Abstract

This attractive novel is, ostensibly, the English translation of an ancient Japanese manuscript with an introduction and footnoted commentary by the translator. Leonard Walker is an archaeologist who has discovered The Pillow Book of Lady Kasa , a diary-like manuscript dating from the Nara Period (AD 710-794). In his work as translator and commentator, Mr. Walker is not as rigorously objective nor as truthful as one might expect of a respected scholar. His own history intrudes the pillow book, bringing up questions as to its authenticity and the role it may be playing in revealing the details of his own life. This particular, peculiar, and charming arrangement for a novel is, in a sense (though theirs was a Siamese evolution), necessitated by Walker's character. Only in the interplay between his slipping devotion to scholarship and his unsettling nostalgia is his personality revealed.