flemmings | Recent reads

Spent something like five days wading through the 12K story with the regicide of Hou navel-gazing about his motives. Either the heat or the high level Japanese or both made the thing a midnight black slog. Not helped by the fact that the mass-murdering King of Hou is lovingly (and endlessly) recalled by his assassin as 'a clean man', a phrase that bewilders me now quite as much as it did when the Beatles used it about Paul's uncle in A Hard Day's Night. Actually, I have a better idea of what clean (or pure or spotless or however you wish to translate the word) means in Japanese than of what it conveys in northern England English. Not a *clear* idea, mind you, but a better one. Am also convinced that one of the things it means is 'I am hero-worship idealizing this person out the wazoo', but then an admiration for spiritual impeccability is something the west hasn't done for a while. Call it 'integrity' and we can agree; call it 'untainted' or 'pure', and yuck.

So I'm glad the next story is Rakushun and all, but IIRC it's Rakushun being a Confucian counsellor, so instead I'm reading those Silk Roads anthologies that defeated me three years ago. They don't defeat me now, even the Ima Ichikos (but then I've read those stories once and sometimes twice before.) No, the biggest qvell is that I can read the Three Kingdoms pastiches without pain; or rather, the only pain is having lost

mvrdrk's list of Who's Who In 3K, which I came across while tidying the front room last spring and put in a safe place where I will never find it again. So I must have recourse to mandarintools and google, but they've not let me down yet.