Introduction

'With nothing better to do, I sit all day before my inkstone, jotting down without order the trifles that pass through my mind, and a strange feeling comes over me.' Essays in Idleness consists of some two hundred and forty passages of every length; with Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book it is one of the two jewels of the Japanese essay. Kenkō writes of impermanence, 'it is precisely because the world is uncertain that it has its depth'; of nature, 'Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless?'; of reading, friendship, houses, drinking, the learning of skills and the ways of the world, and he records many anecdotes of court and town. Unhurried and graceful in style, subtle and penetrating in its observation of life, it has been among the books the Japanese love most for seven hundred years.