Disclaimer: I don’t claim to have full fluency in Japanese. This translation may contain errors or misinterpretations. Read at your own risk.
tags>>saiunkoku|translationI originally started this blog because I was dissatisfied with the features at LJ: I was tired of not having access to statistics, and of the insularity of Livejournal in general. In general, in terms of features, this blog more than meets my expectations. I have all of the features I desire. Unfortunately, everyone I know still mostly uses LJ or a clone, so I miss blogging as conversation. So, I think if I update more frequently, I’ll get more hits.
So my new plan is to start importing old content from my livejournal, namely my old book blogs. Since most people didn’t really comment on them, not much is lost by only importing the body of the review, and not the comments. I need to go seek out a blogosphere, really; actually, all the hype about strikethrough or fans leaving in a huff aside, LJ really is losing traffic, probably because of Myspace et al, so I am kind of wondering about the future of the English-speaking portion of the site.
Finished reading this book, Kawabata’s last, and I think my primary reaction is to recommend one of his others. Not that this book wasn’t, as usual, beautifully written (well, as much as one can assert such a thing when reading the translation: the descriptions of the works of art, of the paintings and novels, are excellet), but the story was rather unsatisfyingly enigmatic. The story is such: a novelist in his fifties, a married man with a son and a daughter, on a whim, decides to visit his former mistress in Kyoto, who has since become a famed painter. The novelist started his affair with her when she was fifteen and he about thirty, and during their affair she became pregnant, but the baby was stillborn, after which they parted, and he wrote a famed novel about their relationship, which ironically became the basis of the prosperity of his family. His meeting with his former lover is anticlimactic. She takes a philosophical view of the circumstances, even though she has decided since then never to marry; her protegee (and lover) Keiko, an abstract painter, becomes obsessed with the thought of avenging her teacher, despite her teacher’s pleas to give up such an idea. Although some readers found Keiko fascinating, I think I was more irritated by her shocking statements and insane plans; perhaps this is because she vaguely reminded me of one of the sadistic fatal women in Tanizaki’s works, but less blindingly perverse. The novel is quite short, and the ending very sudden, and slightly unexpectedly so.
tags>>yasunari kawabataApologies, this site was down for awhile while I tried to get everything working again. Things now seem to be mostly back to normal, although I need to go and reinstall some plugins.
BTW, I have uploaded an archive of the data to my backup site.
tags>>announcementsI forgot to write a summary for this gaiden. This is the first gaiden; however, most of the stories were covered in the anime, so I’ll only summarize the part that wasn’t animated.
tags>>saiunkokuSecond part of the Gaiden. (covering the third story). Thanks to everyone for your comments. I’m glad that we’re getting some discussion in.
tags>>saiunkokuHey, it’s the Return (dramatic music) of the hideous charts! Er, looking at these charts will SPOIL you for all of the novels. So if you don’t like spoilers, don’t look at them.
tags>>family tree|saiunkokuThere has been some confusion here, so I’ll try to clear it up a bit. There are twelve Saiunkoku light novels and now, three Saiunkoku gaidens, so now fifteen books in all. “Gaiden” literally means “outside story,” and in the gaidens are side stories/short stories. Most have been serialized in The Beans magazine. The Saiunkoku manga, on the other hand, is up to two volumes right now, but I’m not summarizing it here since people are translating it anyway.
Anyway, in this gaiden, two of the stories have appeared in The Beans magazine before, and the other is new material. BTW, can someone tell me where the stuff in the anime about Shouka and his great-aunt appeared? Also, I think this is pretty much the moment where the anime and the novels are going to “diverge.” (Well, not so much diverge as the novel story is continuing, whereas the anime will, I am speculating, stop at volume twelve. As it is, the new material is too relevant to what is probably going to happen in the next volume, IMHO, for a reader of the novels to skip this gaiden).
Also, thanks to everyone for your comments! I will try to respond to the questions later.
tags>>saiunkokuI wish they would include a map of Saiunkoku in the novels. In the anime they did, but they change some things in the novels, so I don’t know how ‘accurate’ it is.
Anyway, I thought I would make some notes on Saiunkoku’s geography. There are SPOILERS here up till book 12.
Read the rest of this entry »
Org chart contains incidental spoilers, so click at your own risk.
tags>>saiunkokuWell, looks like I managed to finish this summary before the new Gaiden comes out on November 1st. Yay? I uh… will probably get that one done in a more timely fashion, as I plan to split it into two parts, first the new material and then the old stuff.
tags>>saiunkokuAnd now for the latest volume… BTW, this book is long; the author herself says so in the afterword. XD
tags>>saiunkokuI just installed Wordpress 2.3. Out of all of my plugins, only Simple Tagging was not compatible. Anyway, it is made obsolete by 2.3. (BTW, if you have either of these installed, make sure to run the converter).
The major upgrade this time is tags. However, this means that you need to upgrade your theme. This is one way in which Wordpress shows that it’s not made for the complete newb. Look. The average person doesn’t know php. Okay, they may be able to c&p, but how are people supposed to know exactly where to paste to get the results that UTW and Simple Tagging achieve effortlessly? Also, since php is code, you can induce errors by putting in special characters, like colons.
Anyway, what you need to do is this. In your theme, there will be an index.php (main index file) and a single.php (single post file). Locate these files.
Then just follow these instructions. http://iivee.com/add-wordpress-23-tags-to-wordpress-theme-bogart/33/
So far, I’ve updated the Skittlish, Lainlog, and Tarski (actually found an updated version) themes. I hope to go through my themes and update the rest of them soon. Actually, now that I’ve gotten Skittlish working fairly well, I might just go with that one. Or maybe I’ll whip up my own header for Tarski.
More of Saiunkoku 11. Sorry about the length. I write a long letter because I have not the time to write a short one, etc.
tags>>saiunkoku