In the Library
The Pillow Book
Sei Shōnagon, 1002
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Arthur Waley (1928, partial)
- Original
- Original ja
- Chapters
- Chapters 19
- Length
- Length 25k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful. In summer the nights.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
"In spring, the dawn." So her book begins, and so it goes on, a thousand small acts of attention: the mountain rim slowly paling and flushed with red, fireflies adrift in the summer dark, wild geese shrunk to specks in a far autumn sky, snow fallen on a winter morning. Sei Shōnagon served the young empress Teishi in the Heian court, and into a private sheaf of paper she poured everything she noticed: things that make the heart beat faster, things that should be small, hateful things, the exact pleasures and irritations of a refined life. What undoes you is the nearness of her. A thousand years dissolve, and here is a living woman, dazzlingly sharp, helplessly alive to beauty, telling you precisely what delights and annoys her. To read it is to be handed a whole sensibility intact, proof that the texture of a single day, noticed hard enough, outlasts the court that made it.