Unbinding “The Pillow Book”: The Many Lives of a Japanese Classic by Gergana Ivanova

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unbinding “The Pillow Book”: The Many Lives of a Japanese Classic by Gergana Ivanova Joannah Peterson UNBINDING “THE PILLOW BOOK”: THE MANY LIVES OF A JAPANESE CLASSIC, by Gergana Ivanova. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 240 pp. $65.00 cloth; $64.99 ebook. Gergana Ivanova’s Unbinding “The Pillow Book”: The Many Lives of a Japanese Classic illuminates the complex reception history of one of Japan’s most celebrated and widely adapted texts. The Pillow Book (c. 1002), written during the height of Japan’s Heian era (794–1185), contains author Sei Shōnagon’s account of her time as a lady-in-waiting in the service of Empress Teishi. The text draws upon a variety of literary genres (memoir, essay, lists, anecdotes, poetry), fostering great diversity in the ways in which it has been rewritten and adapted over the centuries, variously as erotic parody, educational material for women, nativist rhetoric, and even as a prototypical Heian blog. Its reception has been impacted by conceptions of its author’s feminine gender, comparisons to the canonical Tale of Genji (written by female contemporary Murasaki Shikibu around 1008), and the many interpretative communities through which it has traversed. As Ivanova demonstrates, The Pillow Book is a consummate “case study of how literary criticism, gender structures, and the status of women have changed over time” (p. 1). Japanese markets have recently seen a surging interest in the classics, from scholarly commentaries to comics. Similarly, the afterlives of classical texts have gained attention in English language publications. Scholarly interest in The Pillow Book is reflected in vital works by Keller Kimbrough, Linda Chance, Evelyne Lesigne-Audoly, and Valerie Henitiuk. However, it is due to Ivanova’s tremendous efforts that The Pillow Book now enjoys a more diachronically all-embracing study of its long and fascinating history. Impeccably researched and well-articulated, Ivanova’s monograph contributes to recent re-conceptualizations of “reception history” and “canon formation”: that is, the shift away from a presupposed stable “original” text and a heightened interest in the ways in which texts are continually re-made. Ivanova extends considerations of Michael Emmerich’s work on the Tale of Genji (2013) by emphasizing the importance of secondary writings in the face of a lost and unknowable original, as well as notions from Joshua S. Mostow’s work on the Tales of Ise (2014) regarding the ways in which texts have been used to advance social and political goals. Ivanova’s book breaks further ground by showing that “even within the same historical setting, [The Pillow Book] did not perform the same [End Page 349] functions for audiences of differing genders” (p. 2). Ivanova also reveals new insights into educational texts for women by bringing disparate adaptations into a new context, one based on readership rather than genre. Furthermore, Ivanova’s innovative use of previously overlooked materials, such as parodic rewritings of The Pillow Book, enables her to broaden her interpretive scope while at the same time challenging previous notions of the utility of parody, thus demonstrating that conceptualizations of genre continue to impact views of The Pillow Book’s reception. Chapter one, “What is The Pillow Book?,” serves as a highly accessible introduction to Ivanova’s theoretical stakes, research parameters, and ambitious goals. Chapter two, “(Re)constructing the Text and Early Modern Scholarship,” reveals the ways in which early modern scholars, seeking to make the work more comprehensible by compiling an authoritative text from the many variants in circulation, assigned a single genre to a work that is comprised of many. This narrow classification had profound effects on later characterizations of Sei’s work, namely, the designation of the work as a zuihitsu or miscellany, which was first used by nativist scholars to assert Japan’s literary superiority and later used to argue that it was “random, spontaneous, and trivial” (p. 48). Chapter two also situates changing perceptions of Sei’s artistry within the seventeenth century’s burgeoning publishing industry. In showing how the demand “to turn Japan’s literary heritage into ‘common knowledge’” shaped texts such as The Pillow Book in ways that had long-lasting effects, Ivanova makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the...