satsumabug 's review for:

The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon

4.0

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Delightful and strangely poignant. As someone else said, it's like reading a thousand-year-old blog ("People who seem enviable"... "Repulsive things"... "Common things that suddenly sound special"... put a number and a photo in front of any of those and you have a Buzzfeed post ready-made). The author is snobbish and self-absorbed, unsurprisingly, but there's something unexpectedly valiant about her determined focus on the beauties and small agonies (the big agonies go largely unmentioned) of her constrained world. (Of course, she probably didn't see it as constrained, especially given her distaste for commoners and common things.) She's witty, astute, critical, and elegantly spirited, and it's hard not to love that.