"Frightened of the daylight": Sei Shōnagon learns to be seen
In her account of entering Empress Sadako's court, Sei Shōnagon turns screens, shutters, light, and a visible hand into a grammar of social exposure.
Sei Shōnagon's first hours at court are narrated as a problem of being seen. A screen, a sleeve, a curtain and a shutter keep turning visibility up or down, while the young writer tries to control even the position of her hair. The scene is funny because the Empress keeps inviting her closer at the exact moments when she wants to disappear.
Shōnagon entered the service of Empress Sadako around 991, when she was about twenty-four. Arthur Waley's preface describes The Pillow-Book as a mixture of reminiscences and diary entries, arranged by headings and often moving without chronology. This selection belongs to that memoir-like side of the book. 1
The passage
Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow-Book (late tenth century; Arthur Waley translation first published 1928), preliminary memoir, "When I first entered her Majesty's service." 1
When I first entered her Majesty’s service I felt indescribably shy, and was indeed constantly on the verge of tears. When I came on duty the first evening, the Empress was sitting with only a three-foot screen in front of her, and so nervous was I that when she passed me some picture or book to look at, I was hardly capable of putting out my hand to take it. While she was talking about what she wanted me to see—telling me what it was or who had made it—I was all the time wondering whether my hair was in order. For the lamp was not in the middle of the room, but on a stand immediately beside where we sat, and we were more exposed than we should have been even by daylight. It was all I could do to fix my attention on what I was looking at. Only part of her Majesty’s hand showed, for the weather was very cold and she had muffled herself in her sleeves; but I could see that it was pink and very lovely. I gazed and gazed. To an inexperienced home-bred girl like me it was a wonderful surprise to discover that such people as this existed on earth at all. At dawn I hurried away, but the Empress called after me, saying I seemed to be as frightened of the daylight as the ugly old God of Katsuragi. I lay down again, purposely choosing an attitude in which she could not get a full view of me. The shutters had not yet been opened. But soon one of the ladies came along and the Empress called out to her, ‘Please open those things!’ She was beginning to do so, when the Empress suddenly said, ‘Not now!’ and, laughing, the lackey withdrew. Her Majesty then engaged me in conversation for some time, and said at last: ‘Well, I expect you are wanting to be off. Go as soon as you like.’ ‘And come back in good time to-night,’ she added. It was so late when I got back to my room that I found it all tidied and opened up for the day. The snow outside was lovely.
Gloss
Home-bred girl means a young woman raised outside the court's highly managed social world. Shōnagon is not only nervous about meeting a powerful person; she is unsure how to behave in a room where every movement can be read.
The ugly old God of Katsuragi is a teasing allusion. The retrieved text preserves the footnote marker but not the footnote's explanation, so its full mythic backstory cannot be supplied honestly here. Within the scene, the comparison turns Shōnagon's fear of daylight into a comic image rather than a reprimand. 1
Imperial Presence is the formal phrase at the end for appearing before the ruler. It makes the hurried return sound ceremonial, even though Shōnagon has just been pushed out of hiding by the head-girl.
Close read
The passage's main device is visual framing. Shōnagon introduces the Empress behind a three-foot screen, then gives us only part of her hand, then moves to the speaker's own hair, the shutters, the curtains and finally the snow-clouds that can make her "almost invisible." Each object narrows or widens the field of view. The scene does not describe courtly power in the abstract; it makes power operate through who can see whom, and how much.
The partial hand is especially precise. A hand stands in for the whole Empress, a small piece carrying the force of the person behind it. Yet the fragment also changes the direction of attention. Shōnagon begins by worrying about being inspected, but the visible hand is what she studies: its colour, its softness, its difference from anything she has known. The person who feels watched becomes a watcher. Her fear and her curiosity are not separate emotions; the first creates the conditions for the second.
The Empress then plays with the mechanisms of exposure. She calls for the shutters to be opened, stops the opening with a laugh, tells Shōnagon to go, asks her to return, and finally promises that the snow-clouds will conceal her. The commands contradict one another only if visibility is treated as a simple yes-or-no state. In this court, being seen is something adjusted by screens, timing, weather and permission. The novice's education is therefore practical: she must learn not merely where to stand, but when appearance is welcome and when concealment is part of the ritual.
Why it still matters
A first day in a new institution often has the same double instruction: show yourself, but do not show too much; come forward, but know the room's rules before you speak. Shōnagon catches the physical cost of that instruction. She cannot keep her attention on the picture because she is checking her hair. The scene remembers that social intelligence begins as bodily awkwardness, not as confidence.
The Empress's kindness does not erase the imbalance between them. She can turn a shutter, summon a message and decide when the conversation ends. But she also makes the room survivable by converting embarrassment into play. The joke about daylight gives Shōnagon a way to laugh at her fear without pretending the fear was foolish. That is why the passage feels less like a ceremonial welcome than like the first careful adjustment of a relationship.
Reflection
When you enter a room whose rules you do not yet know, what do you try to control first: your words, your body, your appearance, or the amount of yourself that other people can see?
References
- 1Project Gutenberg, *The Pillow-Book of Sei Shōnagon*
gutenberg.org
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