Mother writers
Both Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon had, it seems, babies. I don’t know to what extent ladies at Heian court raised their babies. From the books it is difficult to tell. But at least, it would appear, somewhat. Even empresses nursed. Shikibu in her diaries describes the patheticness of her empress’s baby not quite latching on. Shonagon complains in The Pillow Book of overly possessive wet nurses. Shonagon’s empress, a different empress than Shikibu’s, is sent away from court to have her baby, and though it was normal to be sent away, she was sent somewhere conspicuously low in status, she’s in political decline, and the passage in which Shonagon describes this pregnant exile is one of the most willfully cheerful passages in the whole book; that empress dies shortly after giving birth.
Today there are many writers who are mothers, sometimes writing specifically about motherhood, and in a genre that we recognize as literature. Or, at least, there are some mother writers, in this sense, if not many. There is Elena Ferrante, and Sarah Manguso. But among the mother writers of today probably two of the most celebrated are men: Karl Ove Knausgaard and, in his way, Louis C. K.
When the baby came home
I set her down in her crib, and she didn’t cry. Why, I wondered, is she not distressed? It’s as if she assumes that we will, of course, love and care for her. It seemed so strange for her to assume that. I respected her fearlessness.
When the empress moved
The passage in The Pillow Book titled “When the Empress Moved” tells of all the amusing and comic things that happen when the empress Teishi and her court (including Shonagon) are moved out of the main palace to another residence, one where the gate is not wide enough for the carriage to pass, where the master of the house doesn’t know the words for things, and where the court ladies are not given their proper privacy. In this passage, Shonagon does not mention that the empress Teishi is pregnant and ill, that another woman from another family was also recently named empress, that the move to a house far beneath her station was a political one, part of an attempt to shift power to a different family, and she also does not mention that the empress Teishi will soon die in childbirth, an event that has most likely already happened when the passage was written but which isn’t encompassed in the passage. Instead the writing is crowded over with laughter and “charm,” and scholars tell us that the passage has a special density of what in Japanese aesthetics is known as okashii—the amusing and the strange — and this high incidence of okashii (as opposed to aware, roughly translated to us as the pathos of things passing) often increases in The Pillow Book at moments when we might expect the opposite, at moments of distress and loss. (This is part of what makes me associate the book with what I think of as the “small” as opposed to the “minor.”)
Then the section that immediately follows that of “When the Empress Moved” (and though we can’t be certain of the original order of the passages, it is plausible that they were in this order) is one full of the touchingly named quality of aware. It tells of a once-favored palace dog who is punished by being cast out from the palace — sent to Dog Island! — and who eventually makes his way back, injured and emaciated. The returned dog pretends to be a different dog, but cries telling tears when his true name is mentioned. Eventually, the dog receives an imperial pardon — his offense had been to startle a beloved cat who wore an imperial headdress and was known as Lady Myobu, that was why he was banished — and he is thereafter, according to Shonagon, “returned to his former happy state.” She continues, “Yet even now, when I remember how he whimpered and trembled in response to our sympathy, it strikes me as a strange and moving scene; when people talk to me about it, I start crying myself.” It is the passage with the happy ending that closes in tears.
The Pillow Book is difficult to characterize. It’s not a novel and not a diary and not poems and not advice, but it has qualities of each, and it would have been understood at the time as a kind of miscellany, a familiar form. The book consists of 185 entries, many of them quite short, some of them anecdotes, some lists, some pronouncements. “Oxen should have very small foreheads with white hair,” one short section begins. “A preacher ought to be good-looking,” begins another, but the passage then bumps into, “But I really must stop writing this kind of thing. If I were still young enough, I might risk the consequence of putting down such impieties, but at my present stage of life I should be less flippant.”
Often Shonagon seems wildly petty about issues of “taste”—“Nothing can be worse than allowing the driver of one’s ox carriage to be poorly dressed”—and we have to remember that the writer of the passage, Shonagon, was a person whose very delimited power derived almost exclusively from her expert manipulation of the language of passing fashions. She knows the best way to starch cottons, what colors look best under what other colors, and just how to hold a fan; this arena of tiny decisions was a kind of politics, and the only kind available to her. In her list, “Things that have lost their power,” we find
a woman who has taken off her false locks to comb the short hair that remains… A large tree that has been blown down in a gale and lies on its side with its roots in the air… The retreating figure of a sumo wrestler who has been defeated in a match… A woman who is angry with her husband about some trifling matter, leaves home and goes somewhere to hide. She is certain that he will rush about looking for her; but he does nothing of the kind and shows the most infuriating indifference. Since she cannot stay away for ever, she swallows her pride and returns.
Scholars are not even sure of what Shonagon’s real name was, but it is known that her father was a poet, that she was not considered naturally beautiful, and that whether she died an impoverished nun in the countryside or in mild gentility with a second husband is not clear.
My very favorite entry in The Pillow Book is a not-so-simple story Shonagon tells about “the woman’s hand.” “The woman’s hand” is written in Japanese, rather than Chinese. The passage begins simply:
The Captain First Secretary, Tadanobu, having heard certain false rumors, began to speak about me in the most unpleasant terms. “How could I have thought of her as a human being?” was the sort of thing he used to say…
Not mentioned in the passage is that Tadanobu was formerly Shonagon’s lover, and he had recently been promoted to a high position in court. His new hatred of Shonagon is not just emotionally painful, but also a threat; Shonagon, like any court lady, was always at risk of being sent away from court, as soon as her presence was no longer considered charming, but this possibility is not emphasized in the telling; instead Shonagon tries to laugh off the problem. She then hears word that Tadanobu has admitted that life has “after all been a bit boring without” Shonagon. Shortly after, a messenger arrives for Shonagon with a letter from Tadanobu. She doesn’t want to be flustered when she reads it, so she tells the messenger to leave and that she’ll send a reply later; the messenger says no, that his master told him that if he didn’t get a reply right away he should take the letter back. Shonagon opens the letter, and finds the opening stanza of a Chinese poem: