Sei Shōnagon
- Japan Society of Boston
- 4 hours ago
- 6 min read
By Danielle Cochran, Volunteer
Written around the same time as The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book is often considered its companion that details court life during the Heian Era (794 to 1185 CE). While the former is a work of fiction that one is to make inferences about the time it was written, the latter was written almost like a diary and gives a firsthand viewpoint of its author, Sei Shōnagon.
Little can be confirmed in records about her life; even her name is a mystery. Sei is the Sino-Japanese pronunciation of the first character in her family's surname, Kiyohara, but it's not known why she was known as Shōnagon, or lessor counselor (Keene 412). It was the practice of the Heian court to call a woman by the title of either her father or husband, but her father was not a shōnagon, nor were the two men she married, so it has been suggested, out of desperation, that it was the title of a third husband.
Born in or about 966, Sei Shōnagon was raised in a literary family; her father, Kiyohara no Motosuke, was a distinguished waka poet, and her great-grandfather, Kiyohara no Fukayabu, was an even more distinguished poet with 41 of his poems appearing in imperially-sponsored anthologies. Around the age of 16, she married Tachibana no Norimitsu and gave birth to a son the following year. Their marriage ended in a divorce after approximately nine years.
It wasn't until the year 993 that Sei Shōnagon entered the court in service of Empress Sadako (also known as Teishi). During this time, higher-ranked aristocrats competed to marry their daughters to the emperor in the hopes of raising their status and, given all that a favorable marriage could bring a family, a daughter was a valuable asset for realizing a father’s political ambition (Ni). In order to make their daughters attractive to an emperor, higher-ranked aristocrats sought well-educated women from lower-ranked aristocratic families to cultivate their daughters’ tastes and sensibilities in poetry, music and calligraphy.
This is what was needed of Sei Shōnagon, and though she was shy in the beginning, she quickly got over those feelings. Of this time, she writes in The Pillow Book, "When I first went into waiting at Her Majesty's Court, so many different things embarrassed me that I could not even reckon them up and I was always on the verge of tears. As a result I tried to avoid appearing before the Empress except at night, and even then I stayed hidden behind a three-foot curtain of state" (Keene 413). She became a favorite of the empress, however, which Sei repaid with her loyalty: staying with her mistress despite the empress's waning influence at court and her eventual death in childbirth near the end of the year 1000.
The reason for the empress's waning influence was due to the fact that, for the first time in history, there were two empresses who reigned at the same time: Sadako and Shōshi. The former was served by Sei Shōnagon while the latter was served by Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji (Keene 414). However, Sei Shōnagon and Murasaki Shikibu were not on the best of terms. Judging from a passage in Murasaki Shikibu's diary, she writes, "Sei Shōnagon, for instance, was dreadfully conceited. She thought herself so clever, and littered her writings with Chinese characters, but if you examined them closely, they left a great deal to be desired (Keene 415). There is one thing to note about this passage. It's written in the past tense when referring to Sei Shōnagon, which suggests the latter was no longer at the court and perhaps not even the capital, and it's not certain if the two ever met (Keene 415). Despite this, due to the The Pillow Book and The Tale of Genji being written around the same time, the two women are considered by some to be rivals.
Sei Shōnagon began writing The Pillow Book when she was given a booklet for writing by the empress. The booklet's paper was different from modern paper: each sheet was made individually by hand, making it a very precious item. Because it was so precious, she was unsure what to write, but she decided that although she couldn't write a historical work like the Records of the Grand Historian, she would write something that would serve as a record of the imperial court (Nagoya Sword Museum). It's the earliest known text of the zuihitsu genre, which is often translated from Japanese as “following the brush,” a capacious genre that incorporates nonfiction, musings and confessions, poetry, and miscellany to create a spontaneous, layered text (The Poetry Foundation).
Of the records she did write down, there were two types of "catalogues" or lists. The first consists of places, plants and objects familiar from their use in poetry such as "peaks," "plains," "markets," "ferries," etc., and second being "things," to which Sei Shōnagon had some individual reaction to such as "awkward things," "things that should not be seen by firelight," or "things that look pretty but are bad on the inside" (Keene 418).
It's her opinions and individual reactions that have made The Pillow Book still relatable even 1000 years after it was written. Scholars and readers who are charmed by its elegance and cleverness are frequently taken aback by Shōnagon’s intolerance for those whom she considered beneath her, socially, economically, or intellectually (Crossett Library). She writes of women “who are of no more value than a roof tile” and complains that it is annoying “to be disturbed by a herd of common people.” As David Greer notes in his article “The Lists of a Lady-In-Waiting”:
She complains. She gloats. She finds fault with others. And when she does, the millennium separating her from us vanishes: “Just as a woman is about to tell me something really interesting,” she writes in her list of Things That Irritate Me, “and I’m sitting there just dying to hear it, her baby starts crying.” “I know I shouldn’t think this way, and I know I’ll be punished for it,” she writes in her list of Things That Make Me Happy, “but I just love it when bad things happen to people I can’t stand.” “Ugly people,” she starts off her list of Things That Don’t Have Any Redeeming Qualities, “with disagreeable personalities (Greer).”
She even writes extensively about her affairs. Few of her lovers please her, however, and most find themselves included in her list of Things That Irritate Me as they snore and stumble around in the darkness the morning after (Greer). Sei Shōnagon’s writing displays an extraordinarily heightened visual, aural, and poetic sensibility, and even a mosquito can be amusing and comical in her description: You’ve just settled sleepily into bed when a mosquito announces itself with that thin little wail, and starts flying round your face. It’s horrible how you can feel the soft wind of its tiny wings (Ni). These are just few of the many things she writes in her records.
There are many different theories as to what happened to Sei after the court as no definitive information remains. Some believe she married a man who became governor of Settsu Province and they had a daughter; another claims she died impoverished and alone; another says she entered a convent (Crossett Library). The last known reference to her was in 1017.
Despite being written over 1000 years ago, The Pillow Book still retains its influence and historical significance. Evidence in The Pillow Book suggests that its existence was known, and the creation of manuscripts many centuries later speaks to the work’s enduring popularity (Crossett Library).
A few English translations have been made, the earliest appearing in 1889. This translation was by Theobald Andrew Purcell and William George Aston who selected six passages in hopes it would give a better idea of the work as a whole (Ni). Arthur Waley and then Ivan Morris chose free approach, meaning they chose parts to translate that had more appeal, whereas, more recently, Meredith McKinney chose spoken or even colloquial English to let the readers hear the lively voice of Sei Shōnagon.
The Pillow Book and Sei Shōnagon herself have become enduring influences despite "never intending," as she writes in its final page, “these notes to be seen, I simply wrote to while away those long hours when I had nothing better to do (Greer).”
Additional Selected Media
The Pillow Book: Series 1-11, a historical crime drama written by Robert Forrest ft. narration by Benedict Cumberbatch https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09dms95/episodes/guide
The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon from Continuing the Conversation on GBH, https://www.pbs.org/video/the-pillow-book-of-sei-shonagon-3vgvc6/
Makura no Soshi (The Pillow Book) from Story Land in Classical Japanese on NHK, https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/4043002/
Works Cited
Crossett Library. “The Courtly World: Sei Shōnagon and Lady Murasaki: Sei Shōnagon.” Libraryguides.bennington.edu, libraryguides.bennington.edu/courtly/shonagon. Accessed 10 June 2026.
Greer, David. “The Lists of a Lady-In-Waiting.” Kyoto Journal, 5 Aug. 2015, kyotojournal.org/culture-arts/the-lists-of-a-lady-in-waiting/#top. Accessed 9 June 2026.
Hamano, Chihiro. “Who Was Sei Shōnagon?” 和樂Web 美の国ニッポンをもっと知る！, 15 Aug. 2023, intojapanwaraku.com/culture/223161/. Accessed 10 June 2026.
Keene, Donald. Seeds in the Heart : Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century. New York, Henry Holt & Co, 1993, archive.org/details/seedsinheartjapa00keen/page/n5/mode/2up. Accessed 8 June 2026.
Nagoya Sword Museum. “Sei Shōnagon and the Hyakunin Isshu.” 名古屋刀剣ワールド, www.meihaku.jp/hyakunin-isshu-kajin/kajin-seishonagon/. Accessed 10 June 2026.
Ni, Jindan. “Guide to the Classics: The Sophisticated Aesthetics of Sei Shōnagon’s the Pillow Book.” The Conversation, 6 Dec. 2023, theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-the-sophisticated-aesthetics-of-sei-shonagons-the-pillow-book-212619. Accessed 9 June 2026.
The Poetry Foundation. “Sei Shōnagon.” Poetry Foundation, 22 May 2024, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sei-shonagon. Accessed 9 June 2026.