Other Pillow Books
More generally, a pillow book is a collection of notebooks or notes which have been collated to show a period of someone or something's life. In Japan such kind of idle notes are generally referred to the zuihitsu genre. Other major works from the same period include Kamo no Chōmei's Hōjōki and Yoshida Kenkō’s Tsurezuregusa. Zuihitsu rose to mainstream popularity in the Edo period, when it found a wide audience in the newly developed merchant classes. Furthermore, it gained a scholarly foothold, as Japanese classical scholars began customarily writing in the ‘’zuihitsu’’ style. Reputable authors from this movement include Motoori Norinaga, Yokoi Yayu, and Matsudaira Sadanobu.
Eleanor Bron and Heather Mallick have both used this form to collect essays. Aidan Chambers' novel This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn is based on the concept of the pillow book. In the case of the fictional character Cordelia Kenn, it shows her life and thoughts so that her daughter can relive her past.
There is a 1996 film of the same name by writer/director Peter Greenaway, which tells a modern story but references Sei Shōnagon's literary work. The film stars Vivian Wu and Ewan McGregor.
The Pillow Book is also the name of a series of three radio thrillers written by Robert Forrest and broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour Drama. These are detective stories with Sei Shōnagon as a principal character and feature many of her lists.
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Famous quotes containing the words pillow and/or books:
“Just getting in the pool for seven straight hours is unbearable to me.... It’s grueling. There’s nothing physically pleasurable about it. If you’re doing a hard workout, you’re throwing up in the gutter. At night you cling to your pillow and just hope that your body revives before you have to go back and do it again.”
—Diana Nyad (b. 1949)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)