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Observations by a Scholar of Japanese Literature: Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life as an Encyclopedia of Okashi

By Naomi Fukumori

Okashi. I’m sure this is the adjective that Sei Shônagon, a lady-in-waiting cum documentarian of the tenth-century Japanese court, would use to express her impressions of Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life.

Okashi is Sei Shônagon’s favorite adjective, used most often in her Pillow Book (422 times in one variant of the text that runs 443 pages in modern typeset, therefore appearing with the frequency of nearly once every page! I think Ms. Rosenthal would appreciate this bit of knowledge, cf., “Appendix f” of Ordinary Life). Okashi holds a range of meanings, all positive—amusing, charming, delightful, interesting. A possible etymology of the term breaks into two parts, a conjugation of the verb “oku” meaning “to invite” or “to elicit” and the causative/adjectival formant “shi,” creating a descriptor for things that “cause to invite” or “cause to elicit.” In other words, okashi characterizes people/objects/places/events that draw forth the interest of an observer. Moreover, it is clear from usage that okashi describes matters that appeal to the observer’s wit through the unique confluence of a specific time, space, subject/object, and action. For instance, the dawn of spring, when the mountain ranges gradually brighten and purple wisps of clouds drift across them (the opening passage of The Pillow Book). Or the circumstance Lady Shônagon deems at the top of her list of “Hateful Things”: when an important visitor arrives unannounced at one’s home just when one is in a rush to leave, and one is begrudgingly forced to entertain—how hateful! In Sei Shônagon’s writings, things that are okashi are the extraordinarily amusing things that punctuate ordinary life (albeit quotidian life in the imperial court). The things Ms. Rosenthal captures are, therefore, the hallmark of okashi.

Ms. Rosenthal traces the gestation of her Ordinary Life back to Sei Shônagon’s birth in 965 (q.v., page 21). This strikes me as an apt genealogy, one that Lady Shônagon would approve of. Ms. Rosenthal’s work shares with Lady Shônagon’s writings the penchant for listing/taxonomy, the fragment, and non-linear narrative, in addition to the loving detail to daily life already mentioned. And, dare I say it, they share a decidedly female perspective. In categorizing Lady Shônagon’s sui generis work, Japanese literary historians have since the nineteenth-century labeled it a zuihitsu, a term of Chinese origin that literally means “following the brush.” This term evokes “natural,” uninhibited, unstructured writing that meanders the course of a writer’s whim (not the stream-of-consciousness psychology of modernist writing that the term would seem to suggest). Ms. Rosenthal’s work, too, exhibits such characteristics of spontaneity and levity and thus rightly belongs within what the Japanese call the zuihitsu genre. As Ms. Rosenthal notes, there is yet to be a literary term coined in English to encompass the variety of her writing in Ordinary Life; in the meantime, “encyclopedia” does suffice. Although seemingly desultory in content and organization, Sei Shônagon’s Pillow Book has withstood the test of readerly tastes for over a millennium through its witty, kaleidoscopic evocation of tenth-century court life. Through her alphabetical, whimsical, encyclopedic musings on her life, Ms. Rosenthal likewise gathers much that is captivating about our twenty-first-century existence. This is not an easy task, although the breezy effect of Ms. Krouse’s writing may make it seem so. It takes the very unique capacity to encapsulate the okashi effect of everyday life—a sensibility upon which Sei Shônagon placed great value.

Naomi Fukumori
Specialist in Sei Shônagon’s The Pillow Book
Assistant Professor of Premodern Japanese Literature, The Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

July 30, 2003