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One day Lord Korechika, the Minister of the Centre, brought the Empress a bundle of notebooks. 'What shall we do with them?' Her Majesty asked me, 'The Emperor has already made arrangements for copying the "Records of the Historian".'
'Let me make them into a pillow,' I said.
'Very well,' said Her Majesty. 'You may have them.'
I now had a vast quantity of paper at my disposal, and I set about filling the notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material. On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects. I was sure that when people saw my book they would say, 'It's even worse than I expected. Now one can really tell what she is like.' After all, it is written entirely for my own amusement and I put things down exactly as they came to me. How could my casual jottings possibly bear comparison with the many impressive books that exist in our time?
from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, translated by Ivan Morris
1. I miss my bolster
I miss my bolster, the long pillow held between my legs and hugged to my chest from the time I was born to when I turned thirty-three.
I have the impression that it was the same pillow although this could not be true. Perhaps it stayed the same because the slip would change. A fresh pillowslip smelled not unpleasantly of washing powder. After drying in the sun for hours on a bamboo pole, it was hot to my thighs. I also liked the sensation of it cooling and, later at night, the sensation of warming it in the cleft of my body.
There was a dark brown pillowslip with overlapping white squares. Another pillowslip was blue with white balloons. My favourite had the pattern of palm leaves.
Darren laughed at the bolster when he visited me from England and slept in the same room. We must get you a woman, he said. Darren had straw blond hair and a swimmer's shoulders. At the beach he pulled on green...