from The Pillow Book

One day Lord Korechika, the Minister of the Centre, brought the Empress a bundle of notebooks. ‘What shall we do with them?’ Her Majesty asked me. ‘The Emperor has already made arrangements for copying the “Records of the Historian”.’

‘Let me make them into a pillow,’ I said.

‘Very well,’ said Her Majesty. ‘You may have them.’

I now had a vast quantity of paper at my disposal, and I set about filling the notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material. On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects. I was sure that when people saw my book they would say, ‘It’s even worse than I expected. Now one can really tell what she is like.’ After all, it is written entirely for my own amusement and I put things down exactly as they came to me. How could my casual jottings possibly bear comparison with the many impressive books that exist in our time?

The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon
Translated by Ivan Morris

2. when my parents gave up their idols

When my parents gave up their idols for the Christian faith, they asked a priest from the nearest temple to send the household gods off. The altars, gold calligraphy on red sheet metal, were left at the base of a rain tree. The next day they were gone.

The altar table was not so easily removed. A dour work of dark pine-wood without any charm, it had stood in the living room for as long as I could remember. We tried changing its purpose, at one time storing my trophies and plaques behind its glass. They never looked right there. After it was finally hauled away, Father had to paint over the soot left by burning years of incense.

What to put in its place? My bookcase, from IKEA, sagged and leaned forward alarmingly. The corner was too small for the dining table, we rediscovered every New Year’s Eve when we sat together for my mother’s steamboat treat. Then there were no more reunion dinners when my sister and I moved to the States. My parents changed the round table for a rectangle and jabbed it into the space.

Now the table holds boxes of tissues, biscuits soft enough for Father’s gums, Mother’s diabetes pills, and my white laptop when I visit during my summer break and wish to write.

3. well organized things

A dictionary. A rainforest. A supermarket.

A columbarium, a place to urn the dead, is organized for the convenience of the living. The Civil Service, a place to earn a living, is organized for the dead.

The passport office in Singapore.

A dragonfly. A quartz.

4. disorganized things

The Botanic Gardens after a storm. The apartment after a party.

Before the command to come to attention, the enlistees relax in various states of sleep, their rifle slings entangled with their limbs.

When I cross the checkpoint into Johor Bahru, I cannot help observing that the trees that were planted in regimental intervals now sprout in confusion. The city has poured and set round them, and not they for the city. If the trees have given the pleasure of pattern before, they now surprise with their surge of green.

Disheveled hair.

7. chinese wedding banquets

Chinese wedding banquets are insufferable. Guests arrive an hour late at the restaurant slotted in a multistorey car park, and dinner is served an hour later. Ten courses in clattering succession, from cold cuts to almond jelly. The couple, their parents, and the photographer struggle from table to table. The bridegroom is puffy red from too much drink. The bride, corseted in some heavy material, purple or salmon, not white which is the color of mourning, looks as if she is about to cry from tiredness. There is nothing charming in the scene. Worst of all, one or the other of my parents would get...