Late Middle Ages · East Asia · Culture
1331
Yoshida Kenko begins the Tsurezuregusa
1331
A Japanese court poet and sometime Buddhist monk began recording essays and musings in his hermitage near Kyoto. Essays in Idleness would become one of the three great works of medieval Japanese prose, celebrating impermanence, aesthetic restraint, and the pathos of things. The cultured samurai would treasure it for centuries.