household is a garden out of time, and the book shapes her court as a lost paradise kept intact by memory. The seasons of the opening set a cosmic order the rest is placed inside, and the impermanence that Buddhist thought gave the age stands, unspoken, behind every bright scene. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that none of this bears load as a pattern. Teishi is given no arc; the fall that would make her tragic is withheld, so the archetype is present only to a reader who brings the history. The narrator is a type, the clever woman at court, before she is an archetype.

Score: 7.0 / 10

The inheritance: the waka culture and its catalogues of poetic places, the Chinese learning of the court, Bai Juyi above all, and the women’s kana prose of the tenth century, the tale and the diary, the Kagerō diary among them. The turn is a form none of them offered: a book with no story and no single occasion, made of lists, judgments and scenes, governed only by a first-person sensibility that ranks the world. The list section, a category and its members chosen by taste, is its instrument. The stake was real and was paid: the voice displays Chinese learning and competitive wit at a court that thought such display unbecoming in a woman. Held below the top because the waka culture supplied the categories, and the daily practice of wit at court placed part of the wager on proven ground.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Change the form and the book loses what it knows. A continuous memoir would have to narrate time, and time at Teishi’s court ran to exile and death; the miscellany, discontinuous and without chronology, keeps every moment at its own height, and its silence about the fall is a property of the form, not only a choice. The list is the second instrument: a category with its members is a judgment held open, so the world is known as a field of discriminations rather than a sequence of events. The mixture of kinds is the third: a scene of the Empress’s wit beside a list of hateful things makes the court’s grandeur and its irritations one texture. Held off the top because the order is not secured: the Maedabon and Sakaibon lines rearrange the sections by kind, and the work survives it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence rather than promise. The book has been read, copied and commented on for about a thousand years: named by Kenkō in Tsurezuregusa, commented on in the Edo period, parodied, and taught in Japanese schools. Modern scholarship keeps finding questions in it: four textual lines and no fixed order, the politics of its silence about Michinaga, a woman’s display of Chinese learning, a self made in public, the list as a form. The voice changes with the reader who returns to it, arrogant at one age, brave at another, elegiac at a third. Held below the higher bands because much of its yield is renewed pleasure rather than renewed meaning, and beside The Tale of Genji, its own age’s well, it has sustained less argument.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The field: Japanese vernacular prose and poetry of the tenth and early eleventh centuries, with the Chinese letters of the Heian court behind them. The force is high. The book is the founding work of zuihitsu, prose that follows the brush, and with the opening seasons and the lists it gave Japanese prose a form for the judging self that it had not had. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Hōjōki (1212) and above all Tsurezuregusa, which names the Pillow Book, stand in its line; the zuihitsu ran through the Edo period to the modern Japanese essay; and “okashi” became one of the two words by which the Heian aesthetic is described, set against Genji’s “mono no aware”. Held below the top because Genji redirected more, and abroad its reach has been admiration more than redirection.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Span: about a thousand years read without break, copied in the medieval period, named by Kenkō, commented on in the Edo period, taught in schools now and translated widely in the last century. That puts it at the top of the step for centuries and at the threshold of millennia. Form is charged: no autograph; four lines that differ in content and in order; the best Sankanbon manuscripts lacking the opening part; supplementary sections whose place in the work is uncertain. The defining form, lists, reflections and scenes in one voice, is legible in every line, so the charge is moderate, about three tenths. Presence is wide in Japan and narrower abroad, where it is read chiefly by students and admirers; that holds it off the top of the band.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The command of the sentence is the book’s surest quality, judged on the Japanese as far as this reading can judge it. The opening is four judgments of two words each, with a few strokes of image apiece, and has served for centuries as a model of Japanese prose. The reminiscences are timed like comedy: the Xianglu Peak exchange turns on one unspoken allusion, and the banished dog Okinamaro is recognised at last by his tears. In the lists the judgment comes as the last word of an item, and the cruel aside lands without preparation. Charged: the axis includes arrangement, and the arrangement is loose and unsecured, and some name-lists show no making at all. The music of the kana prose is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.

Score: 8.6 / 10

One physics governs the whole: everything that enters the book is judged, and judged by the same eye. Take the two most distant elements: a list of the names of rivers, and the last reminiscences of the Empress in her decline. One law holds them, the law of what is fitting and what delights, applied to a place-name for its poetic echo and to a mistress for her grace. The range of tone is wide, from the farce of the pedantic official whose gate was too narrow for the carriages to the yamabuki petal, and the voice never breaks its rule; even the silence about the fall obeys it, since ruin is not “okashi” and is not admitted. Held off the top: the law is a taste rather than a vision, and narrowness of class is part of its coherence.

Score: 8.4 / 10

More orders are present than the form suggests. The self and its judgments; the court as a state in miniature, in rank, office and ceremony; the natural order through the seasons, fully and finely; the sacred, in temple pilgrimages, preachers and the calendar of rites; love, in dawn leave-takings and letters; labour, glimpsed in carpenters eating and servants at work; and history, the fall of the Empress’s house, held by omission. One sensibility joins them, and the list is the joint. But much is listed rather than integrated, and every order is seen from one room and one rank: the state as ceremony, labour as spectacle, the provinces as rumour, and the history that shaped the author’s life kept outside the frame. A wide small world, wider than a lyric body, narrower than a novel of society.

Score: 7.3 / 10