Through the Bamboo Blinds

Although I grew up in Japan, not far from the old capital where Sei Shonagon had written the lists, anecdotes, and observations that The Pillow Book is comprised of, I thought of her only as a distant historical figure until I read “Hateful Things” in Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay in 1999. A precursor to the list essay, “Hateful Things” moves from storytelling to commentary and back again with an impressive blend of irony and lyricism. I couldn’t believe it was written a millennium before our time—Sei Shonagon served as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Sadako from 993 to 1000 a.d.—or that I had waited until I was 42 to discover a writer who should have been my role model all along. Sei Shonagon’s combination of frankness and charm, her ability to say whatever she wanted to say without apology because she said it so well, her remarkable independence in a society that was so restrictive: these were qualities I wanted to emulate both in my life and in my writing.

In “Hateful Things,” Sei Shonagon expresses her disdain for everything from squeaky inkstones and cawing crows to spoiled children and their parents, but her thoughts always return to one topic, a lover’s visit. She portrays several “hateful” lovers with great comedy (“A gentleman has visited one secretly. Though he is wearing a tall, lacquered hat, he nevertheless wants no one to see him. He is so flurried, in fact, that upon leaving he bangs into something with his hat. Most hateful”). Then she describes the perfection they missed: “A good lover will behave as elegantly at dawn as at any other time. He drags himself out of bed with a look of dismay on his face. . . . He gives a deep sigh, as if to say that the night has not been nearly long enough and that it is agony to leave. . . . Even when he is dressed, he still lingers, vaguely pretending to be fastening his sash. Presently he raises the lattice, and the two lovers stand together by the side door while he tells her how he dreads the coming day, which will keep them apart; then he slips away. The lady watches him go, and this moment of parting will remain among her most charming memories.”

Sei Shonagon’s tone is almost wistful. Lulled by the poignant details, we, too, watch the lover slip away and imagine the lady sighing after him, before the delicate, sweet coating of the last sentence melts away to reveal Sei Shonagon’s candor. The best part of a lover’s visit, she is saying, is the memory of his leaving. While the lover lamented the coming of day and pretended to be tightening his sash, the lady was anticipating the hours of solitude during which to recall and describe his excellent behavior. She must have been relieved to get him out the door before he spoiled the scene with a less-than-perfect word, gesture, or glance.

In Ivan Morris’s translation, all of Sei Shonagon’s insights sounded fresh and acerbic. My favorite “hateful thing” was this one-sentence aphorism: “Sometimes one greatly dislikes a person for no particular reason—and then that person goes and does something hateful.” That pretty much summed up how I felt about a few of my neighbors in the condominium in Cambridge where I was living in a 440-square-foot apartment. A few months before I encountered Sei Shonagon’s work, I had moved there from Green Bay, Wisconsin, where I was conspicuous as an Asian woman living alone, and discovered that the anonymity I’d gained in a diverse city full of single people came with a price. In my neighborhood near Harvard, no one talked to strangers on the street—not even to comment on the weather—and the only people I met in my building in my first few months were those who had something to complain about. My downstairs neighbor terrified me by storming up to my apartment one late night to scream at me because my cats...