To do so, means we are human, making mistakes and living through them. It is bravery to fall from the pedestal of womanhood. I have the quote on my wall now to remind me that perfection (even self-imposed perfection) is another bar in the prison of gender. And from Shikujo’s friendship, the Princess sends her a poem, telling her to live her emotions and embrace her imperfections. She enters back into her old life serving the Princess, an old woman who knows she is dying. There’s a beautiful moment, maybe three-quarters into the novel, where Shikujo has left her husband (though not divorced him) and returned to the capital. She wants to be the wife out of Japanese folk-lore. Gender is a performance and Shikujo wants nothing more than to be perfect and never raise her voice or contradict her husband or reveal that she has emotions to withhold. But she merely plays the role of wife, the way she believes she ought. She is the perfect wife and Kaya no Yoshifuji resents her perfection. We see her as no one else does we see her behind the screens, behind her floor length hair and behind the pretty poems she writes, playing marriage politics with her husband. Through Shikujo’s diary (her “pillow-book”) her loneliness and desire and anger become palpable. But she is so much more than a rival or a foil for Kitsune. While not the protagonist, Shikujo is one of three first person narrators who brings the folk-tale to a level intimate with the voices of women. And while Kitsune is more than deserving of her own blog post, allow me to introduce Shikujo.
The novel, based off a 9th Century Japanese folk-tale, centers on Kistune, a fox who falls in love with a nobleman, Kaya no Yoshifuji, and uses fox-magic to win his love. I mentioned in a previous post, wanting to write about the female characters from Kij Johnson’s The Fox Woman.
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