Twee Magazine

"The Pillow Book" by Sei Shōnagon.

I realize that by including Sei Shōnagon's "The Pillow Book," I am expanding the definition of twee and pushing it back by about a thousand years (the book was published in 1002). But I have said before that I think the sensibility we now call twee has existed for a long time, in a variety of forms, and the contemporary idea of tweeness is just the newest iteration. "The Pillow Book," which mostly consists of a series of lists of the author's aesthetic reactions to her world, nowadays reads as twee.

Sei Shōnagon had her own word, and she uses it throughout the book, relentlessly, so much so that modern translators choose to use a variety of synonyms so as not to sound repetitive. That word is okashi, which translates as "amusing" or "delightful." Translator Meredith McKinney describes the words as follows;

Okasi is much more than a matter of merely  private and transient responsiveness. It is in essence a kind of aesthetic response, one that can be cultivated and honed, which delights itself by its awareness of the frisson of pleasure that an object or moment produces, and whose pleasure is compounded by the knowledge that it would be shared by others of cultured sensibility.

It should be noted that contemporary American twee sensibilities already borrows from Japanese sensibilities, particularly kawaii, which represents a sort of squealing delight in cuteness that finds its purest expression in America in Zooey Deschanel's character on "The New Girl."

But okashi is an older sensibility, and deliberately refined. Sei Shōnagon liked poetry -- a lot. "The Pillow Book" repeatedly offers stories of spontaneously composed poems, often by the author, and how delighted people were to hear them. Sometimes these poems are challenges, intended to be answered by another poem, which Sei Shōnagon has a particular talent for.

She also likes clothes, and talks about them frequently, and sometimes likes and sometimes doesn't like fine art (she tells a story of hiding from an especially graphic collection of images of hell). Sei Shōnagon was part of the court culture in 11th century Japan, acting as a court lady to the empress, and much of her writing is about the activities in the palace.

But okashi encompasses much more than a cloistered world of fine arts, fashion, and court politics. Just about anything can produce a reaction of delight from the author: the way a group of women lean out of a carriage, the voice of a priest reading out a prayer, birds rising from a pond. Sei Shōnagon seems to go through her life looking for experiences that give her a little ripple of pleasure, and then documents them in lists, which then expand to stories. Her tastes can be strange and contradictory, and, when her pleasure is interrupted, she can be hilariously irritable. She is as bothered by a sleepy exorcist as she is by someone who disturbs a sleepy exorcist, and she cannot abide the sounds of barking dogs or crying children.

The Japanese court seems especially prankish in Sei Shōnagon's telling, sometimes alarmingly (the book starts by describing a puckish tendency of courtiers to just smack each other, which was treated as hilarious by everyone except whoever got smacked), sometimes filled with whimsey. There is a long sequence dedicated to the members of court betting how long a mountain of snow will last, and Sei Shōnagon offers a suggestion that seems absurdly long, but then the mountain just lasts and lasts and lasts, and everyone grows slightly hysterical about the subject.

Okashi seems to have been considered to be as shallow and inconsequential in Sei Shōnagon's era as twee is today: "Tales of the Geni" author Murasaki Shikibu called Sei Shōnagon "ridiculous and superficial," and the books was parodied in the Edo Period in a book titled "The Dog Pillow," which borrowed Sei Shōnagon's tendency to list things, but with a sharp comic sensibility, such as:

Things One Would Like to Send Away

An old wife.
Someone who appears in the middle of a conversation.
A beggar standing at the gate.
The officious parent of one's boy favorite.
A woman who falls asleep after making love.

Even though the "Dog Pillow" is making fun of Sei Shōnagon's sensibilities, the parody somehow manages to be equally twee. The parody, after all, fulfills on of Sei Shōnagon's main requirements: It is delightful.