The Pillow Book On occasion,I'll share what I have read off-line from my book diary, sometimes with additional commentary.
Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book/Penguin Books 1967. I found this in an old books store in Vancouver BC. Had been looking for this for AGES.
Original Commentary: "The Pillow Book is an interesting bit of Heian court life, albeit not representing the larger culture of the time".
Additional: In other words,The Pillow Book was basically like when I went to an exhibit of Hermitage art at the Frye Gallery a few years ago. I went there to see the Vigee Le Brun paintings but was very disappointed. It was patronage art which was stilted in its composition, stuffy in its muted stately colours of ermine and regal blue, and altogether soulless in the attitude of the era's pre-revolutionary smugness. I much preferred the work of Zhi Lin an artist who painted life under early Communist China. He captured on the canvas the horrible atrocities that still happen in China today. The work was alive and realistic in its pain and blood, not posed and sanitary like the Hermitage paintings or The Pillow Book
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