Sei Shonagon

Sei Shonagon wrote the Pillow Book, the sharpest surviving account of life inside the Heian court and one of the founding works of Japanese prose. Almost nothing is known about her outside it, including her name: Sei is the Chinese reading of the first character of her father's clan and Shonagon is a court office, so what survives is a nickname. Her father was Kiyohara no Motosuke, a poet and provincial governor, and she served the empress Teishi from about 993 until Teishi's death in childbirth in 1000, which is the period the book covers. The Pillow Book is not a diary and not a memoir but something the Japanese tradition calls zuihitsu, following the brush: anecdotes, complaints, descriptions of a snowy morning, and above all lists. Things that make the heart beat faster. Things that should be large. Hateful things, which runs for pages and includes a lover who takes too long to leave and a dog that barks at the wrong moment. She is funny, extraordinarily observant, and a snob, and she is the reason we know what a Heian corridor smelled like. Murasaki Shikibu, writing the Tale of Genji at the rival empress's court, disliked her intensely and left a note saying she was pleased with herself and would come to no good. What became of her is unknown; the later tradition, which enjoyed the idea, has her ending in poverty. She was writing at the same moment as her rival, in a court where men wrote in Chinese and women therefore invented the literature.

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