My Name Is SEI Shonagon

By Jan Blensdorf

Book Overview

Who is Sei Shonagon? The tenth-century author of The Pillow Book? A woman of mixed-race parentage, surviving life in modern Japan? Or a voice from behind a screen, reaching across centuries, linking... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1585674435
• ISBN13: 9781585674435
• Release Date: November 2003
• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Contrast: tenth century and modern Japan

This is a well-written book, with careful evocations of place - sight and scent especially. It is enahnced by a little background browsing. Read the chapter on "Women of the Heiean..." in The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris and browse a bit in his translation of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon for a better grasp of the model for her evening chats with men friends (complete with traditional screen).

Experience the character's love of beauty.

This is a novel about a woman in modern Japan. In an ingenious plot device, the woman, as a favor to a friend, converses with the friend's depressed and shy father, using a screen to separate them visually, kind of like a psychiatrist's couch. This turns into something of a career, but also echoes the writings of a famous medieval Japanese woman author, at a time when noblewomen led secluded lives. The love of beauty unites the two women, and is an important element in both historic periods, however unsatisfactory other aspects of the periods are. Now Blensdorf had lived in Japan only 2 years when she wrote this book, and I cannot vouch for the accuracy of some of her commentaries on modern Japanese life; certainly, she isn't very artful or subtle in conveying them. Nor is Sei Shonagon's general plot line very artful or subtle. What Blensdorf does remarkably well is to make the reader experience the woman's love of beauty, and its powers of sustenance.

A Story of Suspense and a Dream Rich in Ambiguities

Many have written of the otherness of Japan, about its history and culture but few have managed to get inside its soul in the way Jan Blensdorf has done. My Name is Sei Shonagon is no mere travel book. The story itself is set in contemporary Tokyo and emerges via a series of intriguing memories and flashbacks recounted by a near-comatose woman known as Sei Shonagon. Even as the tale gets beneath the skin of the modern city, it is revealing the contrasting threads of beauty and violence that run through the whole of Japanese history. Whether one knows much about Japanese life or not, this book floods the mind with colours, sounds, odours and images of the daily theatre that is Japanese life. You emerge from reading as if from a dream rich with ambiguities.Jan Blensdorf spent two years in Japan and inevitably her direct experience must have been as a foreigner, an expat, but she has said in interviews that gradually she came to internalise many of the Japanese attitudes, customs and forms of daily life. For me that is also what makes the character of Sei so fascinating - that she is somehow suspended between two cultures: she has the inside knowledge available to a Japanese together with the detachment of a critic. Her struggle for personal survival - in many senses - is only one part of a complex tale that deftly interweaves the lives of various people Sei comes to know at a level of extraordinary intimacy.My Name is Sei Shonagon is a multi-layered experience - a story of suspense, a celebration of beauty and, above all, a meditation on the search for personal identity.