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Zuihitsu is a category of Japanese prose that can bring observations, recollections, judgments and reflections into separate passages. The Pillow Book, Hōjōki and Tsurezuregusa are often grouped as its three classics, although their structures and circumstances differ.
Lists, anecdotes, argument and description can coexist in a zuihitsu. A passage may stand alone or echo its neighbours. The label does not establish that the author wrote without selection, revision or arrangement; surviving versions can also differ in sequence.
Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book draws on the Heian court, combining scenes and people with seasonal observations and evaluative lists. Its judgments reveal a situated literary voice, rather than a survey of everyone’s daily life in Heian Japan. The National Institute of Japanese Literature dates it to around 1001 and identifies its author as an attendant to Empress Teishi.
In the passage on endearing things, The Pillow Book places a hopping young sparrow, a small child noticing a speck of dust, dolls’ furnishings and a tiny aoi leaf beside one another. Their smallness and movements give substance to the concluding preference for little things. The passage lets the reader encounter examples before accepting its category.
Selection matters: this is the writer’s way of arranging affection and attention, rather than evidence that everyone at court shared precisely the same tastes.
Kyushu University Library describes four textual families of The Pillow Book: Sankanbon, Nōinbon, Maedabon and Sakaibon. The first two mingle lists and reflections with diary-like court passages; the latter two regroup material by type.
Individual readings differ too. A temple associated with hearing a conch is Kiyomizu in Sankanbon but Hase in Nōinbon. Edo readers commonly encountered Nōinbon, whereas many later annotated editions use Sankanbon. Naming the version clarifies both wording and arrangement; present chapter numbers need not reproduce the author’s initial order.
Kamo no Chōmei completed Hōjōki in 1212. It moves from impermanence and disasters—fire, earthquake and famine—to his secluded life in a small hut at Hino. This progression differs from the Pillow Book’s arrangement. Kyoto University’s early movable-type edition is a later witness, not Chōmei’s autograph.
Hōjōki opens with flowing water and transient bubbles as images for people and their dwellings. Disasters give that comparison concrete force: wind spreads fire through houses, putting possessions and lives beyond secure control. Later, Chōmei describes a small hut that can be dismantled and moved, its limited space arranged for books, instruments and religious practice.
The ending unsettles this apparent solution. Might loving the hut and its quietness itself be attachment? He receives no clear answer from himself and utters a few invocations of the Buddha. The work moves from external catastrophe to self-questioning; the chosen refuge also becomes a problem to examine.
The fourteenth-century Tsurezuregusa, associated with Kenkō, ranges across conduct, taste, impermanence and experience. Heian court writing, a recluse’s account and medieval social reflection arose in different settings. Reading the anecdote and the judgment it supports together is useful. Shōtetsu’s 1431 copy, held by Seikado, also separates the work’s composition from the history of surviving manuscripts.
Section 52 of Tsurezuregusa tells of a priest from Ninnaji who visits Iwashimizu alone. He worships at Gokurakuji and Kōra and returns satisfied. He noticed others climbing the mountain but thought his own purpose was already fulfilled, so never went up. His confidence reveals the mistake: what he saw on the way was not the whole destination.
The closing observation calls for a guide even in small matters. The judgment grows out of the mistaken journey; the priest’s satisfaction makes the failure more pointed. This movement from story to reflection differs from a list that places examples alongside one another.
In the Edo period, recollection, scholarship and recorded experience broadened the field. NINJAL’s corpus includes Oritaku Shiba no Ki, Sundai Zatsuwa, Uiyamabumi and Rangaku Kotohajime among its essay materials. Its separate treatment of travel writing is a reminder that not all prose belongs to one category.
Sugita Genpaku’s Rangaku Kotohajime recalls the work of translating a Western anatomy book. Faced with unfamiliar language, the group began with recognisable diagrams of the body’s exterior and matched their symbols to the explanations. Unresolved terms received a circled cross to be reconsidered later.
Knowledge appears through difficulty, collaboration and the pleasure of gradually accumulating usable words. This is a later recollection of the undertaking, rather than a verbatim record made during each meeting.
Modern essays also developed through periodical writing and new fields of inquiry. Physicist Terada Torahiko combined scientific observation with lyrical attention to daily life and published short prose in Hototogisu. His 1923 Fuyuhiko-shū gathered observations from convalescence; Yabukōji-shū included earlier pieces such as Donguri, recalling his late wife and their child. Kaki no Tane (1933) collected magazine instalments. Scientific inquiry, memory and short-form publication met in one writer’s practice.
Terada Torahiko’s Chawan no Yu begins with an apparently ordinary bowl. Why does its steam curl? Why do moving bright and dark lines appear on the bottom when light falls through the water? With the bowl uncovered, patches of surface water cool unevenly. Cooler water sinks and warmer water moves in, creating regions of different temperature; light bends at their boundaries and illuminates the bottom unevenly, producing moving bright and dark lines. Terada then compares this with light disturbed by moving, heated air.
He also leaves a puzzle open: he cannot fully explain the mist-like coloured layer and cracks he sees at the surface. Looking closely, proposing explanations and admitting what remains unclear let the essay show an inquiry taking shape.
Modern Japanese also uses zuihitsu for personal prose in books and periodicals. The three classics offer a useful comparison, but do not make all personal writing from Heian to the present a single unchanging form. Author, date, form and textual transmission still matter.
Court scenes and lists in The Pillow Book; disaster and retreat in Hōjōki; anecdotes and reflection in Tsurezuregusa.
No. It is a later printed witness.
No. Form and writing process are separate questions.
Scientific observation, daily experience and personal memory.
It places small creatures, a child, dolls’ furnishings and a little leaf together, making the preference for smallness tangible through chosen examples.
No. Chōmei asks whether love of the hut and its quietness is another attachment, without reaching a clear resolution.
He takes the places at the mountain’s foot for the whole destination and does not climb. The ending draws from this the need for guidance, even in small matters.
Textual families can differ in wording and arrangement, changing both individual details and the passages encountered together.
Uneven cooling makes cooler water sink and warmer water move in. Light bends at the resulting temperature boundaries, illuminating the bottom unevenly as the water moves.