Paper short abstract:

The Pillow Book is famous for high textual variance, yet read today mostly in a single textual line. Showing how much portrayals of women differ between textual lines, this paper demonstrates the degree of variance, arguing that this diversity is the better mirror of how the work was actually read.

Paper long abstract:

Works from the Heian period have always been read in the fluid, diverse array of variants they assumed over time though copying by countless hands. When still extant, these older manuscripts and the texts they preserve are documents of great value to us in studying the bibliographic fortunes of the Pillow Book, or the details of its reception history. Indeed, even among texts from the Heian era, the Pillow Book is known as a more extreme case of textual variance. Nonetheless, today the Pillow Book is read and interpreted mostly from one textual line alone, the Sankan-bon Text. Only rarely are other extant textual lines compared with it, or made the subjects of analysis in their own right. If, however, one keeps in mind that the production and consumption of such a textual variety is itself precisely one of the most characteristic facts about the Pillow Book's reception history, it becomes clear that such issues of textual difference are something no research on the work can afford to ignore.

Drawing from all these various textual lines, this paper will consider in particular passages of feminine portrayal, demonstrating the degree of variation among images of women as painted differently by different Pillow Book texts. Such passages from the Pillow Book of discourse on women are among those most cited, assigned a significance reflective of the text's reception as the work of Sei Shōnagon, a woman herself and in court service. A careful comparison, however, of textual differences between the various textual lines reveals that the images they paint of women are by no means the same. One finds, for example, departures from the logic of the Sankan-bon Text—that most frequently interpreted in modern terms—which in their sheer contrast thoroughly relativize it, "Sankan-bon logic" becoming thus the viewpoint of one Pillow Book version among others. Considering several examples from various textual lines, I hope not only to convey the fundamental diversity of the Pillow Book's textual universe, but also to suggest that this very diversity is the best mirror of how that work was, in fact, actually read.