The Pillow Book is a diary from a Japanese woman in eleventh century, by Sei Shonagon. This novel contains poetry written by Shonagon. In the eleventh century, poetry was considered a beautiful art. Shonagon uses two rhetorical devices (syntax and figurative language) to articulate her opinions on the Heian period’s social norms and expectations for women, resulting in the knowledge of the audience to know how Shonagon felt about her status as an elite woman. Sei Shonagon uses metonymy (a form of figurative language) to express describe a woman’s body. In Shonagon’s poem, “When A Woman Lives Alone,” the narrator asserted, “When a woman lives alone, her house should be extremely dilapidated, the mud wall should be falling to pieces, and if