and published in modern times as a book, is nevertheless a true novel. More specifically, it’s a women’s romance novel. Jane Austen fans could easily parse The Tale of Genji.

While this proto-novel was being written, a rival work appeared, known as The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. This other composition is certainly not a novel. It’s intensely literary, yet it can’t be described by contemporary literary-platform terminology. The Pillow Book is a nonlinear set of writings jotted down on a loose heap of leftover government stationery.

The Pillow Book is not a diary, a miscellany, an almanac, a collection of lists, or even a resource for composing Japanese poetry, although it seems to us to have some aspects of these modern structures. It is better described in terms of user experience.

This experience was a four-or five-year effort to beguile the tedium of a tight circle of Imperial ladies-in-waiting. The experience had a star author/ designer—the glamorous and attention-hungry Court Officer Sei—but it had no press, no publisher, no editor, no distributor, and it was never for sale. Its user base— in total, maybe 200 women—probably never read it. Instead, they heard the work recited aloud by someone crouching near a lantern after dark.

A strictly literary approach to this experience hurts our ability to comprehend what The Pillow Book is doing. This ancient “book” is related only distantly to our books; in function and audience, it has more kinship with a small-scale blog.

The most notorious part of The Pillow Book is a list of things that

Sei Shonagon finds “unsuitable.”

Such as the following:

 

“Snow on the houses of common people. This is especially regrettable when the moonlight shines down on it.”

 

What is Sei Shonagon saying here? Moonlit snow is “ unsuitable” on the homes of the peasantry. The pretty snow is too nice for those lowly, humble people. The glamour of the snow clashes with their squalor.

Sei Shonagon receives much grief from contemporary observers because of the snobbish nature of this remark. Of course we find ourselves bound to interpret this statement as hurtful, hateful, and politically incorrect. After all—what if one of those poor commoners were to read this crass insult?

But commoners could never read it. First, because peasants were illiterate; next, because the work was copied by hand and circulated within a small royal clique; third, it was written in a special cursive script used only by women. It was girl talk no man could overhear.

In this structure of interaction, it was not possible for this remark to become offensive. Its crassness for us was unimaginable for Sei Shonagon. To think otherwise is an anachronism.

Which leaves us to balk at the unthinkable notion that lovely snow on the homes of the peasants really was inappropriate. Sei was telling the truth—though we’re hard-put to imagine that now. This was not a catty remark but an aesthetic assessment, refined and apolitical. It was like saying that lime green clashes with aviation orange. If Sei, somehow, had directly said that

to a peasant—that peasant would have promptly removed the snow. He would not have wanted his ugly misstep to trouble her ladyship further.

The infrastructure of publishing constrains the thinking of writers. Obviously, all forms of art and design have some inherent constraints—but it seems to me that writers are especially misled by the apparent freedoms of language. Published language, in print, on paper, is not language per se: It’s an industrial artifact.

 

Writers cling hard to the word, to semantics, to meaning and sensibility. Design, by contrast, is less verbal. Design is busily inventing new ways to blow itself apart. Design is taking more risks with itself than literature. That is why contemporary design feels almost up to date, while literature feels archaic and besieged.

Design and literature don’t talk together much, but design has more to offer literature at the moment than literature can offer to design. Design seeks out ways to jump over its own

• Bruce Sterling at Art Futura 2005 Barcelona, Spain.