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My Name Is Sei Shōnagon
Who is Sei Shōnagon? 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 them both? Just off a fashionable street in the upbeat heart of contemporary Tokyo, lies a fragment of another age – an old incense shop. Above it, in a room furnished with nothing but a simple paper screen, guests come to speak with the woman known as 'Sei Shōnagon', hoping to find answers to the mysteries of their own bizarre lives. 'Sei Shōnagon' seeks out beauty where she can find it – whether in her memories, or in traditional Japanese culture. As she grows older, the need to understand what she sees around her becomes a personal odyssey that affects the lives of everyone she encounters.
152 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
December 27, 2017
Maravilloso. Ha sido una lectura espectacular. Una genial crítica a la sociedad nipona en especial, pero que se puede trasladar al mundo en general, sobre como ha estado mal visto expresarse en tiempos pasados, e ir contra la norma y como chocan esas costumbres con el actual periodo de cambio. Ese choque entre los que se aferran a lo tradicional, lo que se considera bueno, contra lo nuevo. Contra la búsqueda de tus propias normas. El libro crítica el consumismo, la falta de libertad de decisión propia, la falta de pensamiento individual, no solo colectivo, y sobre todo crítica el papel que le toca a la mujer. Siempre el más perjudicado. Un lectura feminista esencial que expresa la lucha de una mujer por ser dueña de si misma, rechazando las convenciones sociales. Y todo esto escrito de una manera directa, sencilla y preciosa. Unos de libros que más he disfrutado este año.
April 16, 2021
4.5*s. What a wonderful surprise!
March 28, 2021
Might need to invoice Blensdorf for dental work with the effect of the increasingly clenched teeth I had in reading this. Don't doubt she means well in using Japanese society as a backdrop for her story of feminist self-determination, but there's a glaring outsider gaze to this that chafes in its embrace of archetypes every step of the way.
April 29, 2019
My Name Is Sei Shonagon- Jan Blensdorf
Set in Tokyo, our unnamed protagonist, a woman of mixed-race parentage, is trying to survive life despite tragedy surrounding her. The pieces of her life come together to explain her present day state, intertwined to paint a picture of simple joy and harrowing pain.
This book enchanted me, every sentence had my attention. I felt transported around Japan, through trains, incense shops and even history, this read caught me by absolute surprise.
5/5 Stars ✨
Set in Tokyo, our unnamed protagonist, a woman of mixed-race parentage, is trying to survive life despite tragedy surrounding her. The pieces of her life come together to explain her present day state, intertwined to paint a picture of simple joy and harrowing pain.
This book enchanted me, every sentence had my attention. I felt transported around Japan, through trains, incense shops and even history, this read caught me by absolute surprise.
5/5 Stars ✨
July 31, 2008
This book takes place in a small shop in Tokyo amist the fast pace city and ever progressing culture, a young woman sits behind a painted screen listening to men unburden themselves about their work dominated lives. These are their stories...
July 17, 2024
MY NAME IS SEI SHONAGON By Jan Blensdorf.
For over a century, ever since Lafcadio Hearn sent his first rhapsodic dispatches off to The Atlantic Monthly, foreign journalists have found unusual inspiration in Japan -- the impulse not just to describe it but to become somehow of it, to demonstrate how far beneath that famously inscrutable surface they have dipped. Hearn took a Japanese wife and a Japanese name and never left. Jan Blensdorf, an Australian journalist now based in Europe, spent only two years in Tokyo, but in this slender first novel she goes native another way, writing in the voice of a modern Japanese woman.
It's a risky move, and not a completely successful one. The narrator of ''My Name Is Sei Shonagon'' is only half Japanese, to be sure, but after her American father dies, she returns, at the age of 7, to her mother's family in Tokyo. Those early New York memories, Blensdorf suggests, provide enough detachment for the girl to grow into an ironic observer of what has become her (less than happy) home. She sounds, in effect, like an unusually perceptive foreigner.
The story is one long flashback recalled from a hospital bed -- the cause of the woman's semi coma, as well as the identity of her addressee, is revealed only in the final pages. The fatherless girl, soon motherless as well, grows up in her uncle's unwelcoming house, ''an expert on the nature of silences.'' The Japan she describes is a triptych: the numbing, materialist present flanked by visions of the past. A whiff of the refined Heian court persists in the incense shop she has inherited, but a darker history is embodied in her uncle, a tyrant obsessed with ''the art of the sword.''
In an elegantly spare room above the shop, the past and present coexist. Calling herself Sei Shonagon after the witty Heian diarist, the woman holds private audiences from behind a painted screen. Speaking in the voice of the bygone courtier, she leads her clients into a fantasy that allows them to speak freely -- a creative answer to a society that shuns psychotherapy. As she offers entrancing glimpses of the past, they respond with confessions of the pain and drabness of the present -- the overworked salaryman whose home life has withered and died, the aging fashion designer who fondles schoolgirls on the subway.
This farfetched premise is less a plot than a showcase for Blensdorf's knowledge of Japan, ancient and modern. The vignettes that form the novel include set pieces on everything from creation myths to Office Ladies and the self-conscious re-use of name-brand shopping bags. Most of this is familiar, even for casual Japanophiles, so when the narrator begins to use the collective first person -- the ''we Japanese'' that has rejected foreign understanding for centuries -- it feels as if Blensdorf is overstating her claim to cultural authority. Though she was clearly a more observant sojourner than most, it's disappointing to run across the same old chestnuts: the ''otherness of this country,'' its ''culture of self-discipline and self-restraint,'' the social masks behind which ''there is madness and passion and blood enough to rival any of the ancient myths.''
The touches of understated lyricism with which ''My Name Is Sei Shonagon'' is sprinkled make this disappointment especially acute. Blensdorf is alert to the contrasts of urban Japan: the ''untroubled surface, like calm water,'' of a tatami room; the ''half-dead chorus line'' of dozing commuters on a crowded train; the moment of entering a garden, ''when the high-pitched impassive scream of the city just . . . stops.'' Blensdorf points out that the social constraints of Tokyo are an unlovely echo of Heian etiquette: now as then, a writer's duty and salvation are to ''swoop down and pluck the essence from the history of your age and save it so that later, much later, what you saw and felt and lived will be known.'' Sei Shonagon did this so well that her observations are sharp after a thousand years.
The New York Times Book Review Janice P. Nimura Nov. 30, 2003
For over a century, ever since Lafcadio Hearn sent his first rhapsodic dispatches off to The Atlantic Monthly, foreign journalists have found unusual inspiration in Japan -- the impulse not just to describe it but to become somehow of it, to demonstrate how far beneath that famously inscrutable surface they have dipped. Hearn took a Japanese wife and a Japanese name and never left. Jan Blensdorf, an Australian journalist now based in Europe, spent only two years in Tokyo, but in this slender first novel she goes native another way, writing in the voice of a modern Japanese woman.
It's a risky move, and not a completely successful one. The narrator of ''My Name Is Sei Shonagon'' is only half Japanese, to be sure, but after her American father dies, she returns, at the age of 7, to her mother's family in Tokyo. Those early New York memories, Blensdorf suggests, provide enough detachment for the girl to grow into an ironic observer of what has become her (less than happy) home. She sounds, in effect, like an unusually perceptive foreigner.
The story is one long flashback recalled from a hospital bed -- the cause of the woman's semi coma, as well as the identity of her addressee, is revealed only in the final pages. The fatherless girl, soon motherless as well, grows up in her uncle's unwelcoming house, ''an expert on the nature of silences.'' The Japan she describes is a triptych: the numbing, materialist present flanked by visions of the past. A whiff of the refined Heian court persists in the incense shop she has inherited, but a darker history is embodied in her uncle, a tyrant obsessed with ''the art of the sword.''
In an elegantly spare room above the shop, the past and present coexist. Calling herself Sei Shonagon after the witty Heian diarist, the woman holds private audiences from behind a painted screen. Speaking in the voice of the bygone courtier, she leads her clients into a fantasy that allows them to speak freely -- a creative answer to a society that shuns psychotherapy. As she offers entrancing glimpses of the past, they respond with confessions of the pain and drabness of the present -- the overworked salaryman whose home life has withered and died, the aging fashion designer who fondles schoolgirls on the subway.
This farfetched premise is less a plot than a showcase for Blensdorf's knowledge of Japan, ancient and modern. The vignettes that form the novel include set pieces on everything from creation myths to Office Ladies and the self-conscious re-use of name-brand shopping bags. Most of this is familiar, even for casual Japanophiles, so when the narrator begins to use the collective first person -- the ''we Japanese'' that has rejected foreign understanding for centuries -- it feels as if Blensdorf is overstating her claim to cultural authority. Though she was clearly a more observant sojourner than most, it's disappointing to run across the same old chestnuts: the ''otherness of this country,'' its ''culture of self-discipline and self-restraint,'' the social masks behind which ''there is madness and passion and blood enough to rival any of the ancient myths.''
The touches of understated lyricism with which ''My Name Is Sei Shonagon'' is sprinkled make this disappointment especially acute. Blensdorf is alert to the contrasts of urban Japan: the ''untroubled surface, like calm water,'' of a tatami room; the ''half-dead chorus line'' of dozing commuters on a crowded train; the moment of entering a garden, ''when the high-pitched impassive scream of the city just . . . stops.'' Blensdorf points out that the social constraints of Tokyo are an unlovely echo of Heian etiquette: now as then, a writer's duty and salvation are to ''swoop down and pluck the essence from the history of your age and save it so that later, much later, what you saw and felt and lived will be known.'' Sei Shonagon did this so well that her observations are sharp after a thousand years.
The New York Times Book Review Janice P. Nimura Nov. 30, 2003
September 20, 2022
TW: mentions of suicide, death, grief, misogyny and others but I loved this book
This book was so exceptionally well written. Like wow! So poetic and transformative, with beautifully crafted descriptions that also had a strong meaning that you can totally understand. We basically follow an unnamed protagonist who moved from America to Japan when she was seven (she’s mixed parentage), her childhood to adulthood and lots of things happen to her. Also she is telling us about the people who come to speak to her about their lives and problems. A mix of Japanese mythology, stories, beliefs with skilfully penned observations of a contemporary Japan are imbedded throughout. An example is the inclusion of the origin of ‘kanji’ characters with direct links to the modern day. It definitely deals with many topics but with a hard-hitting and emotive meaning. I don’t want to explain the plot too much as the piecing together of her story (like she does) is masterful and needs to be experienced first hand. I adored this book.
This book was so exceptionally well written. Like wow! So poetic and transformative, with beautifully crafted descriptions that also had a strong meaning that you can totally understand. We basically follow an unnamed protagonist who moved from America to Japan when she was seven (she’s mixed parentage), her childhood to adulthood and lots of things happen to her. Also she is telling us about the people who come to speak to her about their lives and problems. A mix of Japanese mythology, stories, beliefs with skilfully penned observations of a contemporary Japan are imbedded throughout. An example is the inclusion of the origin of ‘kanji’ characters with direct links to the modern day. It definitely deals with many topics but with a hard-hitting and emotive meaning. I don’t want to explain the plot too much as the piecing together of her story (like she does) is masterful and needs to be experienced first hand. I adored this book.
February 11, 2019
Al terminar este libro he sentido la necesidad de plasmar de alguna manera lo que ha significado para mi esta lectura.
Simplemente me ha fascinado. Me parece maravilloso cómo a través de la protagonista conocemos las costumbres ancestrales niponas y cómo éstas chocan con las costumbres modernas que intentan abrirse paso con bastante poco éxito en muchas ocasiones.
Nos muestra las creencias, preocupaciones e inquietudes humanas que fácilmente se podrían trasladar a cualquier otra parte del mundo. Y sobre todo hace una crítica al papel tan negativo que ejerce sobre las mujeres los valores tradicionales japoneses.
Para mi una lectura altamente recomendable.
Simplemente me ha fascinado. Me parece maravilloso cómo a través de la protagonista conocemos las costumbres ancestrales niponas y cómo éstas chocan con las costumbres modernas que intentan abrirse paso con bastante poco éxito en muchas ocasiones.
Nos muestra las creencias, preocupaciones e inquietudes humanas que fácilmente se podrían trasladar a cualquier otra parte del mundo. Y sobre todo hace una crítica al papel tan negativo que ejerce sobre las mujeres los valores tradicionales japoneses.
Para mi una lectura altamente recomendable.
December 30, 2025
There are things that I like in this book and others that I don't. I like her story and all the info about life in Japan + glimpses into the lives of those (somewhat mental) men she communicated with from behind the screen.There stories are interesting: a depressed suicidal man, a dejected fellow whose wife left him, another man haunted by his ex girlfriend, and many other such.
Some boring details and philosophical rants I had to skim through🥱... And I am kind of confused about what happens at the end.🤔Was her uncle a paedophile? The smell of cigarettes in her hair and the cup and her uncle's threat to keep it hushed, are pointing to her being molested by him but I am still not sure.
Some boring details and philosophical rants I had to skim through🥱... And I am kind of confused about what happens at the end.🤔Was her uncle a paedophile? The smell of cigarettes in her hair and the cup and her uncle's threat to keep it hushed, are pointing to her being molested by him but I am still not sure.
October 16, 2021
Lectura perfecta para los amantes de la cultura oriental.
La autora ha conseguido juntar una crítica a la vida en Tokio con muchas historias diferentes dentro de una misma novela, cuya protagonista nos cuenta en primera persona.
Se une el pasado y el presente consiguiendo partirme el corazón y a la vez, enseñarme el poder que tiene Sei Shonagon. Una de las protagonistas más valientes y fuertes que he conocido.
Sin duda, sé que guardaré un buen recuerdo de esta lectura.
¡Ah! Y espectacular final ❣️
La autora ha conseguido juntar una crítica a la vida en Tokio con muchas historias diferentes dentro de una misma novela, cuya protagonista nos cuenta en primera persona.
Se une el pasado y el presente consiguiendo partirme el corazón y a la vez, enseñarme el poder que tiene Sei Shonagon. Una de las protagonistas más valientes y fuertes que he conocido.
Sin duda, sé que guardaré un buen recuerdo de esta lectura.
¡Ah! Y espectacular final ❣️
August 9, 2023
Me gusto mucho la historia aunque dice que es una historia descriptiva, me pareció bastante fácil de leer y entender.
La historia trata sobre como el libro lo dice Dei Shonagon lo cual es sus primeros años de vida vivía en los Estados Unidos, pero por la muerte de su padre tuvo que trasladarse al país donde proviene su madre, Sei Shonagon tuvo varios choques culturales referente hacer mujer en Japón, es amante al arte y a la poesía lo cual recurre un amor por este gusto.
La historia trata sobre como el libro lo dice Dei Shonagon lo cual es sus primeros años de vida vivía en los Estados Unidos, pero por la muerte de su padre tuvo que trasladarse al país donde proviene su madre, Sei Shonagon tuvo varios choques culturales referente hacer mujer en Japón, es amante al arte y a la poesía lo cual recurre un amor por este gusto.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 11, 2018
DNFed at page two. Author didn't even take two minutes to perform one simple Google search to figure out the correct spelling of "Omotesando" (hint: it's not Omotosando like she uses in the book)
Obviously the rest of this book is also going to be riddled with errors about Japan. DNF.
Obviously the rest of this book is also going to be riddled with errors about Japan. DNF.
October 25, 2018
Having read many books by Japanese authors, this stands out painfully as written by an outsider.
September 19, 2020
Que frío hace en Japón, que frío y gris hacen las personas a Japón.
May 26, 2021
A beautiful book. I loved the writing and imagery created with his choice of words.
December 26, 2022
Interesting, short read for someone not familiar with the Japanese culture like myself.
[ENG - from the library]
[ENG - from the library]
Read
August 16, 2023Just adding this as a reminder. Read when an ARC when it was first published in U S.
October 15, 2024
La mitad o más del libro son simplemente descripciones, la trama en sí es muy básica y corta.
May 26, 2025
“Todo tiene su ritual, incluso la forja de un sueño.”
April 19, 2023
Comencé a leer este libro sin ninguna expectativa, no sabía nada sobre él. Me llevé una gran sorpresa; es una historia de lucha, a veces silenciosa, a veces acompañada. Es la historia de una niña-mujer que está buscando su lugar en el mundo dentro de una sociedad opresiva y llena de convencionalismos que lejos de hacerte sentir realizado, te hacen mudo e invisible.
Nos presenta diversos temas como la pérdida, el dolor, el suicidio, la lucha por encontrar la belleza aún cuando te sientas rota y vacía, la pérdida y lucha por tu inocencia, etc., todo esto alrededor de un machismo fuertemente anclado en la sociedad y mundo de la protagonista.
Nos presenta diversos temas como la pérdida, el dolor, el suicidio, la lucha por encontrar la belleza aún cuando te sientas rota y vacía, la pérdida y lucha por tu inocencia, etc., todo esto alrededor de un machismo fuertemente anclado en la sociedad y mundo de la protagonista.
November 13, 2012
The rights to this novel were reportedly sold to eight countries before publication, an enviable record for a debut novelist. Aiming at being a modern rendering of Sei Shonagon’s 11th century
Pillow Book
, it’s the story of a Japanese-American woman who inherits a Tokyo incense shop and finds herself acting as counsel to the insecure inner lives of her customers. It’s a ‘spiegel im spiegel’ of interiors, constantly looking further into the life of ‘Sei’ and how she engages with the lives of other people, lives far more interesting than her own which seems to have had most of the joy written out of it. This book is also good for providing a discreet look inside the private behaviours of present-day Japanese who come across as a nation mostly fearful of offending each other, largely reflecting what generations of Japanese would still see as the truth despite the excesses of post-war Western influence. As a whole it has the feel of a book that’s been assembled from disparate parts and rewritten maybe too much, all pieced together with the joins and spikes of interest smoothed over. It is observant and artfully prismatic, though not quite as engaging as I’d hoped for.
May 17, 2012
A book that appeals to the senses - sounds, smells & sights of old Tokyo intertwined with modern Tokyo. There was a sense of comforting grey, which may be linked to the fact that the story was told from someone in a coma. A book to be read at a leisurely pace to absorb and appreciate the imagery. Its languid writing may seem slow, but there's a lot of Tokyo & its inhabitants to absorb, and the ending certainly surprised me.
September 5, 2022
14.6.2022 Everything I saw about this after buying it based on the title alone made me highly sceptical. Someone wrote a scathing review. In the end it is a barely offensive middle of the road novella. Written in a familiar fashion. I didn’t care for it.
Read and watch ‘The Pillow Book.’
4.9.2022 I can’t remember anything that happens in this book.
Read and watch ‘The Pillow Book.’
4.9.2022 I can’t remember anything that happens in this book.
January 18, 2017
Written in a different style than normal. Need to read the jacket introduction to understand what's going on. Good insights into Japanese culture. Nice story with reading between the lines to follow along.
January 22, 2016
A poetic novel that explores both the beauty and dark side of culture/societal norms. I recommend this book along with the German movie "Cherry Blossoms" for a foreign yet insightful look into Japanese culture.
August 24, 2008
Didn't finish, very cloudy.....no clear story line.
November 17, 2012
This book is bored as hell
April 7, 2013
A lovely spare little book. All about memory and the water colour fade of childhood. A gift from a friend. Delightful.
November 11, 2014
Estuvo bien, aunque hasta el final no pude tomarle el rollo a los cambios de situación, y a los saltos de pasado y presente continuos.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews