Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa)

A collection of 243 short sections, some a single sentence and some a page or two, written around 1330 by Yoshida Kenkō, a former courtier who had become a Buddhist monk. It belongs to the Japanese genre of zuihitsu, writing that follows the brush. Kenkō opens by saying he has spent idle hours setting down whatever passed through his mind. The sections move freely between anecdotes about the court, advice on taste and conduct, reflections on friendship, drink and old customs, and repeated meditations on death. Its core is impermanence (mujō): Kenkō argues that if we lived for ever, things would lose their power to move us, and that beauty depends on uncertainty and passing. Famous passages ask whether we should look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom and the moon only when it is cloudless, and prefer the incomplete, the worn and the suggested to the perfect. He urges readers not to postpone what matters, since death comes without warning.

It is one of the founding texts of Japanese aesthetics and a calm, often witty guide to living with impermanence, still widely studied in Japanese schools.