Sei Shonagon lived during the Heian Period and was surrounded by the court and lived in the capital for the majority of her life.  This influenced her to be very wise and witty.  Sei Shonagon had great education and training in her writing and showed ideas of this time period better then anyone else.  She used much detail in her writing, ecspecially compared to poetry from Di Fu, Li Bo, or The Kokinshu.  “The Pillow Book” has the same ideas of nature being the main focus but there is less room to interpret differently.  Her diary entries are very detailed but very straight forward.  In the first entry “In Spring, the dawn” she speaks of all the seasons and picks out something beautiful about all of them.  She does not leave it up to the reader to figure out what she is saying about the season but instead explains what is beautiful through flowing words.  For example,she says “In winter, the early morning– if snow is falling, of course, its unutterably delightful, but its perfect too if there’s a pure white frost, or even just when its very cold.”  If you compare this to a excerpt from “The Kokinshu” it is very drawn out for you.  Sei Shonagon created a new way of writing and put them together in a  way that explained how people of the Heian period thought and reacted to life events.

It is said that Shonagon is funny in her writing but I didn’t find any signs of humor in the text.  I would like to understand what made her writing humorous.  Was the way she wrote humorous to people during that time period and not recognizable now? Are there specific examples that are meant to be funny in the text that I missed?