Language reaches beyond the barriers that seem prominent in Shonagon’s society. She also expresses, privately in The Pillow Book, a significant disdain for those who use language ineloquently. Shonagon earns a reputation, and many close relationships, through her skillful attention to language. Literacy is a mark of class in the Heian court, and nothing is more elegant and respectable than writing, memorizing, and reciting both Chinese and Japanese poems with ease. Many of her delicately crafted poems describe relationships with the Empress Teishi, who presides over the Heian court, as well as many male courtiers. Shonagon describes a deep interest in the art of poetry.
Some reviewers have remarked that parts of The Pillow Book feel uncannily similar to a Tumblr account, a listicle, or Twitter feed a young woman might write in our own century. The parallel identified between The Pillow Book and The American Diary-both texts largely ignored by academia-promises to clarify further early Japanese immigrants' experimentation with their bodies, citizenship, and other markers of identity to create a Japanese American subjectivity.Even so, Shonagon’s vivid descriptions of nature, her fascination with royal spectacle, and her tendency to gossip, have a timeless quality. This article demonstrates that cross-dressing originates in moments of personal crisis and that its practice is sustained by the anxiety of cultural dislocation.
It is especially the portrayal of what Marjorie Garber has delineated as a “category crisis” that links Japanese medieval writing and early fictional accounts by Japanese American authors. Shônagon and Noguchi engage in “authorial crossdressing” to inhabit a social, cultural, and national space onto which they only have a precarious hold. Both narratives appropriate (cross-) dressing as a means of overcoming gender, cultural, and class borders. Throughout Yone Noguchi's novel The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902), Morning Glory, a newly arrived Japanese immigrant to the U.S., experiments with a multitude of different identities through clothes. The Pillow Book by Sei Shônagon, Empress Sadako's lady in waiting from about 993-1000, offers rich detail about the meaning and power of dress during the Heian period.
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