The Pillow Book Reading Order

The Pillow Book (Makura no Sōshi, c. 1000–1010) by Sei Shōnagon is one of the great works of Japanese literature and one of the most distinctive literary forms in any language — a miscellany of observations, lists, memories, and reflections kept by a lady-in-waiting at the court of Empress Teishi during the Heian period in Kyoto. The Pillow Book defies easy classification: it contains numbered lists ('Things that make one's heart beat faster,' 'Unsuitable things'), extended prose observations on court life, anecdotes from Sei Shōnagon's experience, poems, and sections of prose that approach the philosophical. Its structural principle is associative rather than linear — the mind moving from one thing to another, accumulating rather than arguing. Sei Shōnagon was a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu (author of The Tale of Genji), and the two women knew of each other; their literary aesthetics are entirely different. Where Murasaki is melancholy, Buddhist, and concerned with loss and transience, Sei Shōnagon is brisk, witty, exacting, and primarily interested in elegance and the embarrassment of the inelegant. The Pillow Book's aesthetic is admiration and contempt — Sei Shōnagon is the most exact observer in Japanese literature, and her categories (the elegant, the unsuitable, the awkward, the delightful) are a sustained taxonomy of sensibility. Her lists are also a form of definition: 'Things that make the heart feel cleaner' tells us what Sei Shōnagon values more directly than any declaration.