Glossary of Poetic Terms

A Japanese hybrid form that can be traced back to Sei Shōnagon’s 10th-century text The Pillow Book, zuihitsu is often translated from the Japanese as “following the brush.” This capacious genre incorporates nonfiction, musings and confessions, poetry, and miscellany to create a spontaneous, layered text. In her poetry collection The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2008), Kimiko Hahn writes that “the sense of disorder” is “integral” to the form of zuihitsu. 

Other examples of zuihitsu include Essays in Idleness by Kenkō, translated by Donald Keene (Columbia University Press, 1967); “Zuihitsu” by Jenny Xie from her collection Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018); “False Dawn” by Khadijah Queen; and anthologies including The Columbia Anthology of Japanese Essays: Zuihitsu from the Tenth to the Twenty-First Century (Columbia University Press, 2014) and The Land We Saw, the Times We Knew: An Anthology of Zuihitsu Writing from Early Modern Japan (University of Hawai'i Press, 2018).