\u003cDIV\u003eIn a small incense shop in modern Tokyo, amid the manic consumerism of cartoon-colored Shibuya youth culture, incense is still made in the ancient wayâslowly ground by hand and matured over time. Above the shop, a young woman sits behind a painted screen, listening to men unburden themselves about their work-dominated lives. She calls herself âSei Shonagon,â ? after the eleventh-century woman who wrote The Pillow Book. This exquisite first novel is a Pillow Book for the twenty-first century; its âSeiâ ? is a young woman who, as a child, moved to Japan from America to live with her strict, tradition-obsessed uncle after the death of her parents, an American academic and a Japanese student. As the novel opens, âSei,â ? now a young woman, lies in a hospital bed, hearing sounds around her, unable to speak except silently to herself-\"I don't even know if you are still aliveâ¦Iâm going to talk to you anyway, tell you everything I remember.â ? Thus her story unfolds, back to a dark past and toward an unimaginable fate.\u003c/DIV\u003e
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