Essays in Idleness

Essays in Idleness, known in Japanese as Tsurezuregusa, is a collection of essays composed by the Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenko between roughly 1330 and 1332, comprising a preface and 243 passages ranging from a single line to several pages. Kenko explains the work's title in his opening passage, describing the strange feeling of having spent whole days before his inkstone jotting down whatever idle thoughts entered his mind, and the collection that follows moves between Buddhist reflections on death and impermanence, observations of the natural world and courtly customs, and wry anecdotes, without sustained narrative connecting its parts. Alongside Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book and Kamo no Chomei's Hojoki, Tsurezuregusa is considered one of the three representative works of the zuihitsu tradition of Japanese personal essay, and it shows the direct influence of both earlier texts as well as the eremitic strand of medieval Japanese writing that Hojoki exemplifies.