This is a book of observations and musings recorded by Sei Shōnagon during her time as court lady to Empress Consort Teishi in 990s and early 11th century in Heian,Japan. The book was completed in the year 1002. In it she included lists of personal thoughts, court events, poetry and opinions on her contemporaries.

This extensive anthology includes excerpts from plays and novels plus stories, fairy tales, and many poems. "The sweep of Japanese literature in all its great variety was made available to Western readers for the first time in this anthology. Every genre and style, from the celebrated Nô plays to the poetry and novels of the seventeenth century, finds a place in this book; and many of the selections have their own introductions."--Publisher's description....

Eleven plays, including the most popular domestic tragedies and one history play, still performed in present-day Japan by puppet operators and Kabuki actors.

In this famous postwar Japanese novel, the first of Abe's to be translated into English, Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist in pursuit of a rare specimen of beetle, wanders into a strange seaside village, whose residents all live in sandpits. He is taken prisoner, and, along with a widow cast out by the community, he is forced to move into her sandpit and continually shovel away the sand that threatens to take over the village. In Niki's struggles...

These essays include themes about the beauty of nature, the transience of life, traditions, friendship, and other abstract concepts. The work was written in the zuihitsu style, a type of stream-of-consciousness type of writing. Some are brief remarks of only a sentence or two; others recount a story over a few pages, often with discursive personal commentary added. This collection iso ne of the most studied works of medieval Japanese literature, written...