![]() On the other hand, none of these categories applies to The Pillow Book without engendering further conceptual destabilization. Sei Shōnagon’s work simultaneously mobilizes several layers of problematic concepts. In this sense, Sei Shōnagon’s œuvre can be read in resonance with Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses (1966) and its attempt to defamiliarize rational categorization, a conceptual device which can also be found in the work of Jorge Luis Borges. The lists show a playful approach to language and to what Foucault has called the “categories of thought”. Later generations of readers have treated the text’s enumerations as catalogues of poetic topics or even, since the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially in translation, as poetry. It has been adapted to the screen outside Japan (The Pillow Book by Peter Greenaway, 1996) and translated twice to Brazilian Portuguese (in 20). It also is the most translated Japanese text in the world, and occupies a stable place in the list of works that are considered as belonging to the realm of Weltliteratur. The Pillow Book (枕草子, Makura no Sōshi) of Sei Shōnagon (清少納言, c.965CE–?), written between the end of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century, has attained undeniable canonical status in the context of Japanese Literature. ![]()
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