Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

Forbidden Fruit, an 1865 engraving after a painting by Auguste Toulmouche. (photo credit 16.1)
Setting aside a group of books or a genre for a specific group of readers (whether Greek novels or the
pink-covered series of my childhood) not only creates an enclosed literary space which those readers are
encouraged to explore; it also, quite often, makes that space off limits for others. I was told that those
pink-bound books were for girls, and being seen with one of them in my hands would have labelled me
effeminate; I remember the look of surprised reproval on the face of the Buenos Aires shopkeeper when I
once bought one of the pink-covered books, and how I had to explain quickly that I meant it as a gift for a
girl. (Later I was to come across a similar prejudice when, after co-editing an anthology of male gay
fiction, I was told by “straight” friends that they would be embarrassed to be seen with the book in public,
for fear of being thought gay.) To venture into the literature society sets aside, condescendingly, for a
“less privileged” or “less accepted” group is to risk being tainted by association, since the same caution
did not apply to my cousin who could trespass into the green series without provoking any more comment
than a quip from her mother about her “eclectic tastes”.
But sometimes the reading material of a segregated group is created, deliberately, by readers within the
group itself. Such a creation took place among the women of the Japanese court sometime in the eleventh
century.
In 894 — a hundred years after the founding of the new capital, Heian-Kyo, in what is now Kyoto — the
Japanese government decided to stop sending official envoys to China. For the three previous centuries
the ambassadors had been bringing back the art and teachings of Japan’s vast millennial neighbour, and
Japanese fashion had been ruled by the customs of China; now, with that break from Chinese influence,
Japan began to develop a life-style of its own devising, which reached its peak in the late tenth century
under the regent Fujiwara no Michinaga.
Women are being spied on in their quarters, in an illustration by Tosa Mitsuyoshi for The Tale of Genji.
(photo credit 16.2)
As in any aristocratic society, those who enjoyed the benefits of this renaissance were very few. Women in
the Japanese court, even though they were very much privileged in comparison to women of the lower
classes, were subject to a large number of rules and limitations. Closed off from most of the outside
world, forced to follow monotonous routines, limited by language itself (since, with very few exceptions,
they were not instructed in the vocabularies of history, law, philosophy “and every other form of
scholarship” and their exchanges were normally conducted by letters rather than through conversations),
the women had to develop on their own — in spite of reams of restrictions — sly methods to explore and
read about the world they lived in, as well as the world beyond their paper walls. Speaking of a young
princess, Prince Genji, the hero of Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, observes that “I do not think we need
worry too much about her education. Women should have a general knowledge of several subjects, but it
gives a bad impression if they show themselves to be attached to a particular branch of learning. I would
not have her completely ignorant in any field. The important thing is that she should appear to have a
gentle, easy-going approach even to those subjects that she takes most seriously.”
Appearance was all-important, and as long as an apparent indifference to knowledge and an untampered
ignorance were feigned, the women at court could manage certain ways of escape from their condition.
Under such circumstances, it is astounding that they managed to create the foremost literature of this
period, inventing some genres themselves in the process. To be at the same time the creator and the
enjoyer of literature — to form, as it were, a closed circle that produces and consumes what it produces,
all within the strictures of a society that wants that circle to remain subservient — must be seen as an
extraordinary act of courage.
At court, the women’s days were spent mostly “gazing into space” in an agony of leisure (“suffering from
leisure” is a recurrent phrase) something akin to the European melancholy. The largely empty rooms, with
their silk hangings and screens, were almost constantly in darkness. But this didn’t afford privacy. The
thin walls and latticed parapets allowed sounds to travel easily, and hundreds of paintings depict voyeurs
spying upon the activities of the women.
The long leisure hours they were forced to spend, barely broken by yearly festivals and occasional visits
to fashionable temples, moved them to practise music and calligraphy, but above all to read out loud or to
be read to. Not all books were permitted. In Heian Japan, as in ancient Greece, in Islam, in post-Vedic

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India and so many other societies, women were excluded from reading what was regarded as “serious”
literature: they were expected to confine themselves to the realm of banal and frivolous entertainment,
which Confucian scholars frowned upon, and a clear-cut distinction was made between literature and
language that were “male” (the themes being heroic and philosophical, and the voice public) and those
that were “female” (trivial, domestic and intimate). This distinction was carried into many different areas:
for instance, since Chinese ways continued to be admired, Chinese painting was called “male” while the
lighter Japanese painting was called “female”.
Even if all the libraries of Chinese and Japanese literature had been opened to them, the Heian women
would not have found the sound of their own voices in most of the books of the period. Therefore, partly
to augment their stock of reading material and partly to gain access to reading material that would
respond to their unique preoccupations, they created their own literature. To record it, they developed a
phonetic transcription of the tongue they were allowed to speak, the kanabungaku, a Japanese purged of
almost all Chinese word constructions. This written language came to be known as “women’s writing”
and, being restricted to the female hand, it acquired, in the eyes of the men who ruled them, an erotic
quality. To be attractive, a Heian woman needed not only to possess physical charms but also to write
elegant calligraphy, as well as to be versed in music and able to read, interpret and compose poetry.
These accomplishments, however, were never considered comparable to those of male artists and
scholars.
“Of all the ways of acquiring books,” commented Walter Benjamin, “writing them oneself is regarded as
the most praiseworthy method.” In some cases, as the Heian women had discovered, it is the only
method. In their new language, the Heian women wrote some of the most important works in Japanese
literature, and perhaps of all time. The most famous of these are Lady Murasaki’s monumental The Tale of
Genji, which the English scholar and translator Arthur Waley considered to be the world’s first real novel,
probably begun in 1001 and finished not before 1010; and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, so called
because it was composed, at about the same time as Genji, in the author’s bedchamber, and probably kept
in the drawers of her wooden pillow.
In books such as Genji and The Pillow Book, the cultural and social life of both men and women is
explored in great detail, but little attention is paid to the political manoeuvring that took up so much of
the male court officials’ time. Waley found that the “extraordinary vagueness of women concerning purely
male activities” in these books was disconcerting; being kept away from both the language and the
performance of politics, women such as Sei Shonagon and Lady Murasaki undoubtedly could not have
given more than hearsay descriptions of these activities. In any case, these women were essentially
writing for themselves — holding up mirrors to their own lives. They required from literature not the
images their male counterparts indulged in and were interested in, but a reflection of that other world
where time was slow and conversation was meagre, and the landscape hardly changed except as the
seasons themselves brought change. The Tale of Genji, while displaying a huge canvas of contemporary
life, was intended to be read mainly by women like the author herself; women who shared her intelligence
and acute perspicacity in matters psychological.
Writing a few years after The Tale of Genji, another brilliant woman, Lady Sarashina, described her
passion for stories as a young girl in one of the remote provinces. “Even shut away in the country I
somehow came to hear that the world contained things known as tales, and from that moment my
greatest desire was to read them for myself. To idle away the time, my sister, my stepmother, and others
in the household would tell me stories from the Tales, including episodes about Genji, the Shining Prince;
but, since they had to depend on their memories, they could not possibly tell me all they wanted to know
and their stories only made me more curious than ever. In my impatience I got a statue of the Healing
Buddha built in my own size. When no one was watching, I would perform my ablutions and, stealing into
the altar room, would prostrate myself and pray fervently: “Oh, please arrange things so that we may
soon go to the Capital, where there are are so many tales, and please let me read them all.”
Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book is a seemingly casual record of impressions, descriptions, gossip, lists of
pleasing or displeasing things — full of whimsical opinions, prejudiced and conceited, utterly dominated
by the notion of hierarchy. Her comments have an outspoken ring that she says (are we to believe her?)
comes from the fact that “I never thought that these notes would be read by anyone else, and so I
included everything that came into my head, however strange or unpleasant.” Her simplicity accounts for
much of her charm. Here are two examples of “things that are delightful”:
Finding a large number of tales that one has not read before.
Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a
disappointment.
Letters are commonplace enough, yet what splendid things they are! When someone is in a distant
province and one is worried about him, and then a letter suddenly arrives, one feels as though one were
seeing him face to face. And it is a great comfort to have expressed one’s feelings in a letter — even
though one knows it cannot yet have arrived.

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Like The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book, with its paradoxical adoration of the imperial power yet scorn for
the ways of men, lends value to the enforced leisure and places women’s domestic lives on the same
literary level as the “epic” lives of men. Lady Murasaki, however, for whom the women’s narrative needed
to be brought to light within the men’s epics and not, frivolously, within the confines of their paper walls,
found Sei Shonagon’s writing “full of imperfections”: “She is a gifted woman, to be sure. Yet, if one gives
free rein to one’s emotions even under the most inappropriate circumstances, if one has to sample each
interesting thing that comes along, people are bound to regard one as frivolous. And how can things turn
out well for such a woman?”
At least two different sorts of reading seem to take place within a segregated group. In the first, the
readers, like imaginative archeologists, burrow their way through the official literature in order to rescue
from between the lines the presence of their fellow outcasts, to find mirrors for themselves in the stories
of Clytemnestra, of Gertrude, of Balzac’s courtesans. In the second, the readers become writers,
inventing for themselves new ways of telling stories in order to redeem on the page the everyday
chronicles of their excluded lives in the laboratory of the kitchen, in the studio of the sewing-room, in the
jungles of the nursery.
There is perhaps a third category somewhere between these two. Many centuries after Sei Shonagon and
Lady Murasaki, across the sea, the English writer George Eliot, writing about the literature of her day,
described what she called “silly novels by Lady Novelists … a genus with many species, determined by the
particular quality of silliness that predominates in them — the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic.
But it is a mixture of all these — a composite order of feminine fatuity, that produces the largest class of
such novels, which we shall distinguish as the mind-and-millinery species.… The standing apology for
women who become writers without any special qualification is, that society shuts them out from other
spheres of occupation. Society is a very culpable entity, and has to answer for the manufacture of many
unwholesome commodities, from bad pickles to bad poetry. But society, like ‘matter’, and Her Majesty’s
Government, and other lofty abstractions, has its share of excessive blame as well as excessive praise.”
She concluded, “ ‘In all labour there is profit’; but ladies’ silly novels, we imagine, are less the result of
labour than of busy idleness.” What George Eliot was describing was fiction which, though written within
the group, does little more than echo the official stereotypes and prejudices that led to the creation of the
group in the first place.
Silliness was also the fault which Lady Murasaki, as a reader, saw in the writing of Sei Shonagon. The
obvious difference, however, was that Sei Shonagon was not offering her readers a stultified version of
their own image as consecrated by the men. What Lady Murasaki found frivolous was Sei Shonagon’s
subject-matter: the everyday world within which she herself moved, whose triviality Sei Shonagon had
documented with as much attention as if it had been the shining world of Genji himself. Lady Murasaki’s
criticism notwithstanding, Sei Shonagon’s intimate, seemingly banal style of literature flourished among
the women readers of her time. The earliest known example of this period is the diary of a Heian court
lady known only as the “Mother of Michitsuna”, the Journal of Summer’s End or Fleeting Journal. In it,
the author tried to chronicle, as faithfully as possible, the reality of her existence. Speaking of herself in
the third person, she wrote, “As the days drifted away monotonously, she read through the old novels and
found most of them a collection of gross inventions. Perhaps, she said to herself, the story of her
wearisome existence, written in the form of a journal, might provoke some degree of interest. Perhaps she
might even be able to answer the question: is this an appropriate life for a well-born lady?”
In spite of Lady Murasaki’s criticism, it is easy to understand why the confessional form, the page on
which a woman could appear to be giving “free rein to one’s emotions”, became the favourite reading
matter among Heian women. Genji presented something of the lives of women in the characters who
surrounded the prince, but The Pillow Book allowed women readers to become their own historians.
“There are four ways to write a woman’s life,” argues the American critic Carolyn G. Heilbrun. “The
woman herself may tell it, in what she chooses to call an autobiography; she may tell it in what she
chooses to call fiction; a biographer, woman or man, may write the woman’s life in what is called a
biography; or the woman may write her own life in advance of living it, unconsciously, and without
recognizing or naming the process.”
Carolyn Heilbrun’s cautious labelling of forms also vaguely corresponds to the shifting literatures the
Heian women writers produced — monogatari (novels), pillow-books, and others. In these texts, their
readers found their own lives lived or unlived, idealized or fantasized, or chronicled with documentary
prolixity and faithfulness. This is usually the case for segregated readers: the literature they require is
confessional, autobiographical, even didactic, because readers whose identities are denied have no other
place to find their stories except in the literature they themselves produce. In an argument applied to gay
reading — which can fairly be applied to women’s reading, to the reading of any group excluded from the
realm of power — the American writer Edmund White notes that as soon as someone notices that he (we
can add “or she”) is different, that person must account for it, and that such accounts are a kind of
primitive fiction, “the oral narrations told and retold as pillow talk or in pubs or on the psychoanalytic
couch”. Telling “each other — or the hostile world around them — the stories of their lives, they’re not

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just reporting the past but also shaping the future, forging an identity as much as revealing it.” In Sei
Shonagon, as well as in Lady Murasaki, lie the shadows of the women’s literature we read today.
A generation after George Eliot, in Victorian England, Oscar Wilde’s Gwendolen in The Importance of