HARU wa akebono—yoyo shiroku nariyuku yamagiwa wa, sukoshi akarite… Most people in Japan can reach back to their school days to recite without hesitation the famous opening lines of the thousand-year-old classic known in English as The Pillow Book. The sounds roll off the tongue like poetry, with the same resonance and authority that transcend mere meaning. They are accompanied by a little swarm of facts rendered almost meaningless by repetition and familiarity: Sei Shōnagon, gentlewoman at the court of Emperor … ? (the name often slips the memory), mid-Heian period ‘woman writer’, contemporary and rival of the author of The Tale of Genji. They also generally carry more private associations of the boredom of the classroom, and the unpleasantness and difficulty of studying classical Japanese and the excerpts from ‘the classics’ that the high school examination system requires.

How far has this text travelled since Sei Shōnagon took up her brush, let her mind hover on the elegant and intriguing question of what moment of the day quintessentially matches the feeling of spring, and pictured that moment when dawn begins to whiten the sky behind the dark line of the mountains? Surely it has travelled quite as far as it must travel to reach us in the translated words ‘In spring, the dawn—when the slowly paling mountain rim is tinged with red …’