The early-eleventh-century miscellany by Sei Shonagon, a lady-in-waiting to the empress Teishi at the Heian court of Japan. Not a story but a 'following-the-brush' notebook (zuihitsu) of lists, opinions, court anecdotes, and nature notes, it records exactly what charmed and disgusted its author with dazzling wit and snobbery. Its governing mood is okashi, the bright delight in what is clever and pretty, a counterweight to the melancholy of The Tale of Genji. Composed over years around the year 1000, it survives in several differently ordered manuscript versions, and the origin of its title remains uncertain.
A thousand years ago, a woman at the Japanese court sat down and made a list of things that make the heart beat faster. Sparrows feeding their young. Passing a place where a baby is playing. Washing your hair, putting on scent, and dressing in lovely robes, even when no one will see you. Her name was Sei Shonagon, and she filled her notebook with hundreds of such lists, opinions, and barbed little scenes, writing down precisely what delighted and disgusted her. She gossiped, she boasted, she sneered at bad calligraphy and common people. The result, The Pillow Book, is not a story at all. It is one of the sharpest, most personal, most modern-sounding voices to reach us across a thousand years.