A place to put these butterflies: finding form in zuihitsu

Abstract

The 1,000-year-old Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (Makura-no sōshi) is a definitive example of the genre of Japanese literature known as zuihitsu—literally, ‘as the brush flows’. An autobiographical account of the cloistered world of a lady-in-waiting at the Emperor’s court in tenth-century Japan, this ground-breaking text comprises a fragmented ‘miscellany’ of loosely associated ideas, personal essays and lists. Beyond its singular importance as a historical record of daily life which is almost microscopic in its detail, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon endures to this day as a source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and scholars interested in experimenting with narrative form. This paper offers a creative, scholarly examination of formal aspects of Shōnagon’s landmark zuihitsu in relation to my own creative nonfiction work, currently being undertaken as part of a PhD in creative writing at Griffith University. In particular, the fragmentation that is the Pillow Book’s defining feature, along with the associative linking techniques seen in many of the lists scattered throughout, have informed the structural interplay of the memoir material.