Unofficial Official Hairpin 3.0 Book Club: The Pillow Book

By Anna Fitzpatrick January 13, 2015

Hello, ‘Pinners! Welcome to the first Hairpin 3.0 Book Club discussion of 2015.

Have you had a chance to read The Pillow Book yet? If not, don’t worry: this discussion will be spoiler free. (That’s because there aren’t really any spoilers to give away! Because this is a nonfiction diary! Although it was written over a thousand years ago, so spoiler alert: everybody dies, I guess.) This post is for casual musings, reactions, thoughts, asides, digressions. We will have another post later this month, and you will be tested. And yes, this will go toward your final grade, but on the bright side: I accept bribes.

So! Did you like the book? Did you hate the book? Did you feel somewhere in between about the book? What did you like? What were your favorite parts? If you could give one gift to any character, what would it be and why? If you had to assign the book a soundtrack, what would you pick? And so on and so forth.

1. First things first: nobody told me that this was a funny book. I was told that it would provide “insight into court life during Heian Japan,” which sounded fascinating but not, you know, like a barrel of laughs. Reader, I was dying. I read a good deal of this book while sitting in the coffee shop next to Professional Funny Lady Monica Heisey, who was trying very hard to focus on her work only to have me interrupt her every eight seconds to say, “Monica. MONICA. Listen to this.”

That switch from the wistful and melancholic (“The man you love and the same man once you’ve lost all feeling for him seem like two completely different people”) to the blunt and observational (“People with long hair and those with short hair”) serve as the pulsing heartbeat behind the book. It is such an accurate string of thoughts, not for its content (although she does have a point: people with long hair those with short hair should never be compared) but for the way it accurately sums up thought patterns and makes connections between the banal and moments that are likely gatekeepers to a whole lot of backstory. WHO IS THIS MAN YOU’VE LOST ALL FEELING FOR, SEI? WHO HURT YOU?

2. It is also a very relevant and prescient book. Is Sei (we’re on first name terms now btw) right about everything? Absolutely not. In fact, she’s kind of a jerk sometimes (a lot of the time). Still, she manages to be cutting and incisive when discussing the minutiae of everyday life, moments that maybe not be universal but that could still resonate with at least one reader (ahem) over a thousand years later on the other side of the world. I read Sei’s prescriptive passages the way I might read an advice columnist with whom I might not always agree with, but within whose assuredness I take a kind of comfort. Here she is on mornings after:

“One does want a lover’s dawn departure to be tasteful.” You know something? She’s not wrong here.

3. I loved the role poetry played in Sei’s day. I loved how flirting essentially went down by sending a poem to a fella you were sweet on, and waiting for him to send a poem in response. I don’t really have any more to expand on this thought. I just got a kick out of it.

4. There are parts that are, ahem, less than fascinating (unless list of bridges are what tickle your fancy, in which case DO I HAVE A TREAT FOR YOU.) There are long, extended anecdotes which are at times difficult to follow unless you are constantly flipping to the notes at the back to provide context for key figures, events, customs, and traditions, and even then they lack the punch of the shorter, more introspective passages. Yet.

I have been keeping diaries since, I think, forever? Since as soon as I could figure out how to write, at least. They have never been truly unselfconscious. My first diaries were especially censored, because I (rightly) suspected that my sister was reading them. Later, when I found a better hiding space, I became concerned that even if nobody I knew now would read it, my great great grandkids would come across one day. (My journals got very weirdly pious around my preteen years because I so desperately wanted my great great grandkids to believe I was a good person.) And then I turned fifteen and discovered Livejournal, and my entries exposed certain insights and vulnerabilities carefully crafted so that my Internet friends would think I was cool. The irony is that now I am a writer, and I have made a living out of being far more candid in front of thousands of strangers, particularly since I have found particular success with publications that champion women writing about their experiences, although with every truth I attempt to reveal with every personal essay, there are a million little details or thoughts or experiences that I am choosing not to disclose.

Throughout The Pillow Book, Sei makes a couple of references to an audience. They are few but they are there. Allegedly, passages of her diary were published before she had finished writing it, so that even if she had never intended for it to be read by others, she knew it was a possibility (toward the end, at least). And she is a good writer, very sharp, very witty, and her book makes for a mostly good read. Yet I don’t believe she was ever (or hardly ever) writing with an audience in mind. It would explain the wild leaps in thought between sentences, winding anecdotes that serve to create an archive of her day rather than tell a story, passages that feel as if she wrote them because she was bored and just wanted something to write down (‘sup, bridge lists), and all the many moments in which she comes off as harsh, or petty, or just plain difficult to like (because aren’t we all in the deepest recesses of our brains). That, I think, makes her a certain kind of loveable.