The Pillow Book

Chapter 1 begins with lyrical descriptions of the sky in spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Shonagon fixates on “the blazing sun” and its low position “very close to the mountain rim,” or the “unutterably delightful” sight of snow in the winter morning (3). This meditation on the “times of year” continues in the next chapter, where Shonagon expresses belief that “every month according to its season, the year round, is delightful” (3).

Shonagon shares rituals from early in the year, such as the practice of picking “shoots of herbs that have sprung up in the patches of bare earth amidst the snow” on the seventh day of the year (4). Some of the rituals are interpersonal, as when, on the fifteenth day of the year, “both the senior and gentlewomen of the house go about looking for a chance to strike each other with gruel sticks” in a good-natured game (4). Those who are hit, though, sometimes lose their tempers “and burst into tears” (5).

The spring arrives, and with it Shonagon describes blossoming peaches and emerging willows in great detail. This nature from the outside moves indoors, in the form of branches broken and displayed within the court. Nature and fashion move in symbiosis; the small detail of a willow blossom near a man “wearing a cloak in the cherry-blossom combination” creates an especially desirable effect (6).