A Literary-Meditative Glossary and Several Romantic-Poetic Annotations: Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book (枕草子・Makura no sōshi, 1002?)

The present study aims to emphasise the particularities of the unique literary style used by Sei Shōnagon in the classic masterpiece The Pillow Book, a prose genre (zuihitsu) that combines the journal-memoire type notes and the catalogue-type lists with poetry and anecdotal recounts. As a miscellanea of contemplative meditations triggered by day-to-day experiences or by uncensored associations of random ideas, The Pillow Book reveals Sei Shōnagon as the author of the narration and as a direct participant in the recounted events. By using an unprecedented narrative technique, The Pillow Book contains approximately 300 paragraphs of different lengths (dan), some bearing separate subtitles, in a rhythmic three-part structure that transforms this type of prose into a dynamic text in which the imperial court, the individual and nature are, for the writer, a spectacle that needs to be revealed in and through words. Our analysis aims to argue the particular means by which Sei Shōnagon continuously explores not only the individual creativity, but also the (direct or indirect) poetic potential of the word, by revealing the miraculous presence of the word, in its multiple valences, in the representation of the universe: the word as a decorative element, but also as a world creator (utamakura, makura kotoba, kotodama).

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