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Paper short abstract

The aim of my paper is to explore the commentary rediscovery of the Pillow Book in the early Edo period, particularly in the Vernal Spring commentary of Kitamura Kigin, which I argue evinces a telling concern for the layered textuality of Sei Shōnagon’s complicated work.

Paper long abstract

Though today Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book is often partnered with the magnum opus of her contemporary Murasaki, the trajectories of the two works in historical reception could hardly be more disassociated. Compared to the Tale of Genji, with its endless library of exegetical tomes, works that might be called commentaries on the Pillow Book hardly even exist before the Edo period. How the Pillow Book was actually read over the centuries remains as such shrouded mostly in mystery. The decisive rediscovery came at last in the year Enpō 2 (1674), which saw the successive appearance of two pioneering commentaries: Katō Bansai’s The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon: A Commentary and Kitamura Kigin’s The Pillow Book: The Vernal Spring Commentary. Both works made available to the reading public, for the first time, not only the original work itself, but also an apparatus of explanatory annotations. Kigin’s Vernal Spring was particularly influential, its interpretation of the Pillow Book becoming indeed foundational for research well into the modern period.

A particularly notable feature of that interpretation is the Vernal Spring’s tendency to remark upon the quality of “ineffable excellence” (myō) to be found in the author’s “writing,” her “diction,” her “style.” Concern for writing phenomena is so strong, in fact, that there exist annotations flagging as “writing” even cases where the original text itself eschews the verb. I argue that this concern should be seen as a telling one. For it reveals, not only the annotating Kigin’s personal scholarly interests, but also an assumption of kindred interest among what we might call broader commentary circles, the especially literarily-inclined (portion of the) reading public that such annotations served. It highlights moreover the surprising fact that even from the work’s commentary debut, Edo literary scholarship was already discovering the Pillow Book’s layered textuality: its internal meta-discourse on the writing act, and its external appreciability as a written object. The aim of my paper is to explore this complicatedly new and yet seasoned reception of the Pillow Book, with due consideration also for the contemporary determining factors of scholarly environment and manuscript access.