Japanese Aesthetics, Literature, and Culture

WESsays in Idleness Susie Nakash – December 2025 1. To enter the world of Wesleyan University is to dive headfirst

A Pillow Book of an “Idle” Thanksgiving: Comparing Persistent Gender Roles and the Significance of Food Across Japanese History and

A Tooth Fairy Manifesto Willa Siegmund – December 2024 Today alone I have visited 478 bedrooms. I have always wondered

For this project, to showcase my understanding of not only the text, but also the historical context and the author’s personal history under which the piece was written, I decided to adapt Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book into what I believe a modern-day rendition would resemble. All of the writing is completely my own, drawing inspiration from the general work as a whole, as well as specific passages. All images were found online, but were collaged by me. In total I wrote 19 short pieces, each of which can be broadly categorised under six different categories: descriptive image, descriptive lists, non-descriptive lists, opinion pieces, anecdotes, and romantic scenes, though there is obviously significant overlap between these categories, with many pieces fitting into several (which is true also of the original). The following analysis will walk you through my thought process when creating these pieces, as well as the reasoning behind specific stylistic choices, explaining what the intended goals of the pieces were.