The Pillow Boy of the Lady Onogoro

By Alison Fell
Read: July 2008
Rating: Humn.

I bought this one for $1 at Strand, and so I can’t complain about the price. I was pretty pleased with it at first, titillated on my train ride home, but I stopped about midway through for some reason with the intention of picking it up again when I was ‘in the mood.’ I determined recently that a book about sex in old Japan was a good way to bone up for my senior project, which is set in old Japan and needs some smex. So it became self-assigned reading. I try not to give up on those.

Here’s the premise, in a nutshell. Lady Onogoro’s passion for her lover, the General, has cooled. In order to climax, she hires a ‘pillow boy’, Oyu, to hide behind the screen at her bed and whisper erotic stories to her while she and General are having sex. This makes for a blend of erotica and proper story, but neither was quite up to par for me.

I made it all the way through this time, and it’s quite a mix. The sexy bits weren’t as compelling as I’d built them up to be in my mind, and I wasn’t really engaged with the characters or rooting for them, so it was a slow read until the very end. At which point Onogoro’s transformation to self-impowered woman seemed to come sort of out of nowhere. Maybe I missed the subtlety. Maybe I rode the language high without taking in enough of the meaning.

The language is also a mixed bag. I have a pretty broad idea of what I consider ‘normal’ language, crossing national, time, and bizarrity boundaries, so I’d never really understood it before when my mom criticized me for using language that didn’t ‘fit’ the setting of a story. Now I do. Fell puts forward this book as a translation of an old text, which doesn’t help matters. She uses the best modern English word to describe what a thing is heedless of how strange it sounds in context.

But on the other hand, you get to enjoy a lovely story teller voice. The narrator will address the audience, without identifying its own voice. Multiple characters tell stories of their own, each with practiced story-teller voices. Onogoro is a poet with poet friends, and their poetry is sprinkled throughout as well.

Some of the stories are erotic. Some are part of the games the ladies play to keep themselves amused. There is a disconcerting degree of brutality in both, but it’s not as anti-feminist or degrading as some of the Amazon reviews make it sound. (I think they got hung up on one of the first stories and that colored the rest for them.) The stories are more about passion than wham-bam-thank you, ma’am. They’re also not every other chapter, as someone seeking hardcore erotica might want.

And, again, the end. It was so much easier to read as the characters got really fired up–but I just don’t know if I buy Onogoro’s change of heart. I’m really glad for her, I like her a lot better this way… But it was a bit too easy. And there was a glow of light around her as she had her ‘ah ha!’ moment.

…Not cool, Alison Fell. Not cool.