![]() ![]() ![]() Shonagon describes the trivial, everyday minutiae of a world extremely alien to us, that of a totally secluded Heian court: one in which people rarely walk, but rather crawl in which women blacken their teeth in which polygamy is normal, but men and women hardly ever see each other’s faces in which professional posts are obtained through poetry contests and in which referring to a woman by name was considered so rude, and thus so thoroughly avoided, that nobody knows what Sei Shonagon’s actual name was. Pillow books (Makura no Soshi) were a genre of personal writing of the time, and it wasn’t unusual for court ladies to swap and read them: the one that survives to our time is the one that was most fun to read.Īnd it is fun to read and not just compared to OTHER 1,000-year-old books. She authored 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 other words, while the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet was creating Beowulf, Shonagon was writing a blog. ![]() Shonagon (966-1017) was a Lady-In-Waiting serving the Japanese empress Sadako in the peaceful Heian era. ![]() Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book is one of the strangest and most delightful works of literature in the entire human history. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |