Japanese pillow pattern BOOKS

ANTHONY BURGESS

The lady novelist is a comparatively recent phenomenon in the West and still, despite the high examples of the Misses Austen, Cross, Brophy and Cartland, not entirely accepted by the more conservative and celibate males of the reading community. Despite all the evidence, literature is taken by men to be a masculine pre- serve in this country. This probably goes back at least a thousand years and has something to do with the nature of Anglo-Saxon: it is very difficult to imagine, say, a lady of the court in the reign of Athelstan wrestling with barking Germanic vocables and thrusting headrime, try- ing to compose a psychological romance at a corner table, away from the fire and the gnawed sheep-bones, in a drunken meadhall. Not even Samuel Butler would have attempted to prove that Beowulf was written by Bishop Wulfstan's daughter.

In Japan things were, and are, different. While the Danes were harrying the English coasts, Murasaki Shikibu was writing The Tale of Genii. This is accepted by the modern Japanese as a great psychological novel, but professional students of world fiction in the West are still apparently reluctant to take it seriously. It must have something to do with its being written by an Oriental woman (whose feet and brain ought to be bound, whose sole accomplishments should be the sterile postures of the geisha). It's always possible to say that it was a flash in the pan, but only if you are wilfully ignorant of what Ivan Morris describes as 'the great mid- Heian period of feminine vernacular literature that produced not only the world's first psycho- logical novel . . . but vast quantities of poetry and a series of diaries, mostly by court ladies, which enable us to imagine what life was like for upper-class Japanese women a thousand years ago.'

Dr Morris brings us, superbly translated and richly annotated, a great non-fiction work by a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu—the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, translated and edited by Ivan Morris (our 55s; companion volume 84s). There is no exact Western equivalent for this kind of compilation, though if you shuffled together Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave (with all the Angst out), a poetic notebook by Edith Sitwell, that Higher Common Sense which Stella Gibbons adumbrates in Cold Comfort Farm, and the diarisings of Fanny Burney, you might get something approaching it. But there is an exquisiteness which, in our sentimental ignorance, we are bound to think of as unexport- able from the Britain of the East to the one of the West :

'In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful. As the light creeps over the hills, their outlines are dyed a faint red and wisps of purplish cloud trail over them.

In summer the nights. Not only when the moon shines, but on dark nights too, as the fire- flies flit to and fro, and even when it rains, how beautiful it is:'

Sometimes we are given, in the Chinese man- ner, little catalogues, as of 'Depressing Things'— 'A dog howling in the daytime. A wickerwork

fish-net in spring. A red plum-blossom dress in the Third or Fourth Months. A lying-in room when the baby has died. A cold, empty brazier. An ox-driver who hates his oxen. A scholar whose wife has one girl child after another'— or of 'Elegant Things,' whose lineal presenta- tion suggests poetry: 'A white coat worn over a violet waistcoat. Duck eggs.

Shaved ice mixed with liana syrup and put in a new silver bowl.

Snow on wistaria or plum blossoms. A pretty child eating strawberries.'

These observations were set down, in the privacy of her bed-chamber, by a lady-in-wait- ing to the Empress Sadako. They are observa- tions which suggest leisure, cultivation, an absolute certainty of taste. If Palinurus's Gallic ecstasies are tortured and nostalgic, the little joys of Sei Shonagon are set in a closed world where the present is all that matters, where a civilised order prevails and always will, where there is no war, cruelty or perversion. She pays a certain price for all her paradisaical fruit, but it is exacted vicariously by such people as the Japanese critic who called her a 'spiritual cripple.' At one end of the scale she evinces an adoration for the royal family which Dr Morris considers 'almost pathological'; at the other she shows a detestation of the lower orders which suggests the hypnopaedia of Brave New World. 'The hemp palm is an all-shaped tree; but it is in the Chinese style and does not grow outside the houses of common people.' And, in her list of 'Unsuitable Things,' we find: 'Snow on the houses of common people. This is especially regrettable when the moonlight shines down on it.'

Sei Shonagon's scorn extends even to the not- so-common 'who have not a single exciting prospect in life yet who believe they are per- fectly happy. .. . Often they are of quite good birth, yet have had no opportunity to find out what the world is like. I wish they could live for a while in our society, even if it should mean taking service as Attendants, so that they might come to know the delights it has to offer.' But what are these delights? Chiefly the sun- moon radiance of the imperial pair, who are never wrong and whose taste is exquisite, who know whole anthologies by heart and who con- duct poetry quizzes in which the ladies of the court don't do too well, who are fond of cats and award them the head-dress of nobility, who call for the flute-players when they are bored, who punctiliously perform whatever ancient ceremonies are prescribed for the White Shrub Month or the Rice-Sprouting Month. In fact, the Empress always sounds charming. Dr Morris has found for her the rhythms of a

finishing-school principal or a mother superior of good family (like Iris Murdoch's in The Bell): 'It must have been your conversation last night that roused his interest in you. Really, I can't help feeling sorry for the poor man. You have been awfully hard on him.'

There is, inevitably, a good deal about love (though the frankness of true pillow confidences is never admitted), and the emphasis is on bed- room decorum rather than amatory procedure : 'One's attachment to a man depends largely on the elegance of his leave-taking. The lover who bumps around in the dark, trying to find his fan: "hateful" is an understatement.' And the lover who fastens the cord of his head-dress in the bedroom: 'Does he really think someone may see him at this time of night and criticise him for not being impeccably dressed?' In- decorum breeds enmities which, in the West, or in an open society, are properly aroused only by moral delinquency.

Ultimately everything becomes a matter of aesthetics, and it is possible to consider on the same level 'a servant who does not speak badly about his master' and 'a silver tweezer that is good at plucking out the hair.' One makes no real distinction between public and private be-

haviour, and presumably one tries to write as well in a pillow-book as in a novel like The Tale of Genji. That Sei Shonagon did not in-

tend her book to be seen by eyes not her own is made clear in her final entry. 'Everything that

I have seen and felt is included. Since much of

it might appear malicious and even harmful to other people, I was careful to keep my book bidden. But now it has become public, which is the last thing I expected.' The whole project of the pillow-book arose out of mere chance.

Korechika, Minister of the Centre, brought the Empress a bundle of notebooks, and Her Majesty didn't know what to do with them. 'Let me make them into a pillow,' said Sei Shonagon. And so she did.

The result is undoubtedly a work of litera- ture. Japanese students, when considering its style, make none of the concessions appropriate to a private document. Dr Morris speaks of the 'extraordinary beauty and evocative power' of Shonagon's language; it is pure Japanese, with hardly any Chinese loan-words; the style— varied, rapid, compressed—is far more lucid

than the somewhat tortuous prose of The Tale of Genji. Dr Morris has done wonders, avoid- ing in his very free-running translation the

deliberately graceless literalness (admittedly

designed to send us scurrying to the original) of Nabokov's Eugene Onegin. In a companion

volume which is a good deal longer than the

Pillow Book itself, he prises open the oyster of an old and idiosyncratic Japan. We see how

Shonagon's mind works and enter the labyrinth of a closed but complex culture which deter- mines every locution, every image. But we can be happy enough with the English : 'I remember a clear morning in the Ninth Month when it had been raining all night. Despite the bright sun, dew was still dripping from the chrysanthemums in the garden. On the bamboo fences and criss-cross hedges I saw tatters of spider webs; and where the threads were broken the raindrops hung on them like strings of white pearls. I was greatly moved and delighted.

As. it became sunnier, the dew gradually vanished from the clover and the other plants where it had lain so heavily; the branches began to stir, then suddenly sprang up of their own accord. Later I described to people how beauti- ful it all was. What most impressed me' was that they were not impressed.'

That lady authors could be as catty then as now about other lady authors is attested by the remarks of the great Murasaki Shikibu herself

about Sei Shonagon: . . the, most extra- ordinary air of self-satisfaction ... those Chinese writings of hers that she so presumptuously scatters about the place . . . full of imperfec- tions.' What was wrong apparently was Shonagon's lack of restraint and lack of selec- tion—too much giving free rein to her emotions, too much indiscriminate sampling of everything that came along. But here, needless to say, lies the charm of her Pillow Book. We can forgive her callousness towards her social and intellec- tual inferiors when she shows such feeling for the natural world, such zest in ritual, colour, and the minutiae of civilised life. She seems as close to the modern reader as his own pillow. It is hard to think of her sleeping in her day- clothes and, following the fashion, making her teeth black.