zuihitsu
zuihitsu (้็ญ), roughly translated as “follow the brush,” is a free-flowing, personal essay. the first zuihitsu was written by Sei Shลnagon back in 11th century heian period kyoto. for my japanese class this semester, we wrote three zuihitsu in response to the works of literature we were reading. to be honest, i loved doing them. usually i hate writing essays. we also had to write two analytical essays for the class and both were just torture. this post that i sent after finishing my senior project final report sums up my feelings on literary analysis essays pretty well:
writing technical documents isn’t all that bad. none of the “how can I BS about this without repeating myself to fill all five pages?!”
anyway, the zuihitsu were a completely different story. i approached them almost like blog posts, and i went away from each of them with a much greater appreciation for the story i was responding to. they were fun to write. i am going to post the three zuihitsu i wrote for the class on my blog, and i plan to continue writing them for all the books/movies/etc that i consume from now on. i hope you enjoy reading them as much as i enjoyed and will enjoy writing them.