The Pillow Book (Makura no Sōshi)

The lists built on courtly rank and Japanese wordplay don't survive translation the way the Hateful Things catalog does, and those stretches turn into a genuine chore, thick with notes rather than the plain prose people came for. There's no chronology to hold onto, and multiple manuscript versions leave readers lost without heavy annotation, more of it than most readers expect going in. Shonagon's class snobbery surfaces too, most sharply in a passage dismissing a commoner whose house had just burned down. Some readers rank the book below its more famous contemporary, calling it “less interesting than its closest contemporary, The Tale of Genji” and written “in a less poetic style.” Pick the wrong translation and it gets worse: one reader calls the Waley edition “AWFUL. Chopped up and useless.”