This third kind of list was my favourite. These lists are beautiful, and they bring a lot of joy and delight if we read them slowly and linger on. Some of the lists describe beautiful experiences and images and scenes. These lists are charming and make us smile and we can relate to them even after a thousand years from the time they were written. In those lists, Shōnagon shares things that bring joy, that are beautiful, that are annoying. Because they all have poetic associations to classical Japanese and Chinese poetry or famous stories. Some are simple, like lists of mountains, rivers, gardens, forests. There are different kinds of lists in the book. In addition to anecdotes and experiences and stories, the book has lists. The book is like a diary and shows a detailed description of court life of those times. One day someone got the empress a big bundle of paper as a gift and the empress gave it to Shōnagon, and Shōnagon decided to write on it, recounting anecdotes and sharing experiences and her thoughts on different topics. She served the Japanese empress of that time. Sei Shōnagon lived around a thousand years back in the Japan of the Heian era. I picked it up recently and read it slowly and finished reading it yesterday. I have wanted to read Sei Shōnagon’s ‘ The Pillow Book‘ ever since I discovered it.
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