A thousand years ago, two Japanese women wrote as if it were today. According to Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar, no one ever wrote a better novel than The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu’s masterful tale of masculine adventure and feminine humiliation. Another Japanese, Sei Shonagon, shared with Murasaki the rare honor of being praised a millenium after the fact. Her The Pillow Book gave birth to the zuihitsu genre, which means literally ‘brush drippings.’ It is a multicolored mosaic made up of short stories, notes, reflections, news items, poems. These seemingly random fragments invite us to penetrate that time and place. – Mirrors, stories of almost everyone, Eduardo Galeano (translated by Mark Fried)