My Name is Sei Shonagon

In a small incense shop in modern Tokyo, amid the manic consumerism of cartoon-colored Shibuya youth culture, incense is still made in the ancient way—slowly ground by hand and matured over time. Above the shop, a young woman sits behind a painted screen, listening to men unburden themselves about their work-dominated lives. She calls herself “Sei Shonagon", after the eleventh-century woman who wrote The Pillow Book.

This exquisite first novel is a Pillow Book for the twenty-first century; its “Sei" is a young woman who, as a child, moved to Japan from America to live with her strict, tradition-obsessed uncle after the death of her parents, an American academic and a Japanese student. As the novel opens, “Sei", now a young woman, lies in a hospital bed, hearing sounds around her, unable to speak except silently to herself—"I don't even know if you are still alive… I’m going to talk to you anyway, tell you everything I remember".

Thus her story unfolds, back to a dark past and toward an unimaginable fate.

© 2003 The Overlook Press (Ebook): 9781468305692

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Ebook: 10 november 2003