A most delightful book, and one that has served as a model of Japanese style and taste since the seventeenth century. These cameo-like vignettes reflect the importance of the little, fleeting futile things, and each essay is Kenko himself. Asian Student If you enjoy things briefly told, if you want to try the prose equivalent of waka and haiku, if you already know Montaigne and would like to meet a spiritual kinsman, then you might want to take an evening and read Essays in Idleness... [A] superb translation. Washington Post A sensitive, personal reading. Journal of Asian Studies The Tsurezuregusa is a key instrument in attempting to teach the classical Japanese tradition to the modern Western student... This is indeed a welcome volume. Monumenta Nipponica

Donald Keene is Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. He is the author of more than thirty books, including So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers; Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan; Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793-1841; and Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, as well as a definitive multivolume history of Japanese literature.

Preface to the Second Paperback EditionForeword, by William Theodore de BaryPrefaceIntroductionEssays in IdlenessSelected BibliographyIndex