Sei Shonagon circulates The Pillow Book

1001

At the Heian court, a rival of Murasaki Shikibu released her Makura no Soshi, a miscellany of lists, observations, and aesthetic judgments that captured the texture of aristocratic Japanese life with caustic wit. Her inventory of 'hateful things' and 'elegant things' became a founding text of the Japanese essay tradition, still read for its luminous precision a thousand years later.