[She was] a complicated, intelligent, well-informed woman who was quick, impatient, keenly observant of detail, high-spirited, witty, emulative, sensitive to the charms and beauties of the world and to the pathos of things, yet intolerant and callous about people whom she regarded as her social or intellectual inferiors.
—Ivan Morris, translator, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon
[What she produced] was an extended, ebullient conversation with somebody else—with her audience. She so engages us because she engages with us, we meet her eye across a thousand years. Perhaps it is the letter form that Shōnagon’s overall style comes closest to—the random flow of anecdotes and opinions and thoughts, apparently dashed off extempore, veering impulsively from one comment to another, each new turn touched off by some random association or tangential connection, or perhaps by nothing at all. The bewildering shifts of tone and comment, the rich mix of the elegant and refined with the down-to-earth and acerbic, produce an effect of spontaneity and intimacy that draws the reader into a warm complicity, even when we find ourselves appalled at her frequent snobbery and occasional cruelty.
—Meredith McKinney, translator, Sei Shōnagon The Pillow Book
