This is the second gaiden. It features the following stories:

1. First appearance of Ryuuren. Occurs at a different place from where it does, chronologically, in the anime. In the anime, it happens while Shuurei is in the palace, but in the novels, it occurs after she has left, around the time of the exam. Events here are quite different, though. I actually don’t understand why this one was eliminated, because it actually gives a lot of insight into the characters of Ryuuren, and oddly, Reishin, as well as developing Shuuei as a character (as he is somewhat underused, I believe).

2. Story of the Autumn Festival: This *wasn’t* animated. It takes place after Shuurei and Eigetsu have become governors, but before New Year’s, so between books five and six. I actually have to wonder if they’ll animate this as a flashback, because IMHO it gives a lot of important information about the Hyou clan and Hyou Riou (both of them). Actually, I wish they had put this in, because it adds more development to Kokujun, Shunki, and Sai Rin.

3. Post book eight story involving the main principals in that book. Ryuuren takes Shuurei and Eigetsu, with Kourin tagging along, on a tour of the newest tourist spots of the Sa Province capital. Occurs after the main events of book eight. This is a fairly cute story. (Yeah, Ryuuren appears a lot in this gaiden. It’s no coincidence he was on the cover.)

4. A short piece, after the afterword. (more…)

Read this book on the recommendation of a friend of mine. After hearing I was reading the Alexandria Quartet, written by Lawrence Durrell, she had told me that she had read some of his brother’s books. Gerald Durrell grew up in Greece, among other places, and ended up becoming a naturalist, roaming the globe collecting animals. The books are quite deftly written in a sort of old fashioned, British way, and charming. We learn what it’s like to have a marmoset as a housepet, not to overfeed baby hedgehogs, what to do if you are a pit with twelve Gaboon vipers (among the deadliest snakes on the planet), and many other things. Durrell is very good with description, so you get a sense of the varied landscapes through which he travels, and even if you don’t know what the animals look like, they’re easy to imagine from his portraits.

This novel is quite similar in format to the short stories in Lou-Lan, except, obviously, it’s longer. Tun-huang, located in what is today China, but was in olden times on the Chinese frontier, on the Silk Road. During the 20th century, priceless Buddhist scrolls and historical records were found in the Buddhist caves near the city. Inoue imagines the events which might have led up to this. The main character arrives from China, and through a complex series of events, joins the Hsi-Hsian army, fighting against various other groups. As in Lou-lan, the political events are quite confusing. Seen from today’s perspective, the lands and peoples depicted are obscure, and their finery and victories vanished under the sand. Perhaps because I read the author’s short story collection on similar themes, and also because there was far less discussion of Buddhism than I thought there would be, I didn’t read this book with as much gusto as I did his short story collection, but it is still worth reading for the unusual setting.

Finished This Scheming World, by Saikaku Ihara, but now I want to read it again. I have always meant to read Saikaku, but have never known where to start out. So I grabbed this book because it looked short. If I read a long book, I would feel compelled to finish it, even if I disliked it. This book not really like a novel as we traditionally understand it, but more of a set of short sketches and episodes featuring various sorts of townspeople during the Edo period in the 1600s, on New Year’s day. I read this in translation (I would be unable to read this in the original, because it’s not modern Japanese), but even there, a strong, strangely light-hearted (even when describing rather depressing things) voice emanates from the work. It feels in a way quite medieval, as it describes a world full of, well, worldliness, the vicissitudes of fortune, and folly. Now, when you think Japanese New Year’s, you envision the stack of mochi topped with an orange, visits to the shrine, snow and chill, ozoni soup, osechi-ryori, kadomatsu, mochi pounding, family visits, and in general, a mood of reflection, somber and cheerful at once.

Well, actually that mood comes through a bit in This Scheming World (there are some interesting details, like the fact that it was traditional for people to put Ise lobsters out with the mochi to welcome the gods. A lobster is mentioned as lasting two weeks, which confuses me; there are also many fascinating details of daily life), but during the Edo Period, the New Year had another meaning: it was the time when debt collectors came pounding on their door, because (I gather) it was their last chance to collect debts, and otherwise they would often just cancel them. So while the rich spent this time squabbling over their social obligations (as New Year’s is also a time to give gifts to people), the poor and financially struggling spent their time scheming to avoid bill collectors and thinking up schemes for making money. So in the end, actually many of the stories revolve around money, appropriate for the world of the townspeople, where money was how one climbed to the top of the ladder. (Rather than artistic refinement or military valour).

Finished reading this collection by Takashi Atoda. These short stories have a decidedly more contemporary air to them than most of the other books I’ve been reading lately; most are Showa era, and even then, the stories set in the past are moved there via reminiscence. (A frequent theme is a character recalling their childhood vividly, reflecting on what is lost from the past, and accepting its transience) The settings are generally realistic, although there are some horror-esque twist endings, which I cannot give away for fear of spoiling them, and a few fanciful tales, although IMHO, these are the weaker stories. On the back cover, Atoda is described as a “popular” novelist, and I suppose this means that his stories are not exceedingly enigmatic, although a few stories end on a deliberately open note, and many are more straightfowardly and wholesomely emotional than certain high literature works. Although the note also says that the stories do have more “human warmth” than Kawabata, I suppose I’d characterize them more as being (as far as I can feel style in translation) much more stylistically subdued than Kawabata, although the writer does move in some stories towards heavy aesthetic description. (extreme austerity sometimes becomes almost ostentatious?)

I rather like the opening of this novel, by Natsume Soseki: “if one lives by the intellect, one grows harsh. If one lives by one’s feelings, one is swept away, and by pride, one is confined, in any case, it is not easy to live in the human world.”

I read it in English, but maybe I should have stretched and tried the Japanese: “智に働けば角が立つ。情に棹させば流される。意地を通せば窮屈だ。とかくに人の世は住みにくい。

I expected the rest of the novel to be an illustration of this, but unfortunately (okay, not really), it’s mostly a meditation about aesthetics, in which the narrator (a painter wandering around in the Japanese countryside) stays at a hot springs inn near a temple and a village in 1906; the Japanese-Russo War is in the background. He converses frequently with the strange and individual daughter of the landlord. The narrator insists that art must remain objective, and praises the objectivity of nature (so this reminded me of Doi’s Anatomy of Dependence, in that the charm of nature is located partially in its inhumanity), which interested me because I was reading something about John Gardner, who insists that literature where we don’t enter in the feelings of the characters suffers from the flaw of frigidity. Indeed, although the narrator insists that the novel is a low form because it’s gossipy and concerned with the self-interests of the characters, there’s nothing like that for getting people interested in reading a story. Anyway, this book probably isn’t a good way to start out Soseki, as it is largely devoid of incident, although quite well-written, and filled with outstanding natural descriptions; I suggest Kokoro if you want to be depressed, and Botchan, if you want to be somewhat more amused.

Finished reading this short story collection by Yasushi Inoue, and I liked it quite a bit. It’s fairly traditional in style, historically based, and the prose in many of them doesn’t have that overt “this was translated from the Japanese” feel, perhaps because many of the stories don’t take place in Japan. The doorway to the past in these stories is archaeological and historical: each story contains artifacts, or is written from the perspective of the present day, so the gap in time is tangible. The first story, Lou-Lan (楼蘭）, is written in the style of a history, dramatizing the sad history of the tiny city state on the shores of the Lop-Nur, caught between the Hsiang-nu (a powerful nomadic confederation. I think they’re also known as the Huns) and Han dynasty China. Loulan is forced to throw in its lot with one or the other, and suffers greatly in the process; the fluctuations of the desert eventually bury the lush lakeside city in sand, until the present day, when it is rediscovered. The most powerful story, I felt, was the last one, set in 1600s Japan, which tells of the “tradition” of abbots sailing to Fudaraku (a divine isle in the Pure Land), which reads almost like a horror story.

Just finished this short novel by Ryu Murakami, his first, and Akutagawa Prize-winning novel. The novel’s basically about a guy (named Ryu, just like the author. Well, probably technically Ryuu), aged twenty, who spends time getting wasted in a squalid apartment, shooting up heroin and taking all kinds of substances, hanging out with his dissipated friends (who are just as dissolute as he is, and some of them more violent), going to drug-fueled, bisexual orgies with members of the American military, and other somewhat monotonous activities. There isn’t much of a plot to the book, and aside from Ryu, who seems to have some kind of artistic gift or sensibility, the other characters are difficult to remember. Anyway, what makes the book stand out is the precision of the prose, which rises to beauty even when describing all kinds of disgusting things (I think if you took a shot of whatever your poison is every time a character vomits (described lovingly; this is not a book you want to read while eating), food is rotting, or there’s an act of violence, by the end you’d probably be an addict too); even in the translation, the originality of the prose comes through, and there are moments of great clarity. (In reviews, I see people comparing it to Burroughs and other counterculture writers. I haven’t read the Beats, but at one point, the narrator mentions Genet, and I definitely saw a resemblance.)

For once, I’m reading a Japanese book written during the Edo period, although most of the stories are set in the medieval period (between Heian and Edo). This collection of tales by Akinori Ueda (roughly translated, the title is:  Tales of Rain and Moon) deals mainly with the supernatural and historical. In one tale, a famous monk meets the ghost of a vengeful retired emperor, who explains how his vengefulness led him to become a demon and seek revenge on the Taira clan and Go-shirakawa:  in others, snake spirits seduce young men, cheating men receive supernatural punishment, the spirit of gold discourses on whether Buddhist or Confucianist ideas of destiny determine who is wealthy, a village is terrorized by a gay necrophiliac cannibalistic demon monk, etc. The edition I read was a very scholarly one, with the intro and endnotes individually being as long as the tales themselves. (The problem with the scholarly approach is that it begins to annoy you that you can’t read the stories in the original. They are of course not in modern Japanese, and the translator rhasphodizes about the binding of the first edition…)  These stories are definitely high context and allusive, continually mentioning beautiful places immortalized in poetry, classical poems (although this can’t really come through v. well in translation), and Chinese literature. After awhile, I got tired of flipping and abandoned the endnotes:  most of the stories do work just as well as ghost tales as didactic literature.

This is a short book set in Kyoto in the postwar period, but at times one almost believes it’s Taisho or even Edo-period Kyoto; the heroine, Chieko, is a foundling raised by a traditional fabrics wholesaler, and the social structure surrounding the kimono business has an almost medieval feeling, as one must pick up the delicate threads of the social relations involved. Although her parents construct an elaborate lie about how her birth parents left the infant Chieko out of their site for a moment, and they spontaneously decided to snatch her, in reality, she was a twin, abandoned by her poor woodcutter parents outside the wholesaler’s. (It’s never explicitly explained just why they did this, but I think it was to spare her from the thought that she was abandoned; most of the human relationships in this novel work on a similar principle of understatement) The other twin, Naeko, was kept, but soon after, her parents died, and she is now herself a woodcutter’s apprentice. Naeko has always yearned to meet her twin sister, and one day, they meet at a temple, but now the difference in their social statuses is such that Naeko always refers to her sister as “Miss” (probably ojousan?), although Chieko offers to take her in, but must settle simply for bestowing upon Naeko a magnificent obi and kimono. There’s more to the plot than this, but it’s actually somewhat difficult to summarize.

The main attraction of the novel, though, is its setting. Yes, you guessed it, Kawabata is working somewhat in the elegiac mode. The prosperous shop of Chieko’s eventual fiance sells Sony radios to American tourists along with Japanese fabric souvenirs, and so the story reads like the evocation of a vanishing, anachronistic world. The events take place during the late summer, around the famed Gion festival, and the myriad other festivals following it (the novel does become more vivid if you do look up some info on what exactly takes place during this festival), so although the events of the novel may not sound very explosive, the prose, restrained imagery, and the cultural details manage to retain the reader’s interest. (Indeed, actually, you don’t need to have iconic characters or blockbuster plot to sustain a narrative, but if not, you need to be very good, or drawing from a deep well.) [Also, the general purity of the novel and the wholesomeness of the personages makes me equate this somewhat to Mishima's Sound of the Waves, meaning that both are Japanese novels that don't, as someone of my acquaintance put it, feature horrible and depressing events. Not that Kawabata's fiction contains anything nearly as disturbing as Mishima's, but this novel feels more positive than some of his other works.]

Perhaps the reason why I am so ambivalent about this conception of the Third Artist is that I don’t like the elevation of SF above other genres. As I said in my discussion with Limyaael, all genres need to change and revitalize, otherwise they risk irrelevancy. Mystery, Romance, and Fantasy are also, in their modern forms, relatively ‘new’ as publishing categories/genres. In fact, even though mystery is maligned as formulaic, it is perhaps one of the newest genres, depending on how you define it. Obviously crime has always existed, as well as the need to control it, but there is obviously a reason that the genre burst upon the scene and became massively popular. And it’s not as if mystery, either, has remained static: just as in the fantasy genre, there are imitators and innovaters. The problem of the Third Artist is endemnic to genre. Perhaps the commentators feel that it is especially relevant to science fiction, though, because hard, realist SF is the ‘ideal’ form of the genre, and such realism is supposed to be highly mimetic, perhaps even journalistic or pseudo-historical, not deliberately ‘fiction-like’ or intertextual, whereas one can say that fantasy is supposed to be inherently ‘intertextual’ if you count mythology and folklore (ancient or modern) as texts. And so with fantasy, it’s a more ambiguous matter to differentiate unoriginal, boring referentiality from transformative, original referentiality. However, I think this is more a quantitative than a qualitative difference. (more…)

I actually really like wordpress. I like the interface, I like the themes, and I love the customizability. I’m just not really sure, though, how to promote my blog, because currently it seems more like a collection of random things. I can’t really remember how I used to do it in the old days; when I joined, people had extensive blogrolls and such. So there was a visible audience.

Also, someone was suggesting that some people perhaps get together a group blog and post  their greatest hits, but why not instead just post excerpts and link back to their respective blogs? That seems to be a much more efficient way to build a hub of readership.

There’s a book going around now that alleges that Web 2.0 is socially destructive because blogs undermine traditional media and Wikipedia is oft inaccurate and prone to abuse. Some parts of this argument, as regards news and information, do have some validity, I think, although generally the book is not being embraced, unsurprisingly, by the blogosphere. (more…)