The Pillow Book’s Heian period court as a proto-Internet

As a brief introduction, I quote Wikipedia:

The version I read is Meredith McKinney’s translation (ebook available), which I can recommend.

When you begin to read The Pillow Book, the first thing you conclude about our author Shōnagon^[1] is that she is highly interested in the natural world. The book opens with a discussion of the most ideal correspondences of each of the four seasons to times of day:

This conclusion is not inaccurate. There are many passages like this in the book, and Shōnagon is often delighted by aspects of the natural world she has witnessed. (Of course, she also often criticises natural phenomena she finds unaesthetic. "[148] Repulsive things – […​] The inside of a cat’s ear.")

Something you notice later, but not all that much later, is that Shōnagon looks down on things that are far, in a literal or metaphorical sense, from the imperial court. Distant provinces, for being boring:

And commoners, for being unrefined (this is among several references to them, some far ruder!):

These are all concerns bound up in the human social order, not nature; they are in fact detached from nature. (Shōnagon also displays, or feigns, a refined ignorance of such things as what rice plants look like before processing—"[94] […​] Our host […​] produced a bundle of something called ‘rice heads’ […​] We laughed with pleasure at how new and strange everything was".) So this side of her character seems in some way at odds with our first impression—​we feel some tension between the archetypes of the nature-lover and the elitist.

There is another aspect of Sei Shōnagon’s character we must turn to to resolve this. It is this: she is, in my view, a quintessential Internet poster. (The term 'poster' is usually applied to those who are prolific in writing amusing or thought-provoking textual content on the Web, say, on a social media or chat platform, or a blog.)

I am not the first to feel some parallelism between The Pillow Book and the Internet. But I am not sure the claim (not unique to the linked review) that the book resembles a blog is really the truest or most relevant expression of that connection. Maybe Shōnagon’s work is reminiscent of a style some blogs have used; what of it? In the absence of dates, clear separation of entries,^[2] interactions with other blogs, or comments, I feel that particular analogy, while not laughable, will not bear great weight. The Pillow Book itself is at least equally reminiscent of a diary—​which I think is a different thing than a blog, overlap though there may be—​and indeed, it was at least ostensibly intended to be private.

Rather, where I see the resemblance to the Internet in these pages is in the court of the Heian period itself.

Here are some activities integral to social life and social status in the Heian court:

Does this all sound quite familiar? It does to me. Maybe most of us don’t write poems often, and appreciation of classic literature certainly varies, but references to media are the bread and butter of much Internet discourse. Short, situational compositions today often take the form of…​ tweets (microblogging, more generally), or messages on platforms like Discord. The art of the funny reply, the clapback, the ratio, certainly. Rapid written communication—​check. Sharing things to which we had a reaction with others—​of course.

Audiences on the Internet are dynamic—​the people in them, and the point in time at which they see what is shown to them, can vary, more so than in most face-to-face interactions. But that phenomenon is familiar to Shōnagon; it appears often The Pillow Book. "[126] […​] I took it along and showed it to Her Majesty. ‘What splendid writing!’ she exclaimed, and taking it in her hand she went on to praise the witty way he’d composed it."

The accessibility of written material should also not be taken for granted as a point of similarity. We have more textual content available to us on the Internet than anyone ever did in centuries past; analogously, being in the Heian court would—​for the privileged, at least—​have certainly entailed far easier access to literature than most any place outside the capital. Besides the classics, that would have included new literature, the books that (for instance) court ladies were writing. The Tale of Genji, one of the most famous works from that period, was written not far in time from The Pillow Book and delivered chapter by chapter to others at court; its author, Lady Murasaki, famously conducted a rivalry with Sei Shōnagon.

You can feel Shōnagon’s satisfaction with these aspects of the court as she recounts events that transpired there. Is it any wonder that she presents it in her writing as the best thing there is? I can understand that; it is how I feel about the Internet.

One objection I anticipate to my argument in the previous section is that poetical allusions to Chinese classics are not the same sort of thing as Internet memes. I think they are not the same sort of thing to most people, but I don’t think the distinction is in their content or origin so much as in whether they’re 'alive' in a given context.

The word "culture", considered in isolation, evokes associations with things that are frozen in amber. Classic literature, to the canons of which new material is not added at any rate perceptible to the casual observer. Classical music, where live performances, at least, face dwindling audiences. Museums, shrines to objects which, out of their contexts, no longer serve the purposes they once did (don’t get me wrong; I like museums). Maybe some folk practices (the "culture of" this or that group of people) which young people probably don’t care for as much as their grandparents did.

That is culture, and there’s a lot that’s beautiful and good about it, but culture is something alive and dynamic in our age too, and the Internet certainly hosts many of the places in which it lives. In Shōnagon’s place and time, the poems and stories they knew and quoted to each other were part of their living culture—​even though they may have been old even then, and even if, to many Japanese high school students studying them now in their Classical Japanese courses, they seem dusty and dense, soon to be forgotten after the exam.

I would be remiss not to mention that yes, the classical music scene and the literature scene and museum science and the field of archaeology, which does a lot besides fill those museums with artifacts, are also all alive, to the people in and around them, which could be you if you’re interested. It’s the same principle. If your friends like old poetry from the Sinosphere, it can be living culture among you again as it was for the elites (but probably not the commoners) of the Heian period.

Some miscellany, in closing.

(The emphasis is mine.) At the time I read this, I had recently seen scary, narrow bridges discussed and portrayed in a far more recent Japanese work (see season 3, episode 4). It amused me that some things stay the same.

Although I’ve attempted to justify the high regard in which Sei Shōnagon held the imperial court, and contest a certain preconception of such places as stuffy and lifeless in all respects,^[3] I would be misrepresenting her if I said she was not, in truth, something of a snob. She was also more than a little petty: "[289] It’s terribly depressing to discover some quite worthless person blithely reciting a poem that you yourself had particularly liked and carefully copied down in a notebook." Well, surely we can all relate to the sentiment a little?

I include again a link to the publisher’s page for Meredith McKinney’s translation of The Pillow Book and the ebook version of the same. You may, of course, also be able to get it via your library system; that is how I first read it. I should include a content warning for a handful of descriptions of typical-for-the-time ill treatment of animals.

Completing this essay may soon give me further cause to feel some kinship with Sei Shōnagon:

Murasaki Shikibu. Various authors. 2026-05-27. In Wikipedia.

Review: Reading a Heian Blog: A New Translation of "`Makura no Sōshi`". Machiko Midorikawa. 2008. In Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 63, no. 1.

Shonagon is hot. Rivka Galchen. 2020-01-02. In London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 1.

The Pillow Book. Sei Shōnagon, Meredith McKinney (transl.). 2007. Published by Penguin Classics. ISBN 9780140448061.

The Pillow Book. Various authors. 2026-06-24. In Wikipedia.

The Pillow Book: Translating a Classic. Meredith McKinney. 2011-06-28. In Kyoto Journal.