A diary? An autobiography or a collection of personal essays? A carefully constructed political statement? Randomly jotted notes? Some sort of proto-blog? The first challenge in discussing The Pillow Book, written in the ancient capital of Japan a millennium ago, is how it should be categorized. Critics sometimes locate this idiosyncratic text within the genre of nikki, which is similar to the Western “diary”, although without dated entries and more often than not composed retrospectively. Other times it is called a zuihitsu, a very Japanese term that literally means “following the brush”, or “miscellany”, but even in the context of the native literary history it stands out as a singular work. The highly personal nature of its quirky format, striking mixture of colloquial and more formal styles, and ever-shifting perspective has led scholars to argue...
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Citation: Henitiuk, Valerie. "Pillow Book". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 January 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=25299, accessed 13 December 2025.]
