Off the Cliff

Not old women in The New Moon's Arms. Fifty-three. A mere infing. So as ever, only Pratchett writes old female protagonists in English. Ima Ichiko, and *maybe* 12 Kingdoms have major old characters in Japanese. Perhaps Dream of Red Chambers, but doing the math suggests Granma too is only in her mid-late 50s. Which might be old for Qing but...

I went to the ears nose and throat specialist about my swollen eustachian tubes and the chronic blockage therefrom. Specialist says my ears, like my hearing, are just fine. Swelling comes from grinding of teeth at night. Night guard is not doing its duty. Oh woe is me.
( Cut for reading natter )

August reading aka these long gaps in my memory, where do they come from?

English
Buried for Pleasure

Japanese
Phantom Moon Tower 2
Aoneko 5
--both rereads

Kasho no Yume

-half of which I read in July anyway. This month I only read the title story and almost all of the last one, because the so above it all prince of Sou annoys me, wandering the world and observing tilting kingdoms (yes OK, that's 'declining' but tilt is what the kanji means) to see what will happen to them. Also because I can make *no sense at all* of the arrangement of the palace of Sou whither our prince has gone to report, so screw that.
( Cut for literary thoughts and health grumps )

So, five weeks later, I get back to 12 Kingdoms and The Dream of Hua Xu/ Prosperity, and doggedly beaver through Sai-rin having the vapours and everyone saying 'If the kirin is sick maybe we should admonish the king?' and everyone else saying 'Admonish him about what?' because the king is tout a fait comme il faut and how can you admonish someone who is perfect?

So I was cheered to find what was looking to be another Ono treatise on the principles of governance turning into a murder mystery, of all the domestically comforting things. (Don't ask me why murder mysteries are domestic and comforting. They shouldn't be, by rights, but as a genre, they are.) And I was happy to read all the 'but all the doors are guarded and no one can enter that part of the palace except its three inhabitants and if it was one of them the guards at *their* chamber doors would have seen them leaving their quarters, but no, wait! there's a door between the king's quarters and that part of the palace OMG could it be surely not!! no no *wait*, there's a wall around the compound and one demon beast, flying low, could enter unobserved over it---' Only now we're back to theories of governance and sideways references to the original story, which you probably have to know to understand why perfect Sai-ou has made his kirin ill.

OTOH it's interesting to read all the etiquette stuff-- like, the Three Ministers who live in the section of the palace are the King's father, aunt, and younger brother. But no one may enter the ministers' palace. Even the king's cousin, also an important minister, is not allowed to visit his mother there. Nor are you told why this is so, which makes it much more convincing. Call this sort of thing etiquette or taboo and you've already classified it. Present it as The Way It Is and it reads as world-building.

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.

Somehow I didn't cotton to this when I was reading 12K five years ago, and certainly not when I was watching the anime err whenever that was, but the reason you have different kanji for king's/ kirin's name and country name isn't entirely 'country's precious forbidden name kanji, therefore use a homonym'. That may enter into it, I suppose, but I think it's more that the king/ kirin and the country are different entities. You call the king after the country, yes of course, but you wouldn't use the same kanji because that implies the king/ kirin and the country are *the same thing*. And of course they're not.

Somehow this is perfectly clear in my head while reading and oddly difficult to express otherwise.

Something that struck me back in vol 1 of First 12K. Youko meets a Japanese soldier who got carried off to Kei just at the end of the war, who's all overcome and kerblonxed because OMG someone who speaks Japanese after all these years. (Which is how you discover, in the novels, that everyone in Kou is *not* speaking Japanese. No Asano and Sugimoto here, and thank god for it.) Soldier asks her when the war ended. Youko says 1945. He says What year is that of Shouwa? Youko has to stop and think.

What I'm wondering is /how/ does she think. When I convert between western and Japanese I just add or subtract from the western year, because I naturally think in western years. Shouwa 35? 1926 + 35 = 1961. 1975? 75 - 26 = 49. But when I was in Japan everything was presented in Heisei. I'm surprised at Youko automatically thinking '1945' for war's end in the first place, and I suppose, when she converts, it's the way I do it. But after that, and supposing you don't have a cumulative calendar year to use as a base, how do you do calculate length of time? Like the guys in the Seven Samurai, counting on their fingers?-- as it might be, you were born in Shouwa 60 and there were 64 Shouwa years and it's now Heisei 7, so hey guess what you're only 11! (2010 is actually Heisei 22, FWIW.)

Also I hadn't registered that both the first and last years of Shouwa lasted a bare week. This is what happens when you juggle two calendars.

One must write, to write. Hence this meme, ganked from all over.

1. Write down the names of 10 characters.
2. Write a fic of fifteen words or less for every prompt, using the characters determined by the numbers. Do NOT read the prompts before you do step 1.

1. Hakkai (Saiyuki)
2. Seimei (from the Onmyouji films)
3. Goujun (Saiyuki Gaiden)
4. Hiromasa (from the Onmyouji manga)
5. Keiki (12 Kingdoms)
6. Iason (Ai no Kusabi)
7. Ryuugyoku/ Dragon Gem (Youmi Henjou Yawa)
8. Kanzeon (Gaiden)
9. Sanzou (Saiyuki)
10. Wen Zhong (Woxin Changdan)
( May have fudged that 15 words thing )

100 50 Female Characters I Love Meme

Maybe I read the wrong stuff or don't watch the right things, or maybe I take that 'love' too seriously, because there aren't that many characters anywhere I actually *love*. Even here, a number are 'strongly like.' You observe there's nobody from Utena, an *anime* I love, nor from Amelia Peabody, whom I still find perfectly readable, but less so as the kids grow up and turn the whole thing into a romance series.

Might be enlightening to make a list of characters I really do love and see what that looks like. You see that Ya Yu tops my female list, but neither Gou Jian nor Fan Li would make it to a male one. Fascinating, absorbing, provocative, but I don't love them. I love Wen Zhong.
( In no particular order )

It's cheering to know that when I'm doing my head-desky 'OK, his name is' (pick someone at random) 'Guan Yu and his uhh courtesy name (takes a while to figure out what a courtesy name is) is Yunchang (雲長) only sometimes it's Changsheng (長生) until he dies when he becomes Marquis Zhuangmou (and let's skip the string of Buddhist names entirely) but for our purposes he's Lord Guan (關公), or Lord Guan the Second (關二爺-- but who's the first?) or else 'Snazzy Beard, Man' (美髯公, and now I see that qwerty really wasn't kidding about that one.) He's apparently even 'Emperor Guan' on occasion except I don't think he ever made it to Emperor...'
( Are you still with me? )

Never did get around to the collection of Twelve Kingdoms short stories, so now I'm reading hacking my way through the Twelve Kingdoms short stories and trying to remember court vocabulary from three years ago. This in an attempt to convince myself that I still know Japanese. I do, but have degraded to the stage where in fact I *don't* know Japanese unless I give it a regular workout. Workouts have been in short supply this last quarter. Hence the hack.

Otherwise must tell myself that if I want to get compliments on my current story it behooves me to finish the current story. No more posting chunks of WIPS. That only guarantees that they remain IP.

Dou shiyou, dou shiyou?

My feet have been like rising breadloaves all week and my knee screams in sympathy, so I promised me a weekend lying on the sofa with my leg up doing nothing until things shrank. Even got anime and wuxia to watch if I didn't feel like reading: which I don't, in my dark living room that needs a 200 watt lightbulb to render text remotely legible. But it's stupid to be sitting inside reading under a lightbulb- or even watching Samurai Deeper Kyo with the lights off- on a warm sunny day when I want to be out on a patio somewhere drinking iced coffee and reading by the reflected sunlight. Alas, sitting is the one thing my knee does *not* want me to do. As I know because, if I must be indoors, the thing I want to do -and do do, alas- is play Addiction Solitaire here at the computer. A very little of that and I can't even stand up afterwards.

Now if only it were grey and typhoony (though I'm glad it's not because Caribana gets hit with bad weather far too often) I'd be happy to sit on the sofa. I was doing that until 1 am Thursday night, going through my FMA eps from last October on. I could have read all night- I could have read all night- and still have begged for more. ( One of life's distinct pleasures... )

I really should go back and read Narnia again to see just how much it's surreptitiously influenced my reading of 12 Kingdoms. This realization brought to you by a sudden flashback to Caspian's tantrum in Dawn Treader that I'd forgotten about, though I could quote you chunks of it verbatim- "Talking beasts, yes. I said nothing about beasts that never stop talking"- and its odd echoes of a tantrum that En'ou throws in Second Taiki.

The current fandom debate (I'd call it something else but I'm a lady) over Nice Girls and Mean Girls makes me want to leave fandom and never come back. As paleaswater said once in a similar context, "I know college girls are full of themselves, but this is ridiculous." Or, more trenchantly, "These are the people who are going to be managing my 401(k)?"

However I cheer me up by reading 12Kingdoms, where the general and the king are having a long discussion over the political state of Tai. The general and the king are both women, a matter not thought worthy of particular comment. I recommend this series to anyone who uses the Dykes to Watch Out For yardstick. (Even better. The general in a flashback goes to confront the Winter Minister over telling the young and impressionable Taiki that the King of Tai, who has ostensibly gone to quell a revolt, may have been lured out of his city by false rumours into a trap. The Winter Minister BTW is in charge of arms, the manufacturing and repair and whatever of same. The Winter Minister of Tai turns out to be a young woman, a fact I *hadn't* gleaned from her name, unlike the Autumn Minister who couldn't have been anything else going from *her* name.)

To quote Molesworth, sort of: Now look at Babylon 5. Ugh.

I had a lovely time in New York, but perhaps the thing that stays with me most vividly is my last night there.
( Cut for RL & poetry natter and subsequent 12 Kingdoms consideration )

Has something happened to NY Kinokuniya? Its webpage is inaccessible, which is annoying. Balked of a proposed shopping trip to NY by continued-crappy lungs, feeling sorry for myself and wanting some 12 Kingdoms as consolation, I went to order online. NY Kinokuniya is closest and cheapest as far as shipping goes, but its wp returns server errors. Anyone know what's up? (And kickinpants- I was going to take advantage of your kind offer to forward but the Seattle store won't deliver to a PO address. What do you do when you order from them?)

(So what do modern productions do with Hamlet's 'Polack'?)

nojojojo mentions "...the protagonist (who) looks like a ten-year-old girl, even though she's actually 53 and a kind of adolescent in her species' terms" and as Flow would have it I've been considering 12 Kingdoms' King of Kyou, the little girl who wishes she had a shorter kirin, the more easily to slap him when so minded. The King of Kyou is twelve and has been king for 40 years or so, meaning that in terms of actual experience she's in her 50s too. Now kings are necessarily childless after they become kings, but one wonders if a prepubescent might not want to be an adult at some time in her theoretically endless life. Adults can have sex, and I never heard that Kings couldn't. You'd think she might ask to be removed from the rolls for, say, six years, in order to reach maturity.
( Further considerations )

One thing 12 Kingdoms is good for, and Konron no Tama as well in fact, is the workout it gives one's keigo. Or perhaps not workout so much-- after a certain point one's mind simply registers that a string of phrases just means 'eat' or 'sit' or whatever-- as simple habituation of the ear. Especially if you subvocalize the way I do.
( Cut for pedantry )

A look at the ads in back of Kaze no Umi etc suggest that the Answers *aren't* in Kaze no Umi etc. but in three or four other volumes. shiny_monkey will be given a wad of yen and a list of obscure titles to be looking for when she goes back to Japan.

And I shall interlard my kirin reading with more Konron no Tama, just because. Mh well, just because to date the 12K novels have added nothing to the anime.

There's an article waiting to be written about how anime is to manga & shousetsu as dramatizations are to novels ie people don't *really* start writing a work until they hear it speak and see it move. Then suddenly anyone can do it- and does. The characters in text get a visible body; the characters in manga acquire colour and voices. Half the writer's work is done for you. Is why it's a lot easier to write LotR stories after the films and FMA yaoi after the anime. In fact some day I shall natter at tanbi about how manga-based FMA yaoi barely seems possible. (Ed and Roy *don't* look cute together there and the women are too interesting to be ignored as prospective partners.)

(mostly for mvrdrk)

Yes the vocab stuff is a little bats-driving until you see the kanji, or get to Rakushun's lecture explaining things, whichever comes first. Taika is womb (I see it's unborn child in chinese) 胎 + fruit 果. Kaikyaku is sea guest. Rakushun is a half-beast hanjuu 半獸
( more stuff peppered with hanzi-that-I-hope-display-properly )

Merely to mention, after finishing eps 25-32 of 12 Kingdoms and then rewatching half of it again (palace politics and very confusing even with the helpful episode guide K-chan sent me)...
( 12 Kingdoms natter, possible mild spoilers )