Before this sounds too literary by half – though classical Japanese culture was literary, in the extreme – consider the poetic consequences of the Japanese dwelling itself. You live in a membrane, the thinness of which, with its paper walls and screens, heightens awareness to an extraordinary degree. Recently, sleeping in an eight-mat room in Kyoto, I felt that I was hardly sleeping at all. Every sound penetrates one’s own space: cough two rooms away, footsteps in the street, even, it seems, moonlight among stones in the garden. Seldom had I been so conscious of my own breath. Never before – or not since camping alone in the desert – had I been conscious of the weight of a word, if I happened to speak.

Types of social space, surely, are conducive to some kinds of poetry rather than others. When you live decorously close to the floor, and walk without shoes near others, there is a pace to things that must affect phrasings, as well as tones and direction of speech. Privacy must become a sensual experience. The breathing space is a world whose inhabitants might crave moments to themselves, even as, in another mood, they thrive on being seen, and on peeping, and on that sweet bird called the letter, which they will to secretly wing its way from one pavilion to another. The hidden, the unhidden, what might be revealed by words tremulously attuned to the physical realities of the dwelling – this seems to determine much.

There is a lovely moment – and ‘lovely’ is a word that seems to arise naturally according to the demands of such a habitat – in the diary of Lady Murasaki, the author of The Tale of Genji, the world’s first great novel, and a fiction that depends absolutely upon poetic dwelling. Murasaki, who is a court attendant, is on her way back to her room, when she looks in on Lady Saisho:

She lay with her head pillowed on a writing box, her face all but hidden by a series of robes – dark red lined with green, purple lined with dark red – over which she had thrown a deep crimson gown of unusually glossy silk. The shape of her forehead was enchanting and so delicate. She looked just like one of those princesses you find depicted in illustrations. I pulled back the sleeve that covered her face.

‘You remind me of a fairy-tale princess,’ I said.

She looked up with a start.

‘You are dreadful!’ she said, propping herself up. ‘Waking people up like that without a thought!’

I remember being struck by the attractive way her face suddenly flushed. So it is that someone normally very beautiful can look even more beautiful than ever on occasions.

It is hard to imagine a more self-conscious passage. Once looking and being looked at are framed so exquisitely there can be no end to art and artifice, and a sense of self agreeably revealed and sometimes violated – all in the interest of ‘beauty’. What kind of poetry arises from such an aestheticised world when beauty can be, well, suffocating and precious in the extreme.

Lady Murasaki’s response was to weave herself into the great fiction of the shining prince, and to place it beside a diary of court life that was elegantly candid about its petty intrigues and absurdities, and fully conscious of her own ‘tasting the bitterness of life to the very full’. Her tone is nostalgic, melancholy and tart. She does not spare herself – ‘a retiring old fossil’ – any more than she does other women at court, such as ‘the dreadfully conceited Sei Shonagon’, the author of The Pillow Book (Penguin, $28 pb, 364 pp, 9780140448061), who ‘thought herself so clever and littered her writings with Chinese characters’. Admittedly, The Pillow Book is not to be compared artistically to The Tale of Genji, which is one reason why Shonagon’s translator, Meredith McKinney, in her superb introduction, feels the need to make a case for the diarist as not a ‘silly chatterbox,’ and not less ‘aware’ (a spiritually central Japanese term) than Murasaki. Within the orbit of Japanese studies, it is fascinating to consider such pleading, but after spending time with Shonagon I feel that her sensibility needs no defence. Poetic dwelling ripples in the whole stream of her observations, even when they are casual asides. ‘As we read her apparently crazy quilt of vignettes and opinions and anecdotes,’ McKinney writes, ‘we find ourselves deep inside this world, and feel her responses along our own nerves.’

Shonagon’s charm lies in the quality of her bemusement and in the mastery of detail that can generate – even across cultures – a shudder. One minute, full of the usual admiration, she observes senior courtiers and others near the Watch Gate of the palace. ‘But when I actually saw them at close quarters at the palace, the attendants faces were all dark and blotchy where their white powder hadn’t covered the skin properly, precisely like black patches of earth showing through where snow has half melted – a truly horribly sight.’

Murasaki intrusively lifts the veil, in the manner of the novelist: Shonagon’s snapshots would be deadly if they were not so droll. Of course, Shonagon loves many things around her: seasons, ceremonies and especially her mistress, Empress Teishi, whom she serves faithfully for seven years, leading up to the year 1000. The Pillow Book is replete with domestic and royal details that glow like gold leaf on a screen painting. Yet at the same time, the inimitable charm of Shonagon is to know how to present her dislikes, especially those moments when men have penetrated one threshold or another. In one of her many lists, ‘Infuriating Things’, she notes:

A man you’ve had to conceal in some unsatisfactory hiding place, who then begins to snore. Or, a man comes on a secret visit wearing a particularly tall lacquered cap, and of course as he scuttles in hastily he manages to knock it against something with a loud bump. I also hate it when a rough reed blind catches on the head as someone passes underneath, and makes that scratchy noise.

Shonagon is acutely sensitive to noise, to scents, to ineptitude, to the inflection of every performance in the living space, including the mediocrity of Buddhist ceremonies, especially when the sutras are chanted too long by monks who are not good-looking. The things she loves are indeed attractive – ‘a baby’s face painted on a gourd’ – but the things that make her wince are equally telling. ‘Dispiriting Things’ include ‘a dog howling in the middle of the day. The sight in spring of a trap for catching winter fish … A birthing hut where the baby has died …’ ‘Repulsive things’ include, ‘Hairless baby mice [tumbling] out of their nest … A rather dirty place in the darkness. A very ordinary woman looking after lots of children. The way a man must feel when his wife, who he’s not really very fond of, is ill for a long time.’

There is an emphatic personal presence here, the conventions of poetry be damned, you might be tempted to say. Except, of course, that these are details a Western modernist would celebrate: the ‘direct treatment of the thing’, as Ezra Pound said. For Shonagon, more formally, poetry starts where The Pillow Book does: with notes on the seasons and the times of year, registrations that embrace the sensual actualities of Kyoto as the place in which she lives in her body and no one else’s, especially in summer ‘at the dark of the moon’, with ‘fireflies … dancing everywhere in a mazy flight’. Soon we come to her notations on mountains, peaks, plains and river pools, topography that has been named with full poetic intent, as McKinney’s treasure trove of notes points out. A name could be more important than the place itself. Some names ‘delight’, others ‘terrify’ Shonagon. As she names things, we experience the envelopment of poetry. ‘Surusawa Pond is a very special place,’ she writes, ‘because the Emperor paid it a formal visit when he heard how one of the Palace Maidens had drowned herself there. Thinking of Hitomaro’s marvellous words “her hair tangled as in sleep”, there is really nothing I can add.’

Hitomaro, one of the great poets of the ninth century, was famously presented in the first of the imperial anthologies. By the time Shonagon was in court, the poetry of the Heian period (794–1192) was in full flower, and all educated persons were expected to be intimate with the Kokinshu, the classic anthology, which ran to twenty-four volumes. Shonagon is thrillingly on her mettle when, just as she and the gentlewomen are settled inside the blinds of the veranda, splendid in their ‘cherry-blossom combination Chinese jackets’, with their ‘sleeves all spilling out on display below the blinds’, who should abruptly intrude but His Majesty himself. Instantly, a courtier intones a poem of praise and, in response, Her Majesty turns to Shonagon and asks her to grind some ink. ‘I was so agog at the scene before me that I could barely manage to keep the inkstick steady in its holder. Then Her Majesty proceeded to fold a piece of white paper, and said to us, “Now I want each of you to write here the first ancient poem that springs to mind.”’ After much consternation, Shonagon wrote:

With the passing years
my years grow old upon me
yet when I see
this lovely flower of spring
I forget age and time.

Then she changed, ‘flower of spring’ to ‘your face, my lady’. We are told: ‘Her majesty ran her eye over the poems, remarking, “I just wanted to discover what was in your hearts.”’

This was not the end of the story. How could it be, when much more than memory was being tested? ‘I felt a sudden sweat break out all over me,’ Shonagon writes, sounding refreshingly unlike Lady Murasaki. And she goes on to tell how, on another day, Her Majesty took out the Kokinshu, read the opening lines and asked her ladies to complete the poem from memory. Agonies. ‘Some of us had copied out the Kokinshu many times, and should really have known it all by heart.’

So the time passed. You were as fine as the costumes you wore, and the poetry you had mastered, and from which you could – at the drop of the royal hat, or in the recesses of the night, when a man expressed his wish to visit, or had, with tact, managed to visit – improvise. Poetry made everything possible because poetry was the quintessence of the ineffable. Poetry also abetted moments as erotic as a sonnet by Shakespeare, but without the Christian pieties that cramped the style of Eros as we know him. Shonagon transmits a carnal relish for the moment when Captain Sanekata, sitting beside a lady whose ‘red cord’ had loosened from her gown, was moved to recite:

A wintry indifference
freezes the well’s blue waters
to a knot of ice.
How might I melt that cord
and loosen its icy knot?

The woman couldn’t speak: she was too young to know what to do, and she was in public. Shonagon: ‘It’s no good being bashful and hesitant when it comes to poetic compositions. Where does that ever get you? ... the important thing is that it must be something you come out with on the spur of the moment.’

It is comments like these that convey the passionate intensity of things, as well as Shonagon’s freshness and courage. She wrote a poem to fill the gap left by the girl’s failure.

The cord’s knot is loose
as ice on the water’s surface.
It finds itself undone
by the warm sunlight of a garland
of festive fern leaves in the hair.

McKinney tells us about the festival to which this moment belonged (the dancers had been performing the Dance of Heavenly Maidens), the significance of red cords, the play on words involved in the Japanese for ‘mountain wells’, ‘mountain indigo’, ‘cord’, ‘ice’, and ‘creeping fern’. Utterances of supreme concentration, these poems might seem trite, but they are not. The writer and spontaneous speaker of them were as attuned to allusion as a good musician. The art of the Japanese poem, especially the five-line tanka (with its 5-7-5-7-7 syllable count), was to refine the note that everyone would recognise as delightfully new – but not so new as to violate convention.

There is another thing that must be said about the essential nature of poetic dwelling in Japanese court life: its characteristic immediacy and concreteness, which is enlivening today. It was not simply that individual sensibilities exercised a penchant for ephemeral states, for fleeting descriptive moments and impersonal registrations of events. Nor was it that Buddhist views committed individuals to a sense of a present that contained all time. But in important ways, the Japanese language did. As McKinney points out, ‘the classical Japanese language does not need, and very seldom has, a specified subject to the verb. Is it I, or you, or we or perhaps she, who is experiencing this?’ The poem, then, is a kind of natural offering outside the self: grammar creates an aesthetic distance that invigorates speaker and poem. McKinney suggests that in The Pillow Book we enter ‘a kind of entranced historical present’. To which I would like to add, bearing in mind that the other feature of Japanese is the range of inflections applied to verbs, that it is an historical present charged with subtle and strong energies: a quicksilver world, hot-bloodedly active with darts aimed at the self as well as others.

The debt we owe to a good translator is profound. How else could we have gone to new and uniquely toned places? With The Pillow Book, McKinney sits in the company of such famous English-speaking scholars of Japanese as Ivan Morris and Arthur Waley. Her edition comes with plans of the imperial court, and charming illustrations of the costumes of the day. McKinney has also translated the work of Sasigyo, the famous tenth-century poet, monk and traveller, and the twentieth-century short story writer Furui Yoshikichi. ‘I set to work with this boundless pile of paper,’ Shonagon said of herself – as did, it seems, McKinney, when she began her Japanese studies at the Australian National University, before going on to teach in Japan for twenty years. It is splendid to read a classic as classically done as a masterful poem.