Sei Shōnagon

Sei Shōnagon is likewise a court nickname rather than her recorded birth name, and almost nothing certain survives about her life beyond what The Pillow Book itself reveals: a decade or so serving as lady-in-waiting to the Empress Teishi, a rival court to the one Murasaki Shikibu later served under Empress Shōshi. The two women's mutual dislike is a matter of record: Murasaki's diary calls her an insufferable show-off.

The Pillow Book is less a narrative than a hoard: diary entries, court gossip, aesthetic judgments, and above all her famous numbered lists ('Things that make the heart beat faster,' 'Elegant things,' 'Hateful things') cataloguing court life with an opinionated, unsparing eye for beauty and its absence. Its miscellaneous form, called zuihitsu, 'following the brush,' became a lasting Japanese literary genre in its own right.

She likely retired from court after Teishi's early death around 1000 and vanishes from the historical record afterward, leaving behind a book copied and treasured continuously for a millennium.