Quick & Tasty

Shanghai Express

2026-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

An old film I love very much is “Shanghai Express”, from 1932, directed by Josef von Sternberg and featuring Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong in very interesting roles.

This is probably the most famous collaboration between von Sternberg and Dietrich and lot has been written about it, essays, reviews, in-depth analysis of what makes it so special. I have listed some of them at the end of this article. I want instead provide some context to the drawing I made from a scene in the film, and also focus on a few points about the film and the actors that I found particularly interesting.

Why I love this film

I love this film because I love old black and white movies in general, and this one is so beautifully shot: The lighting, the framing, the attention to detail. But in particular the lighting, it is extraordinary. Also, it features a train, and I love trains. And it has both Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong, and they are both strong characters.

I also love the way the characters speak. When asked why all the actors in the film spoke in an even monotone, Josef von Sternberg answered

This is the Shanghai Express. Everybody must talk like a train. [1]

In fact, it is not simply a monotone. The cadence of the characters’ speech reflects the rhythm of the train. I like the content of the dialogue as well. I love in particular this exchange between Magdalen, who calls herself Shanghai Lily, and her former lover, Captain Donald Harvey, a surgeon. You have to see it because the delivery makes it a lot better. It starts at about 10 minutes in.

Magdalen.
    Well, Doctor, I haven’t seen you in a long time. You haven’t changed at all, Doctor.
Well, you’ve changed a lot, Magdalen.
    Have I, Doc? Do you mind me calling you Doc? Or must I be… more respectful?
You never were respectful and you always did call me Doc. I didn’t think I’d ever run into you again.
    Have you thought of me much, Doc?
Let’s see. Exactly how long has it been?
    Five years and four weeks.
Well, for five years and four weeks I’ve thought of nothing else.
    You were always polite, Doc. You haven’t changed a bit.
You have, Magdalen. You’ve changed a lot.
    Have I lost my looks?
No, you’re more beautiful than ever.
    How have I changed?
I wish I could describe it.
    Well, Doc, I’ve changed my name.
Married?
    No. It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.
So you’re Shanghai Lily.
    The notorious white flower of China. You heard of me. And you always believed what you heard.
And I still do. You see, I haven’t changed at all. It was nice to see you again, Magdalen.
    Oh, I don’t know. [2]

I also love has what been called the moral ambiguity, which means it is not simply the good are good and the bad are bad. Finally, this movie was filmed in 1931 and released in 1932, so it is nearly a hundred years old, which is quite amazing.

The actresses

Marlene Dietrich (born Marie Magdalene Dietrich in 1901 in Berlin) is rightly famous for many reasons, she was a truly remarkable woman. If you don’t know her, this article “Marlene Dietrich: anti-fascist and a role model for women’s emancipation” gives a good idea. The article refers to her donating her entire income from “Knight Without Armour” to helping the refugees from Nazi Germany. By 1937, Marlene was the highest-paid star in Hollywood, earning the unprecedented sum of $450,000 to star in that movie. In today’s money that would be close to ten million dollars.

According to an article about Dietrich on Music and the Holocaust:

Whilst travelling to London in 1933 Dietrich was approached by Nazi Party members who tried to persuade her to return to Germany and become the ‘pretty face’ of the Third Reich. When she refused, her films were banned. It is alleged that Hitler proposed Dietrich become his mistress; when she refused he had all copies of Der Blaue Engel destroyed except for one, which he kept for himself.

I also like her as an actress. Besides “Shanghai Express”, I like many of her films, in particular Golden Earrings, Witness for the Prosecution, The Foreign Affair and Stage Fright, and her small role in Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil”.

“I dress for the image. Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men. If I dressed for myself I wouldn’t bother at all. Clothes bore me. I’d wear jeans. I adore jeans. I get them in a public store—men’s, of course; I can’t wear women’s trousers. But I dress for the profession.” (Marlene Dietrich, in an interview in 1960) [3]

Anna May Wong (born Wong Liu Tsong 黃柳霜 in 1905 in Los Angeles) is probably less well known, mostly because of the inherent racism in the film industry which stopped her from getting top roles. You should definitely read this article by Katie Gee Salisbury who wrote her biography . It’s a real eye-opener of how openly racist the US was at that time. Here is a snippet:

Wong, they explained, could not play O-lan because Wang Lung, the lead male role, had already gone to Paul Muni and allowing two actors of different races to play husband and wife would violate the Hays Code’s ban on miscegenation, even though they would be playing two Chinese characters.

The Hays Code, officially the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPA) Production Code, put a lot of restrictions on what could be shown on screen. One of those was regarding miscegenation (interracial relationships).

The article also mentions the Chinese Exclusion Act. This was a United States federal law from 1882, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese labourers for 10 years. The act was was renewed and strengthened in 1892 with the Geary Act and made permanent in 1902. Every Chinese American was ordered to gain a certificate of residence from the US government or face deportation. It remained in force until 1943 when it was repealed because China had become an ally of the US against Japan in WW II, and the US wanted to project a positive image.

So Anna May Wong didn’t get top roles and didn’t get the best scripts either. A notable exception is “Impact” (1949), in which she has a small but crucial role. Another movie where she has the lead role is “Bombs over Burma” (1942), a B-movie of barely more than an hour, made as wartime propaganda for China as ally in the fight against Japan. The movie was shot in two weeks and is extremely low budget but nevertheless worth watching, an not only for Anna May Wong’s performance.

The drawing

For this drawing I used my “staple” Chinese ink stick. I wrote an article about its history, making, and poetry, please read it. Compared to the newer ink I used for my drawing of a scene from “Spring in a small town”, these ink sticks feel smoother when rubbing on the inkstone, and it is also easier to make a very dense black with them, but the actual difference this makes to the drawing is very minor. There is also a slight difference in the tint of black, which is more noticeable.

Trial drawings: portraits of Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich

I made several trial drawings for this one. I started with an A4 portrait of Anna May Wong from a different photograph, also from “Shanghai Express”. I did not measure this but drew it quickly in freehand. As a result, the likeness is a little off because the face is a bit too long, but it served as an exercise of control over the ink and brush, and to experiment with the style I wanted.

Freehand portrait of Anna May Wong as Hui Fei

Next, I did the actual portrait that is part of the large drawing, but also on A4. This is using a grid as I wanted to ensure that the proportions were correct.

Study of Anna May Wong as Hui Fei

Finally, I drew the portrait of Marlene Dietrich that is also part of the large drawing, again on A4 using a grid. Instead of ink, I worked it out using graphite aquarelle pencils. Compared to the Chinese ink, the dark tones are a lot less intense, but for this portrait I think it worked very well.

Study of Marlene Dietrich as Shanghai Lily

The large drawing: Hui Fei and Shanghai Lily

I wanted a double portrait of Anna May Wong playing Hui Fei and Marlene Dietrich playing Shanghai Lily. There is a publicity picture that has both of them looking out of the internal windows of their compartment. (I used a crop of it as banner for the article.) In the movie, Lily is looking into the corridor but the window next to her has the blind drawn. Then she moves away to the look out of the outside window. Hui Fei opens the blind, looks out briefly and also moves to the outside window. Then are a few brief shots of the other passengers, and Lily moves back to look out of the internal window. They are not shown together, but it is quite possible that this is a scene that got cut. The position of the film camera is a bit different from that of the photo camera, which is to be expected as the photographer would of course have stood next to the camera.

The scene is interesting for the contrast between the two women, especially in terms of darkness and light. I leave it to others to speculate on the symbolism of Hui Fei wearing light colours and Shanghai Lily wearing dark ones. I think the main reason was for the visual contrast, and because it sets off their hair colour. But it is and interesting detail that Shanghai Lily is wearing men’s pyjamas. They became popular with women because of this and because Claudette Colbert also wore them two years later in “It Happened One Night”.

I used Hui Fei’s pose from the photograph but I wanted Lily’s face to be closer to hers so I used an actual pose from the movie where she bends a bit to her right. I also changed the direction of their glance so they look at the viewer. As usual, it is the expressions on the faces of both characters that interested me. I wanted to show their watchfulness and apprehension.

Double portrait of Hui Fei and Shanghai Lily

I used the rough watercolour paper I like (Fabriano Artistico, 300 g/m² cold pressed “not”), 56 cm x 76 cm. I set up the drawing in ordinary HB pencil and Tombow MONO 100 graphite lead pencils (2B, 4B and 5B). I used a grid to make it easier to match the original picture.

I applied the Chinese ink mostly using a medium-size calligraphy brush, and Hui Fei’s hair with a larger brush. This kind of brush doesn’t allow the precision of a typical watercolour brush, even more so as mine are a worn from use, but that is precisely why I use them. Not having full control over the stroke is part of the style. I want the pencil work and brush stroke to be visible and also somewhat rough and imprecise, so that the overall impression works.

The Chinese characters on the bottom left are 車快海上, which means “Shanghai Express”. The are written on the carriages in the film and run from right to left, which was common but is now usual.

The banner is a crop of the photograph on which the drawing is based. It shows the characters in a wider view of the train compartment.

References

[1] Shanghai Express (1932) by Dan Willard
[2] Shanghai Express script
[3] From the Observer archive, 6 March 1960: Marlene Dietrich’s wardrobe secrets

The Island where Red Spider Lilies Bloom

2025-07-24T00:00:00+01:00

I’ve finished reading “The Island Where Red Spider Lilies Bloom” (higanbana ga saku shima, 彼岸花が咲く島) by Li Kotomi 李琴峰, and it is one of the best novels I have read in a quite a while. I read it in Japanese as it has not been translated yet in any other language I can read.

It was a delight to read, especially after reading Yoko Tawada’s “The Last Children of Tokyo”/”The Emissary” (献灯使, kentōshi) which had been a real struggle for me. In fact, it was a relief as I had started to doubt my Japanese abilities. I don’t mean that Yoko Tawada’s novel is bad, not at all, but there are so many sentences that I had to read three times or more to get what they actually mean. By comparison, the writing in this novel is simple and transparent (only by comparison though). I still had to look up quite a few words, but that is actually fun

The novel has not been translated into English yet at the time of writing (July 2025). The title is translated on Li Kotomi’s web site as “The Island Where Red Spider Lilies Bloom”. The Italian translation calls it “L’isola dei gigli rossi”, which simply means “The island of the red lilies”; the Polish title is “Wyspa pajęczych lilii” which is “The island of the spider lilies”.

What others have said

Despite not having been translated into English yet, there are beside Japanese ones quite a few reviews of and articles about the novel, because it won the prestigious Akutagawa literary prize in 2021.

I recommend in particular the very interesting essay by Anna Specchio, the Italian translator of the novel: “The Island where Future Possibilities Bloom. Language, gender, and identity issues in Li Kotomi’s Higanbana ga saku shima”. It is very comprehensive and covers many of the aspects that I comment on in this article, and many more that I don’t discuss, in particular issues of gender, patriarchy and imperialism, because I feel she did it so much better than I ever could.

Another interesting essay in Japanese is 在日台湾人作家李琴峰『彼岸花が咲く島』研究――アンチ国民国家論の政治的寓話 (“Research article: Taiwanese writer living in Japan Li Kotomi’s ‘The island where red spider lilies bloom’ – an anti-nationalist political allegory”) by Hsieh Hui-Chen 謝惠貞, an associate professor in Comparative Study of Japanese and Taiwanese Literature at Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She discusses in depth the issues of anti-nationalism and gender but also in particular of the languages spoken on the island, with comparisons to the creole and pidgin languages of Taiwan and Okinawa.

The story

The story is almost a fairtale. It is told in a very gentle way, with a lot of eye for details of nature and sensitivity for human feelings and relationships. One day a girl of about fifteen is washed up on a sandy beach of an island so far from anywhere that this has not happened in living memory. She is found by another girl of the same age, Yona, who had come to the beach to pick higanbana, and is looked after by her and her parent, Sera who is a swordfish hunter. The girl has lost all but the vagues memories of her past. Yona gives her a new name, Umi.

When she’s better, Umi is brought before the the head priestess of the island. She gives her a stark choice: integrate into the island and become a priestess, or get thrown out. Umi has nowhere to go, and Yona also wants to become a priestess, so with Yona’s help Umi sets out to learn the language and the customs of the island and the skills required to be a priestess. She also gets to know a boy called Tatsu, who desperately wants to become a priest, but that is impossible as only women can attain the priesthood. Umi and Yona promise to Tatsu that, when they become priestesses, they will change the rules so that men can become priests and learn the secret history of the island.

Language in the novel

Japanese writing gives the author a possible unique flexibility. To start with there are three writing systems, so that words can be written in kanji, hiragana or katakana; words or letters can also be written in rōmaji (Latin alphabet), for example Ｔシャツ (T-shirt).
Then, for many words there is a variety of kanji that can be used to write them. For example, “to whisper” can be written as ささやく, 囁く or 私語く or even ササヤク. For many kanji, there are archaic versions that are also valid to use, for example 蛍 (ほたる, firefly) can be written using the older kanji 螢 which explicitly contains the kanji for fire (火).
Finally, there is a feature called furigana, small kana written next to a word in vertical writing or above it in horizontal writing. It is primarily used to provide the reader with the readings of less common kanji, but it is not limited to kana and can be used for translation or clarification of words with a non-obvious meaning. In that case it tends to be called ruby. It is often used to provide the kana name for a plant name written in kanji. Quite often, the two are unrelated. For example, crape myrtle is sarusuberi in Japanese, usually written サルスベリ; but the kanji writing is 百日紅 which literally means “a hundred days crimson”. So the ruby will provide the katakana name.

All those options result in different connotations and have a strong effect on the atmosphere of a novel. For example, the higanbana of the title could be written as ヒガンバナ, which is the “correct” way for plant names, ひがんばな which is more colloquial, 彼ヒ岸ガン花バナ or 彼ひ岸がん花ばな or in this novel also 彼ビ岸アン花バナー.

In this novel there are also a few examples of the opposite: there are two prayers, one written entirely in hiragana and another entirely in kanji, where the meaning is not clear at all, not even to Japanese native speakers, but there are no Ruby at all, nor any explanation in the text.

Three languages

The novel is a delight for lovers of the Japanese language. Apart from the dialogue, most of text is written in ordinary Japanese, but the characters speak three different variants of Japanese.

Umi speaks a language called hi no moto kotoba, written ひのもとことば. hi no moto means “the origin of the sun”, because from the perspective of China and Korea, Japan was to the East and so the land of the rising sun; it is an older name for Japan: 日の本 hi no moto became 日の本, nihon. The reason for the difference in pronunciation is relevant to the novel: many Japanese words are written in kanji, logographic characters taken over from the Chinese script. Most of them can be pronounced in two ways (called “readings). One pronunciation is the Japanese word, and the other goes back to the original Chinese sound of the character. For example, 本 can be pronounced moto (the Japanese word ) or hon (the Chinese character sound).

The people on the island speak what they call nihongo ニホン語 which means Japanese, “the language of Nihon”, but which is quite different from current Japanese. That they call it ニホン語 and not 日本語 is significant: they have forgotten about the country called 日本 and the word nihon is used purely phonetically, and therefore written in katakana.

The priestesses speak a language called jogo 女語, which means “women’s language” and is very close to Umi’s language.

The reason for these differences is that the through the island’s connection with Taiwan, its nihongo has adopted many Chinese loanwords, and tends to use the Chinese readings for the kanji. There are also words from the languages of the Ryūkyū islands (the group of islands between Japan and Taiwan, of which Okinawa is the largest and most well-known).

The Japanese language has gone the opposite way: in a move to get rid of both Chinese immigrants (in fact, of all “non-pure” Japanese) and Chinese cultural influences, kanji were banned, and Japanese readings of characters were promoted. In this way, 日本語 became ひのもとことば (wich can be written in current Japanese as 日の本言葉). The jogo spoken by the priestesses, and which they teach to the girls of the island, is very close to Umi’s hi no moto kotoba. It is an older form which in writing it still uses some kanji (which is very fortunate for the reader) and does not use as many English loanwords as the hi no moto kotoba.

kanji or no kanji ?

The elimination by the patriarchy of kanji in favour of kana is interesting. Until the Meiji era (early 20th century), women were not supposed to learn kanji. Boys learned Chinese and read Chinese literature but girls were expected to read in hiragana and to learn only a very limited number of very common kanji. The use of hiragana has long been considered feminine, it was even called “the woman’s hand” (女手). Conversely, for a long time women who were able to read and write Chinese characters were regarded as unfeminine. This is illustrated in the 11th-century Tale of Genji (which was written by a woman, in kana):

In women as in men, there is no one worse than the one who tries to display her scanty knowledge in full […] The very worst are the ones who scribble off Chinese characters at such a rate that they fill a good half of letters where they are most out of place, letters to other women […] She cannot of course intend it to be so, but the words read aloud seem muscular and unyielding, and in the end hopelessly mannered (trans. E. Seidensticker).

On the other hand, in the Meiji era there was a movement to eliminate kanji. In fact, there were several, some of which advocated the use of the Roman alphabet. Mori Arinori, the founder of Japan’s modern education system, even favoured dropping the Japanese language altogether for simplified English. His main motivation was nationalist: he was anti-Chinese and therefore anti-_kanji_. In the end, a reduced number of kanji was kept, but it shows the scenario in the novel is not as implausible as one might think.

I was worried that three languages would make the novel hard to read, but this was not really the case. Native readers of Japanese don’t know the Chinese loan words either so they need to be explained anyway; and the additional English loan words are easy to work out.

The noro

What I call priestess is in the novel called noro (ノロ). I thought at first it was a made-up word but I discovered in a paper about plants used during rituals that it is the term used on Okinawa and other Ryūkyū islands for those who can talk with the gods. And just like in the story, they wear white robes and white headbands. And apparently they are still exclusively women and even today men are still banned from entering certain sacred sites. The religion in the novel is a combination of elements from Buddhism and Shinto with some elements from beliefs from the Ryūkyū and Taiwan. The head priestess is the dainoro 大ノロ. (It could be ōnoro because 大 can be read as ō or dai but I think the people on the island are more likely to use the Chinese reading).

umi

The most common meaning of umi is”sea” or “ocean” (written 海 ) but the name of the character is written 宇実, purely for phonetic similarity. In fact, Yona wanted to write it 霧実 where 霧 means “spray” but for Umi that was too complicated so she went for 宇 which means “heaven”.

There is a scene in the novel where Umi, who only knows kana, is taught to write kanji by Yona:

With a black pen, Yona showed Umi how to write a character stroke by stroke. One of those densely black, square “Island” characters that Umi could not read. It started with a dot, dot, then a horizontal line drawn from left to right, from there a short sweeping stroke to the left, then again a horizontal line and another one, and finally a vertical line with a again small upward turn at the bottom. Just by piling up dots, lines, sweeps and little hooks, a complete character was created. Umi scrutinised it curiously. “This is the ‘U’ in ‘Umi’,” Yona said. “Let’s see if you can write it!”

The character in question is 宇. I love this scene as it takes me back to when I first started to learn kanji. I never learned to write them properly by hand though.

yona

Yona’s name is interesting too. It is written 游娜 where the first character means to float or swim and the second means graceful. But it is also a reference to the island of Yonaguni, in kanji 与那国島. Note the presence of the 那 in 娜. This the island of the Ryūkyū archipelago that is furthest from Japan and very close to Taiwan; it is part of Japan. It has its own language (sadly now highly endangered) and a fascinating history, for example it was long rumoured to be a women’s island, and it was at least part of the inspiration of this novel. Even the map of the island in the novel is close to the map of the actual island.

The kamiuta

There is an enigmatic prayer (kamiuta 神歌, song to the gods) in the novel, written in hiragana only and in the language of the island, with lots of Chinese loan words. The kanji are based on a discussion I found on line.

かんぬみち神の道　だかい大海せよ
だかい大海したゆえ故　かみ神ほあひ
やま山いのま間うみ海わた渡れ
わた渡りしたゆえ故　たみ民げんこん現今
おおぐにびと大国人　たいきょ退去せ
たいきょ退去したゆえ故　しまばん島番に
うみ海のなみ波　た立つなかれ勿
しず静まりしたゆえ故　ぎょふ漁夫びんあん安
いね稲のほ保よ　よ良くみの稔れ
みの稔りしたゆえ故　だじゃ大家ふうず風雨無

The queen of heaven

There is a shrine on the island (called by their Okinawan name utaki 御嶽うたき) which looks like a Chinese temple. Yona calls the temple 天后宮テンホウゴン. It is dedicated to Tenhō, a goddess who protects seafarers. The name means Queen (or Empress) of Heaven; in Japanese it’s pronounced Tenkō. On the pillars of the gates are the following prayers, written in kanji only.

天道本慈仁航渡群黎登聖域
后恩施沛澤善導赤子醒迷津

Umi can’t read them at all, and that is of course the point. These exact phrases are also written on the pillars of the Tianhou Temple (tiānhòugōng) in Guanshan, Taiwan. So they are in an archaic Chinese.

I also found a Japanese site providing a reading for the characters:

天道テンドー慈仁ジジンを本モトとして航フネで渡ワタり群黎グンレイ聖域セイイキに登ノボる
后のち沛澤ハイタクに恩オンを施ホドコシ善よく導ミチビキて赤子アカゴ迷津メイシンより醒メザム

I got help from several people for the meaning of the phrases.

天道本慈仁、航渡群黎登圣域。
天道本慈仁 : The heavenly way is inherently compassionate and benevolent.”
航渡群黎登圣域: “She ferries the masses to the sacred realm.”

Overall meaning: The inherent nature of heaven is compassionate; through this benevolent guidance, people are helped across difficulties and elevated to a realm of spiritual enlightenment.

后恩施沛泽、善导赤子醒迷津。
后恩施沛泽: The Queen’s divine grace showers abundant blessings.
善导赤子醒迷津: She guides the innocent, awakening them from confusion.

Overall meaning: Divine grace is profound and abundant, nurturing all like timely rain. The deity guides humanity like a compassionate mother guiding her children away from confusion and toward clarity.

The deity Tenhō is also called Mazu 媽祖, and is a still widely revered sea goddess, protector of seafarers, originating from Putian in China. By pure coincidence, my PhD student Shuxuan Li is from that town and he kindly helped me out with those phrases.

From some people on fedi I learned that there is quite a bit word-play in these phrases. First, they start with 天 and 后 because it’s about 天后; then, 澤 in 沛澤 and 津 in 迷津 are all water-related characters, because Mazu is the goddess of sea.

In particular, 沛澤 “abundant divine grace” is a metaphor for Mazu’s protective and nurturing powers, echoing the imagery of life-giving water, often used to describe Heaven’s or a deity’s virtue. 泽 means “rain” and 沛 means marsh but here it means “abundant” because rain makes all creatures. 天道 means “The heavenly way” but refers here specifically to the Heavenly Mother Mazu.

Plants

What I like in particular is the frequent mentioning of plants and their names, and also that they are often written in kanji, although the customary way to write plant names in Japanese is in katakana.

The island where the story takes place is subtropical, and throughout the novel many local plants are mentioned. So after a fashion, you can tell the story through the plants. But it is really just an excuse to geek out on Japanese plant names.

higanbana

The titular flower, the higanbana, 彼ひ岸がん花ばな, is called Red Spider Lily or Cluster Amaryllis (Lycoris radiata). I don’t like the name “Spider Lily”, I feel it does the flower a discourtesy; although in the novel the petals are compared to a spider’s legs, which I take to be a nod to the English name. The other name, “Cluster Amaryllis”, is better but sounds very “botanical”.

The Japanese word higanbana refers to the period of higan. The term is derived from the Sanskrit pāram and means something like “crossing to the further bank”, with the notion of a river separating this world from nirvana. It is the name for the Buddhist rites held in the week around the autumn equinox, and this is also the period when those flowers bloom in Japan, so Equinox Flower would be a good name.

But the variety on the island blooms year round and has medicinal properties. The people on the island call it bianbanaa ビアンバナー which seems a combination of Mandarin bǐ’ànhuā and higanbana. It is interesting that the euphemism for dying used on the island, gueki 過去 , from the Chinese guòqù, means “crossing to the other bank” (mukōgishi e wataru 向こう岸へ渡る ). In Japanese, 過去 is pronounced kago and means “the past” or “one’s past life”; 過ぎ去る which is the same as 過去する means “to pass”, but it is not used as a euphemism for dying.

Other medicinal plants

The noro act as healers, and the higanbana are primarily medicinal. Other medicinal plants mentioned are jieju ジエジュ for which I have not found a Japanese or Chinese name; nishiyomogi (西にし蓬よもぎ) Indian wormwood (Artemisia indica) and kaininsou (海かい人にん草そう) red seabroom (Digenea simplex), a seaweed with medicinal properties. Yona uses them to help Umi get better after she finds her on the beach, and also later when she gets some infection on her hand after being tatooed. Umi dislikes the bitter taste of the nishiyomogi soup.

Play

There is a scene in the story where Yona and Uma have a play-fight with burrs, prickly seedheads that stick to hair and clothes. The scene establishes the rapport between them and the attraction Umi feels for Yona.

The burrs are called hittsukimushi (引っ付き虫, literally “sticking bugs”) in Japanese. The plant has a wonderful name: tachiawayukisendangusa (立タチ泡雪アワユキ栴檀センダン草グサ). The 立, tachi, means it’s a tall plant; 泡雪 (als 淡雪 ), awayuki, means “light snow”; 栴檀草 means sendangusa where the 草 means grass; the other kanji each represent a kind of tree, but there is no translation for the compound. It has many English common names (more than twenty); I like “butterfly needles” and “bur marigold”. The official name is Bidens pilosa var. radiata.

Rituals

The noro use branches of haibyakushin (這ハイ柏ビャク槇シン) dwarf Japanese garden juniper (Juniperus chinensis var. procumbens) as shrine offerings, and the leaves of the bochōji (母ボ丁チョウ字ジ), also known as Ryūkyū-aoki (琉球リュウキュウ青木アオキ) and in English “wild coffee” (Psychotria asiatica), are used to make charms against evil spirits. The charms and offerings are a recurrent theme in the novel.

Vegetation

Many trees are mentioned throughout, in particular gajumaru (榕樹ガジュマル ), the Chinese banyan tree (Ficus microcarpa) and birō 蒲葵びろう</rt</ruby>) the Chinese fan palm (Livistona chinensis), which are covering most of the island.

There is a nice scene describing the headlands and clifftops, with a lot of detail of the vegetation: susuki (芒すすき) Japanese pampas grass (Miscanthus sinensis) and chigaya (茅ちがや) Cogon grass (Imperata cylindrica), shimahigeshiba (島シマ髭ヒゲ芝シバ) purpletop chloris (Chloris barbata), sunadzuru (砂スナ蔓ヅル）love-vine（Cassytha filiformis), teppōyuri (鉄てっ砲ぽう百ゆ合り), Easter lily (Lilium longiflorum), santanka (山サン丹タン花カ) Chinese ixora (Ixora chinensis), sotetsu (蘇そ鉄てつ ) Japanese sago palm (Cycas revoluta) and adan (阿あ檀だん) umbrella tree (Pandanus odorifer). The latter grows in particular on the lip of a deep chasm rent into the top of the headland, where there is a small shrine with a jizō statue.

More plants are mentioned during Umi and Yona’s visit to the most remote and sacred shrine on the island, for which they have to walk a narrow mountain path through the rainforest. Apart from gajumaru and birō, in those mountain woods also grow tokusaba-mokumaō (砥ト草クサ葉バ木モク麻マ黄オウ), ironwood (Casuarina equisetifolia) — the first part of the Japanese name, tokusaba means “sharp grass leaves”, which is also the name for the common horsetail, and this is reflected in the latin name: equisetifolia means “with leaves like the horsetail”; madake (真ま竹だけ) Japanese timber bamboo (Phyllostachys bambsoides) or giant bamboo, satō-natsumeyashi (砂さ糖とう棗なつめ椰子やし) date palm (Phoenix dactylifera); the satō here means sugar; usually it is called just natsumeyashi, where natsume is date and yashi palm.

A very special tree in the story is a huge akagi (赤あか木ぎ), which means “redwood” but the English name is Bishop wood (Bischofia javanica). The akagi is the location of the shrine, it is so big that five men holding hands can’t surround it. It’s very old and overgrown, in particular with ferns like hōbikanju (鳳ホウ尾ビ貫衆カンジュ) giant swordfern (Nephrolepis biserrata) — hōbi 鳳尾 means firebird tail; and hoshida (穂ほ羊歯しだ) Japanese maiden fern (Thelypteris acuminata), but very much alive.

Food plants

Apart from farm plants like rice, sweet potato (satsumaimo サツマイモ), taro (taroimo タロイモ) and satōkibi (砂糖サトウ黍キビ) sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), also called kansho (甘かん蔗しょ); and garden plants yomogi (蓬よもぎ) Japanese mugwort (Artemisia princeps), botanbōfū (牡ボ丹タン防ボウ風フウ) coastal hog fennel (Peucedanum japonicum) and hōsenka (鳳ほう仙せん花か) garden balsam (Impatiens balsamina), which are used in side dishes and in the island’s version of onigiri rice balls, fantan (飯ハン団タン, from the Chinese fàntuán·zi), other food plants mentioned in the novel are rōzeru (ローゼル), roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa) which is drunk as tea (Umi doesn’t like it); mangō (芒果マンゴー) mango (Mangifera indica) which they eat after the hittsukimushi fight and which apparently simply grows there in the wild.

Conditions for Utopia

The society on the island is not quite an Utopia, it is not perfect, but it is an utopian experiment similar to that in Ursula Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed”. It struck me that such an experiment can only work in two situations. Either the utopian society is dominant, or at least equally powerful as its peers. This is the situation of the Culture in Iain M Banks’s novels. Or it should be isolated from the other, more powerful societies, and that is what we see with the island and also in “The Dispossessed”. In a perfect Utopia, presumably the isolation would be complete; in the imperfect ones there is some degree on interaction. There is in principle a third situation possible: the dominant society could simply not care about the utopia, even if it is very close. I think that rather unlikely because the utopian society would attract people and would also hold up a mirror to the other society showing its deficiencies. And even though the government of the dominant society could not care, it’s enterprising citizens would look for ways to benefit from interactions with the utopia, for example resource extraction.

The words “powerful” and “dominant” need some consideration. This is not necessarily about military or economic power or size. A society can also be culturally or technologically dominant. The isolation therefore must also be in terms of information exchange.

Suppose Scotland was a Utopia along the lines of the island: no money, collective ownership, no police or army, low-tech but with frugal abundance. Then unless there was a closed border and a communication barrier, its proximity to England would result in a strong influence in many respects: some English entrepeneurs would attempt to extract resources, which would lead to conflict; others would attempt trade and as a result, soon the concept of money would be introduced; they could easily trade communication technology which would lead to pushing the English cultural values; introduction of advanced technologically would also undermine the Utopia’s foundations. All of this would happen even if there is no malicious intent. English people would likely desire to settle in large numbers in a Utopian Scotland. If the influx was too large, there would be insufficient scope for integration. Therefore, to maintain the Utopia, isolation is necessary. Ironically, this is also the case for more dolorous regimes, which explains the Iron Curtain and the Hermit Kingdom.

The question is why Taiwan, China and Japan tolerate the island. From the context of the novel, it has to be assumed that the island is not very far from Taiwan but is Japanese territory (like the real-world Yonaguni). That explains why China and Taiwan could not interfere easily. I assume the story is set in the near future, but in principle it could an alternate timeline in which case it could be in the recent past. In either case, Japan must be aware of the existence of the island. Maybe the Japanese authorities consider it preferable to ignore the island as not doing so could lead to all kinds of complications. But it is clear that the future existence of the island in its utopian state is quite fragile.

the banner shows a higanbana with a swallowtail butterfly on it

Spring in a small town

2024-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

One of my favourite films is “Spring in a small town”, (小城之春 xiao chéng zhī chūn) from 1948, directed by Fei Mu. It’s a story of an unhappy marriage and an old love turning up unexpectedly. I love the way it is filmed, both in terms of pace and framing, and how the story is told in a very understated manner.
This is probably one of the most famous Chinese films ever made and lot has been written about it, reviews, essays, in-depth analysis of what makes it so special. I don’t want to repeat all that and instead provide some context to the drawing I made from a scene in the film, and also focus on a few points about the film and the actors that I found particularly interesting.

About the characters

The film only has five characters: the protagonist Zhou Yuwen (周玉紋), her husband Dai Liyan (戴禮言), his younger sister Dai Xiu (戴秀), their servant Lao Huang (老黃) and the visitor Zhang Zhichen (章志忱).

The film opens with Yuwen walking along the top of the old city wall. In voice-over, she says:

	住在一個小城裏邊
	每天過着沒有變化的日子
	早晨買完了菜
	總喜歡到城牆上走一趟
	這在我已經成了習慣
	人在城頭上走着
	就好像離開了這個世界
	眼睛裏不看見什麼
	心裏也不想{着,著}什麼
	要不是手裏拿着菜籃子
	跟我先生生病吃的藥
	也許就整天不回

Living in a small town…
Living a life where nothing ever changes…
Every day after I’m done buying groceries,
I like to walk for a while along the top of the city wall.
It’s already become a habit with me.
Walking along the city wall, I feel as if I’ve left this world behind…
My eyes see nothing…
My mind is empty…
If not for the vegetable basket on my arm,
and the medicine for my husband in my hand,
I might not go home all day.

And then:

Our Dai family house was mostly destroyed by artillery fire. No one can live in the main house anymore. I live with him in the garden courtyard. We each have our own room.

And further:

Liyan doesn’t see me more than once a day. We never say more than a couple of words to each other. I leave in the morning to buy groceries. He goes into the garden where no one can find him.
He says he has tuberculosis. I think it’s neurosis.
I don’t have the courage to die. He doesn’t seem to have the courage to live.

And a final snippet:

Her brother can never forget the splendor of the past, but his sister feels no nostalgia for the past. The decline of the Dai family means suffering and despair for Liyan, but his sister feels no sense of disappointment.

When I come home after buying groceries, I go into the kitchen. Then I get the medicine I bought and bring it to Liyan. When we see each other, maybe we won’t exchange even a single word before parting again.

Then Liyan calls her:

Yuwen…

and the voice-over comments:

Now he calls to me…

There is another important scene to understand the story and the drawing. Yuwen gives Liyan his medicine but he throws it on the ground in a fit of anger.

Yuwen: Why are you acting like that, Liyan? Why so much anger all the sudden?
Liyan: I don’t know why either. I can’t help myself. I’m a failure. The family fortune handed down for generations disappeared on my watch. That’s one thing. And we’ve been married for eight years, of which I’ve been sick for six and lived separate from you for two or three. My little sister is still young and you’ve been the only one around to take care of her. I don’t want to see you continue to suffer like this, spending your days doing needlework in little sister’s room, living such a desolate life, day after day. I don’t know if it’s better if you leave me or if I leave you…

What happens next is that Zhang Zhichen comes to visit. He is a friend of Liyan but before she married, ten years earlier, he and Yuwen were in love.

The drawings

The ink

I got a new inkstick as a present from one of my students and decided to use it for a large drawing.

The inkstick, inkstone and calligraphy brush I used

The ink stick comes in a nice wooden box with the label

中國徽墨  　 
黄山市徽州曹素功墨廠 

which means

China Hui Ink
Huangshan Huizhou District Cao Sugong Ink Factory

This is the same Cao Sugong Ink Factory I talked about in my article about my other ink sticks. Huizhou is a historical region in Anhui Province and this is where Cao Sugong was established in 1667. The company moved to Shanghai in 1864. So by an interesting coincidence, there is a connection between the ink sticks I got long ago and the new one.

A trial drawing: a portrait of Yuwen

I made two drawings from scenes of the film. The first one is a small portrait of Yuwen dressed in an elaborately embroidered dress and holding a handkerchief in front of her mouth. This is based on a still from the film, just before Yuwen says

As if drunk, as if in a dream. Now the moon rises high in the sky and there’s a slight breeze.

The scholar Susan Daruvala comments:

[…] the word dream immediately conjures up the most famous Chinese play, The Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s. The beautiful heroine of the story falls asleep in the garden and dreams of her lover, whom she has never met in real life. Consumed by this passion, she wastes away and dies, leaving behind a picture of herself. In the end she manages to appear in a dream to the man, who has fallen in love with the picture. He has her exhumed, and brings her back to life. In the film we see a brilliant shot of the bright moon and then hear Yuwen’s voiceover “Now the moon is already high in the sky and there’s a slight breeze,” which is a metaphor for her mounting desire and fluttering heart. When she gets to Zhichen’s room and walks in and lights the candle, we feel she is ready to seduce him, and he resists, leaving the room and eventually locking the door with her inside. [1]

I made it as a test for the new inkstick and also to see if I could still draw accurately. It is on A4 format (21 x 29.7 cm) 300 g/m² cold pressed “not” (rough) paper in a spiral-bound pad from Cass Art.

Portrait of Yuwen in progress

A small portrait of Yuwen

The second drawing: Yuwen and Liyan

The second drawing is a larger one, a double portrait of Yuwen and Liyan. It is based on a publicity photograph, the banner picture shows part of it. The scene as such does not occur in the movie but it is a summary of the scene that occurs after Yuwen and Zhichen have had a tense conversation which ends with Yuwen saying:

After I go back, I’ll tell Liyan that I came to talk with you. I wouldn’t want to do anything behind his back. See you tomorrow…I was just playing with you. Don’t be mad.

Yuwen takes the bottle out of a drawer and counts out the sleeping pills, while the camera pans to Liyan who is watching her. She takes them to him with a cup of tea but he does not take the pills. She turns away, he wants to stop her but then doesn’t. He gets up and walks from his chair to the bed and sits down on it, all the while staring at her. She comes to the bed and Liyan discusses with her the possibility of his sister Xiu marrying Zhichen. When Yuwen gets up to leave, Liyan puts his hand on her arm and asks her to stay but she leaves, Liyan’s gaze following her.

The scholar Ling Zhang comments on the scene:

Similarly, the single use of the handkerchief in the film is quite revealing (51’50-54’30). When Liyan asks Yuwen to be a matchmaker for Zhichen and Dai Xiu, Yuwen crumples the handkerchief between her palms in an outward revelation of suppressed nervousness, calling upon yet another convention of traditional Chinese theatrical performance. According to Wei Wei, Fei Mu was skilled at observing actors’ everyday life behaviors and encouragin them to build their personal traits into the characters they played, another form of improvisation. [2]

The expressions on the faces of both characters are what interested me. Yuwen seems at first very composed, but it is only strong self control that allows her to keep her emotions in check. Liyan is ill and therefore is not as emotionless. I think his face and the way he looks at Yuwen, turned away from him, show sadness, longing and despair.

I used the rough watercolour paper I like (Fabriano Artistico, 300 g/m² cold pressed “not”), about 50 cm x 70 cm. I set up the drawing in ordinary HB pencil and added some indicative shading with Tombow MONO 100 graphite lead pencils. I used a grid to make it easier to match the original picture.

Pencil setup of the drawing

I applied the Chinese ink using a medium-size calligraphy brush. The brushes I have are quite old. The characters say 火炬牌 and 纯羊毫大楷上海工艺, which means “Torch brand” and “pure goat hair large regular script Shanghai craft”. This kind of brush doesn’t allow the precision of a typical watercolour brush but that is precisely why I use it. Not having full control over the stroke is part of the approach. I don’t want to recreate the photograph on paper, I want the pencil work and brush stroke to be visible and I want a degree of uncertainty on the result.

Double portrait of Yuwen and Liyan

The actors

Liyan

I could not find much about the actor Yu Shi (石羽) who plays the husband Dai Liyan. He was born in 1914 in Tianjin (close to Beijing) and was of Hui ethnicity. He went to the Nanjing National Drama School in 1936 and from then on worked as a professional theatre actor. In 1946, he joined the Xinhua Film Company, and in 1948 he appeared in Spring in a Small Town. He went on to become a theatre director and later served as director of the Arts Council, director of the Chinese Dramatists’ Association and member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. He died in 2008

Yuwen

There is a lot more information to be found about Wei Wei (韋偉 Wéi Wěi) who plays the wife Zhou Yuwen (周玉紋 Zhōu Yùwén). She was born in 1922 in Zhenjiang (not to far from Shanghai) as Miao Mengyin (缪孟英繆孟英).

About how she got into acting she said [3]

“I went to work as a typist, but all I wanted was to fight the Japanese. One day I saw a play called Metamorphosis, directed by Huang Zuolin and starring Shi Hui, Han Fei and Huang’s wife Dan Ni. I cried. It was about resisting the Japanese invasion and I thought I could fight the Japanese doing just that. So I joined the company which was known as the Shanghai Art Troupe.”

This was the theatre company founded by Fei Mu and when the war was over, they went back to making films and so Wei Wei became a film actress.

About here stage name, she said

“I’m called Wei Wei because theatre actresses all had stage names. The best actresses in Shanghai at the time were Xia Xia, Lan Lan and Ying Yin. I admired them and wanted to have a name with repeated sounds, so I could be as good as they were. When rickshaw men asked people to give ways, they wouldn’t say anything but yelled: ‘Wei! Wei!’ (meaning ‘Hey! Hey!) I thought that was good, like asking people to make way for me on stage.”

The director’s aesthetic views

Fei Mu, the director, explained in an interview “If a film wants to attract the audience, it must assimilate the audience with the people in the story. In order to achieve this goal, I think it is necessary to create “atmosphere” in the story”. The term translated as “atmosphere” or “air” is kongqi 空气 in Chinese, comprised of kong 空 ( “empty”) and qi (气 “vital energy” or “living spirit”). It is a kind of haziness and ambiguity artificially made by space-time creation, contrast and sound effects, and the photography itself, making the film feel like a non-deterministic and multi-sense aesthetic experience.

He was also strongly influenced by the “narrative, analogy and association” theory of Chinese poetry as employed in the Book of Songs (a classic collection of Chinese poetry dating from the 11th to 7th centuries BCE) , the formalisms of Chinese opera and the aesthetics of Chinese painting. In particular he mentions the use of blank, unpainted spaces, a technique know as liubai 留白 (“leaving blank”), suggesting things rather than showing them.

He also favoured long takes: the average shot length is more than twenty-four seconds. Hollywood films of the same era had shot lengths of on average thirteen seconds, and contemporary films just five seconds. His shots usually employ lateral panning or tracking rather than cutting to closer shots of different characters, and dissolves rather than cuts.

Filming during the Second Sino-Japanese War

During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Fei Mu kept on making films as much as he could. In 1936, just before the start of the war, he made “Blood on Wolf Mountain” which tells of a village terrorised by a pack of wolves. The film is usually seen as a direct allegory of the conflict between the two countries.

The Second Sino-Japanese War was in full force in 1937 and, by November of that year, Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese.

During the following “Solitary Island” period (1937-1941), the Chinese sections of Shanghai were occupied by the Japanese while the International Settlement and the French Concession remained free. The films of the period were made in these free zones. During 1937, Fei managed to direct four movies which all took the form of Chinese opera. The four films were deeply nationalistic and were meant to fight against the Japanese hegemony, a common theme in the films of the time.

In 1941, Japan invaded the foreign concessions of Shanghai and took over the film industry. Many artists fled to Hong Kong, but Fei stayed behind to care for his ailing mother. Not wanting to work with the Japanese, Fei changed his focus to working in the theatre and directed numerous plays, first for the Tianfeng Theatre Company and later for the Shanghai Art Troupe, which he founded himself.

It wasn’t until after the war, in 1946, that Fei Mu could make his next film — and it didn’t succeed. “The Magnificent Country” was meant to be a story of the communists and nationalists forming a coalition to rebuild China after the war. However, the breakdown of the negotiations between the Communists and the Kuomintang later that year resulted in the Chinese civil war, destroying Fei Mu’s idealistic vision of China and the film was never finished. As a result, “Spring in a Small Town” reflects Fei Mu’s bitter mood at that time. He hoped to awaken people (mainly intellectuals) to the hope of rebuilding the country after its collapse through the expression of his bitterness.

The era and location

The film was made during a brief period of bloom for the Chinese film industry in Shanghai after the terrible “War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression” (1937-45) and before the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. This period was also the final period of conflict in the Chinese Civil War.

In the film, which is set in 1946, the family house of husband Dài Lǐyán is mostly ruined after the long war and is uninhabitable, so that the family lives in rooms in the garden courtyard.

The film was filmed on location in Songjiang, a water town then about an hour from Shanghai (now it is a suburban district of Shanghai). This whole area saw very heavy fighting and destruction at the start of the war, and a lot of the buildings were in ruins.

The making of the masterpiece

“Spring in a Small Town was done very quickly, in about 40 working days. The small town was in Songjiang. Mr Fei drove one of the cars; there were another car and a couple of trucks and that’s it. Most of us were newcomers, including Li Wei, Zhang Hongmei, and scriptwriter Li Tianji.” (from an interview with Wei Wei in [3])

When the film came out in 1948, it was criticised for being political indifferent and considered petit-bourgeois and out of touch with the times and although it was not banned, it didn’t do well and was pulled from distribution after a very short run. When the Communists took over in 1949, the director moved to Hong Kong. He died a few years later. For a long time after, the film was mostly forgotten until after the end of the Cultural Revolution. In 1980, the China Film Archive issued a new print and in 2014, the British Film Institute released a restored version of the film.

References

[1] ‘The Courage to Live’: Woman, morality and humanism in Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town, Susan Daruvala, University of Cambridge, 2007, presented at “Cinema China – A nationwide festival of Chinese film”
[2] Sound Images, Acoustic Culture and Transmediality in 1920s-1940s Chinese Cinema, Ling Zhang, University of Chicago, PhD dissertation, 2019
[3] From small town to the big screen: a retrospective on Wei Wei, Hong Kong Film Archive, 2017

Yokohama kaidashi kikou

2024-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (ヨコハマ買い出し紀行, “Yokohama Shopping Trip Log”) is a manga by Hitoshi Ashinano serialised between 1994 and 2006. I wanted to write something after reading it, even though a lot has been written about it already, so I probably have no original insights to add. It is quite famous after all as one of the early examples of what is called “healing” post-apocalyptic stories (the Japanese term is iyashi-kei 癒やし系, iyashi means healing, comforting, offering solace).

In short, it is a series of related vignettes of the life of a robot called Alpha who looks like a young woman and runs a coffee shop in a remote rural area. It takes places after the ocean levels have risen so large areas of coastal land have been lost to flooding; the climate has changed for the worse, with frequent heavy rains in the coastal regions but much reduced rainfall further inland. This and other unspecified disasters have severely reduced the population. There are only a handful of characters, humans and very human-looking robots.

Why it is a good story to read now

I feel that this story has become more poignant and more relevant over time. When it was started, in 1994, climate change was to most people something abstract, and people like myself, who were aware and engaged, thought it might still be largely avoidable. Now we know that this is no longer the case, and the sea level rise pictured in the story is now entirely plausible. The change in climate in Japan will most likely be worse than the story imagines it.

Why I like it

For me personally there are many things to like in the story. I like Japan, and have fond memories of the Miura peninsula where the story takes place, and of Yokohama and Kamakura, even though I only visited those places briefly. I like the unexplained mysteries; and I like coffee. But none of that is required to enjoy the story. I like it that the story is on the whole not pessimistic, but does not ignore the bad things either, like the dwindling population and progressing coastal erosion.

I also like the drawings, in particular of the scenery. The way the characters are drawn is rather typically manga and although I don’t mind it, it’s not something that attracts me. The style does allow to portray the full range of expressions and emotions of the characters, so it works well. But the backgrounds and scenery are amazing and the pages and frames are very carefully composed as well.

The work is very lyrical, even poetic, in particular in the way the world is represented, and how the characters view it. It shows the beauty of the drowned landscapes and the roads and towns reclaimed by nature.

The road leading to Café Alpha

I find it notable that the depiction of beauty and the passing of time does not rely much (if at all) on the typical Japanese seasonal identifiers of cherry blossoms and autumn colours. It is very tempting to phrase the novel in those terms, in particular the mono no aware (物の哀れ, appreciation of the fleetingness of beauty). That is certainly an aspect, but is is much more about the quiet coming to terms with the twilight of humanity.

Robots that are forever young

Robots who are very much like people but don’t age is an interesting literary device. It reminds me of the Immortal in Xia Jia’s Eternal Summer Dream, of the tinkers in Ken MacLeod’s The Sky Road, and of Tolkien’s elves.

In episode #45, “Everyone’s boat” (みんなの船), Alpha explains it well to Mikka, one of the neighbourhood kids, even though the girl is a bit too young to understand it (Takahiro is a boy a few years older than Mikka, but also still a kid):

Makki: Do you like Takahiro? Takahiro likes you a lot, Alpha-san!
Alpha: Makki, you are very fond of Takahiro, aren’t you?
Makki: Well, yeah, I guess
Alpha: You know, I do like Takahiro
Alpha: Yes I do … But when it comes to Takahiro, I really envy you, Makki-chan
Alpha: Because you and Takahiro are part of the same age
Makki: ?
Alpha: Although I am now here together with everyone else
Alpha: … I don’t know if I can be considered a person of this same age from now onwards as well …
Makki: ?
Alpha: You and Takahiro are in the same boat, in time and body
Alpha: I guess I am just watching everyone’s boat from the shore
Alpha: Makki, you and Takahiro will always be together, right?
Alpha: That’s why I envy you

Alpha explaining to Makku what it means to be immortal

Coffee and the state of the world

The presence of coffee in the story gives important information about the world. In one scene late in the story (#138, “air”), a now adult Makki gives Alpha bags of Columbia, Kona and Formosa coffee beans. That means that in all those places (Columbia, Hawaii and Taiwan) coffee is still grown in sufficient quantities to be traded to Japan, and that overseas trade still exists and is still capable of transporting such goods. It also means that roasting coffee beans is still a profitable occupation. So, even though we can assume that the sea level rise is global and the population reduction probably as well, it means people are still sufficiently organised to realise such things. And as coffee is hardly essential, it is likely not the only good that is being produced and traded. In fact, although the world depicted in the story seems bucolic, there is quite a bit of technology in it that could not exists without a high level of societal organisation, like electrical scooters and vending machines for hot and cold drinks. Manufacturing such machines requires a complex supply chain, and also a sufficient number of customers to make it worthwhile. So although humanity has been reduced in size, it does not seem to have been reduced much in terms of its capabilities.

The Taapon and the other Alpha

The *Taapon* flying high above the clouds

There is a particular aspect of the story that I find fascinating. Interspersed throughout the story are scenes of another Alpha in what looks like a huge lab. The Alpha there is addressed as 室長 (“shitsuchō”, laboratory manager or section chief); I will call her Lab Chief Alpha to distinguish her from the protagonist Alpha.

These scenes are set inside the Taapon, a huge, very high flying plane. The title of the story (#20) where it is introduced is in Japanese “鵬（HOH)” (the kanji is uncommon, so the text gives its reading, “hoh” or “hō”). The meaning of this kanji is the Chinese word “Da Peng”, which in Japanese is rendered as “Taapon” (ターポン). In Chinese mythology, the Da Peng (大鳥, “large bird”) is a gigantic bird said to transform from a giant fish called K’un (鯤; Kon in Japanese). The oldest occurrence of this myth is in the Zhuangzi (荘子), an ancient Chinese text dating from ca 300 BCE, one of the foundational texts of Taoism. Part of this myth reads:

In the northern darkness there is a fish and his name is K’un. The K’un is so huge I don’t know how many thousand li he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose name is P’eng. The back of the P’eng measures I don’t know how many thousand li across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky. When the sea begins to move, this bird sets off for the southern darkness, which is the Lake of Heaven.

There are many interpretations of this text, but in the context of the story, it is easy to see the parallel between this mythical bird which sets out “when the sea begins to move”, and travels high, far and long, and the Taapon aircraft.

The title of the chapter of the Zhuangzi in which the myth occurs is “Carefree Wandering” (逍遙遊; Xiāoyáo yóu); the term “wandering” (遊; yóu) is used throughout the Zhuangzi to describe how an enlightened person “wanders through all of creation, enjoying its delights without ever becoming attached to any one part of it”. I think this description fits Alpha well.

Another foundational text of Taoism is the “Tao Te Ching”; and one of the books on Alpha’s bedside table in story #3 is called “Taoてポン” (tao-te-pon), which seems to be a pun on Tao Te Ching and Taapon.

There are lots of parallels between the Alpha on the ground and the Alpha in the air: they both have a strong affinity with flying and swimming. In a way, I think one can almost argue that Lab Chief Alpha is the Taapon, at least she controls its flight. And the Taapon is both bird and fish; and the Alpha on the ground often either dreams of flying or projects a part of herself flying in the air, and to her it feels like swimming through water. Lab Chief Alpha remembers swimming once, when she was still “down there”, and also compares flying to swimming, or at least she imagines that swimming must be like flying.

There is also Café Alpha’s wethervane, shaped like a fish with a small propeller. It is shown countless times, from the first page of the first story to the very last page of the final story. That it combines the concepts of fish, air and aeroplane is no coincidence.

All this indicates that the author intended this connection between both Alphas, the Taapon and the mythical bird that is also a fish. Now, is not really important per se, but because it is an integral part of the atmosphere of the story. Without the melancholy and mystery of the Taapon scenes, the story would lose a lot of its poetic appeal. The situation of Lab Chief Alpha, who is not quite unhappy but not happy either, and certainly not carefree and effectively locked in that huge plane, offers a counterpoint to Alpha who is much more happy, carefree and unconstrained. They both observe the twilight of the world but from very contrasting vantage points, Alpha immersed in it, Lab Chief Alpha detached from it.

I particularly like the final Taapon scene (#134, “radio”), which plays out while Alpha has fallen asleep under a parasol, to the sound of music from a portable radio.

Lab Chief Alpha says,

“Let’s plot yet another Northern course.”
“It’s getting quieter and quieter down there. Already, I don’t know how many towns and roads have disappeared.”
“But a little while after the lights of the people have gone out, blue lights tracing the towns and roads have appeared. At night, down there is once more shining with blue lights.”
“I wonder what they are all going through. “

“Wide lands have gone silent. The land where I was born is one of them.”
“But concentrated in smaller areas, there are still signs of humans.”
“From the island where I was born, the radio often plays carefree music.”

“The smell of rain, the smell of bonfires …“
“The smell of asphalt, the smell of fish, the smell of exhaust fumes …“

“Maybe, if once only the blue lights remain, it might be good for me to go there.”
“I don’t know if I want to or not.”

The author’s comment:

Whatever happens up in the air (Taapon) or on the ground, Alpha-san is what she is …

There is so much more in this wonderful story, please go and read it if you haven’t already.

The banner shows a digitally aged picture of the Yokohama skyline, before the floods (taken in 2015)

Onigiri (Japanese style rice balls)

2024-07-21T00:00:00+01:00

Onigiri are just rice balls. They are a staple in Japan and there is nothing magical about them but they are delicious. The simplest version is rice, salt or maybe miso and a little seaweed as wrapper, but even that is optional. I like to put in some tasty filling. If you want to know more you should definitely read Makiko Itoh’s article.

Japanese-style vegan gluten-free 30-minutes • 850 kcal per person

Ingredients

For two people:

Japanese rice (japonica). This is an essential ingredient, both the texture and the taste will be quite different if you substitute a different type of rice. I use Yumenishiki, which is grown in Italy. 200 g is enough for 6 onigiri.
Nori seaweed, the same as used for sushi. One and a half sheet of seaweed (a full standard-size sheet is 19 cm x 21 cm) is enough, cut lengthwise into six strips.

For the fillings, I used:

1 umeboshi (pickled japanese plum) with the stone removed, or a similar amount umeboshi paste
hijiki seaweed with ponzu, a handful dried, soak in hot water for 30 minutes, then marinate in ponzu for another 30 minutes.
kombu seaweed cut in strips or spaghetti seaweed with ponzu, a handful dried, soak in hot water for 30 minutes, then marinate in ponzu for another 30 minutes.
ponzu is a mixture of
- 2 tablespoons soy sauce;
- 1 tablespoon yuzu juice, a typical Japanese citrus fruit;
- half a tablespoon rice vinegar;
- 1 teaspoon mirin rice wine You can also buy it pre-made in asian stores; you can approximate yuzu juice with lemon and tangerine, and another type of vinegar will work fine as well. Mirin adds sweetness, another sweet cooking wine would work too.

In addition to the onigiri I serve a few small dishes:

silken tofu (200 g) with fresh ginger and some of the prepared kombu or hijiki from above
soaked or fresh shiitake mushrooms (I cook the fresh ones for a few minutes in the microwave at full power)
two small aubergines (400 g) with ponzu as in this recipe

Preparation

Soak the seaweed in hot water for 30 minutes (it gets about 5x larger so use a large enough container and plenty of water).
If it’s kombu, cut into narrow strips after soaking.
Make the ponzu and marinate the seaweed in the ponzu for 30 minutes.
Cook the rice as explained here.
Wash the aubergines, slice them and cook them in the microwave for 7 minutes at full power (900 W).
The pros shape the onigiri by hand, while the rice is still scalding hot, as explained in Makiko Itoh’s article. But I cheat and use plastic moulds for the onigiri, like these. Put the seaweed in them, then half of the rice, then the filling, then the rest of the rice. Close the mould and press. Open and shake the onigiri out. If you don’t have such moulds, then Makiko Itoh’s article shows a good way to do it without burning your hands.

Green beans with paneer in tomato sauce

2024-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

This recipe is inspired by Artisa’s Greek-style green beans recipe. It’s a bit more fusion with paneer and miso; make this variant more often.

vegetarian 30-minutes • 825 kcal per person

Ingredients

For two people:

Fresh ingredients & groceries
- 225 g green beans (I used frozen cut beans)
- 4-5 small potatoes (150-200 g)
- 1 or 2 sticks of celery
- 2 cm ginger, finely chopped
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 tin canned tomatoes (300 g)
- 1 pack of paneer (200 g)
- (some leftover baked beans in tomato sauce)
From the store cupboard
- 1 cup rice (I used jasmine rice)
- 1/2 teaspoon miso
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 tablespoon pine kernels
- 4 tablespoons olive oil (as much or little as you like)
- salt and pepper to taste (I added 1/4 teaspoon salt, and sprinkled some pepper on serving)

Preparation

Wash the potatoes, slice them and cook them in a pot in the microwave for 5 minutes at full power (900W).
Meanwhile, - Cook the rice (see “The Basics” for how to cook rice). - Heat the olive oil and garlic oil in a large deep pan and stir-fry the ginger, celery and garlic for about 5 minutes over high heat. Add the potatoes and the paneer - Add the pine kernels at the end and fry for another minute or so until they start to brown. Take care as they burn very easily.
Add the tomatoes, some hot water and the miso and herbes de provence
Cook the beans in the microwave for 4 minutes at full power (900W). Add to the pan.
Cook 5-10 minutes on low hear, stirring to thicken the sauce
Season with pepper to taste.

The age of bloom

2024-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

One of my favourite movies is Wong Kar-Wai’s movie “In the mood for love”, from 2000. It’s set in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, almost all scenes are at night and it rains a lot. It’s a tale of love and unfaithfulness.

Wong Kar-Wai says

Is it basically a love story about these two characters? Finally I think it’s more than that. It’s about the end of a period. 1966 marks a turning point in Hong Kong’s history. The Cultural Revolution in the mainland had lots of knock-on effects, and forced Hong Kong people to think hard about their future. Many of them had come from China in the late 40s, they’d had nearly 20 years of relative tranquillity, they’d built themselves new lives – and suddenly they began to feel they’d have to move on again. So 1966 is the end of something and the beginning of something else.

A lot has been written about this movie, reviews, essays, in -depth analysis of what makes it so special. I want to talk about a novel a and a song that are closely tied to the movie. And about the drawings of course.

A novel

The movie has intertitles at the start and the end:

It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered, to give him a chance to come closer. But he could not, for lack of courage. She turns and walks away.

That era has passed. He remembers those vanished years.

Nothing that belonged to it exists any more. As though looking through a dusty window pane, The past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

This is adapted from novella “Duidao” (“Intersection”) by Liu Yichang. Wong Kar-Wai says:

The first work by Liu Yichang I read was Duidao. The title is a Chinese translation of tête-bêche, which describes stamps that are printed top to bottom facing each other. Duidao centres round the intersection of two parallel stories – of an old man and a young girl. One is about memories, the other anticipation. To me, tête-bêche is more than a term for stamps or intersection of stories. It can be the intersection of light and colour, silence and tears. Tête-bêche can also be the intersection of time: for instance, youthful eyes on an ageing face, borrowed words on revisited dreams. Or a novel published in 1972, a movie released in 2000, both intersecting to become a story of the ’60s.

In her essay “In The Mood for love: intersections of Hong Kong modernity”, Audrey Yue summarises the novel as follows:

Set in 1970s Hong Kong, Duidao tells the parallel stories of Chunyu Bai, an old reporter from Shanghai who fled to Hong Kong in the 1940s to escape the Japanese Occupation, and Ah Xing, a young single woman who lives with her parents.

Bai is nostalgic, fuelled by his memories of Shanghai, his youthful liaisons with dancehall girls and his failed marriage. Ah Xing is forward-looking. Always day-dreaming about herself as a famous singer or a movie star, she longs to find love and marry a handsome husband, someone ‘a bit like Ke Junxiong, a bit like Deng Guangrong, a bit like Bruce Lee, and a bit like Alain Delon’.

Triggered by songs, old photographs, and magazine covers and posters of movie stars, the two characters’ temporalities are retrospective and projective. In the story, they only meet once sitting next to each other in a crowded cinema.

Everyday practices like walking, commuting, listening to music, watching television and going to the movies highlight their close encounters. These practices construct Hong Kong, already a Chinese migrant enclave and a metropolis dizzy with escalating property prices and swirling in the popular media mix of Taiwanese Mandarin pop songs, Filipino renditions of American Top Ten hits, Hollywood cinema and French film icons.

A song

The title of the movie, 花樣年華, Fa Yeung Nin Wa in Cantonese transliteration, is taken form a 1940s song Hua Yang De Nian Hua (花樣的年華) “Age of Bloom” by famous 1940s singer Zhou Xuan. It is this song that Mr. Chan, on business Japan, requests to be played for his wife’s birthday. It’s a melancholy song talking about a happy past that is no longer, and it can also easily be interpreted as a reference to the Japanese occupation.

The song was released after the war, in 1947, as part of the movie “Sauvignon Blanc”. But there is a reference to a solitary island, and a period of gloom and yearning for the homeland.

The period between the start of the Battle of Shanghai in August of 1937 and the outbreak of the Pacific War in late 1941 is known as the Solitary Island Period. During this time, the International Settlement and French Concession in Shanghai were not occupied by the Japanese but the rest of the city was occupied. The film makers who remained worked in these foreign concessions. There is an interesting article about Zhou Xuan that provides more context about the Shanghai movie scene in the 1930s and 1940s.

The writer of the song, Fan Yanqiao, worked for one of those film companies. Likely he used his recollection of that time as inspiration. (He also wrote the original script for “Sauvignon Blanc”, called “Flowers Bloom In Streets”.) The composer of the song is Chen Gexin, under the pseudonym Lin Mei. He wrote this song in Hong-Kong during a brief happy period in his life.

Wong Kar-Wai also made a short film, named Hua Yang De Nian Hua, after the track, consisting of short scenes of movies of that era, with the song as soundtrack. Clearly he considered the song and its background important.

I found this translation of the song’s lyrics:

Age of bloom, spirits like the Moon
A crystal mind like ice and snow
Such a beautiful life, such an adoring couple
A family so whole and complete

Suddenly this lone-standing island,
Is covered by shattered mist and sorrowful rain
Shattered mist and sorrowful rain

Ah, my beloved homeland
When can I return to your warm embrace?
When will the mist and cloud be dispelled
And release your fogged light?

Age of bloom, spirits like the Moon

And another one, with a contemporary performance.

We are young, like blooming flowers
We are fresh, like the shining moon
We are sharp, like ice and snow.
We have a beautiful life, tender lovers and happy families.

But suddenly this lonely island is shrouded in a miserable foggy gloom. A miserable foggy gloom.

Ah! My dear motherland, when can we return to your arms?
When will the dark clouds and fog disperse?
When will we see the light again?

We are young, like blooming flowers
We are fresh, like the shining moon.

The original lyrics in traditional characters (as were used at the time of its release):

花樣的年華

主唱：周璇
作詞：范煙橋　作曲：林枚

    花樣的年華，月樣的精神，
    冰雪樣的聰明。
    美麗的生活，多情的眷屬，
    圓滿的家庭。

驀地裡這孤島籠罩著
慘霧愁雲，慘霧愁雲。

    啊！可愛的祖國
    幾時我能夠投進你的懷抱，
    能見那霧消雲散，重見你放出光明。
    花樣的年華，月樣的精神。

and the transcription:

Hua yang de nianhua yue yang de jingshen
Bingxue yang de congming
Meili de shenghuo duoqing de juanshu
Yuanman de jiating

Mo di li zhe gudao longzhao zhe
Can wu chou yu, can wu chou yu

A ke ai de zu guo
Ji shi wo nenggou kaojin ni de huaibao
Neng jian na wu xiao yun san
Chong jian ni fang chu guangming

Hua yang de nianhua yue yang de jingshen

The drawings

I made two drawings from scenes of the movie, a smaller one in Chinese ink and a larger one in Conté pencils.

The stair scene

I made a drawing of what is probably my favourite scene in Wong Kar-Wai’s movie “In the mood for love”. The protagonists, Su Li-zhen (“Mrs. Chan”) played by Maggie Cheung Man-yuk and Chow Mo-wan played (“Mr. Chow”) by Tony Leung Chiu-wai, pass each other by on a dark, narrow staircase. They steal a glance at each other and the scene is very evocative. All the time I was working on it, Shigeru Umebayashi’s beautiful music “Yumeji’s Theme”, which accompanies the scene, was playing in my head.

I did the drawing on Schoellershammer watercolour paper, 30x40 cm, 250g/m², with the Chinese ink I wrote about a while ago, and two Chinese brushes. The ink is excellent but the paper and the brushes are not great. As a result, there is a lack of control that I find interesting.

The drawing of the stairs scene

The taxi scene

In another, the couple is together in a taxi, after Mr. Chow has told Mrs. Chan of his intention to move to Singapore. I think the expressions on their faces are very evocative of their complex feelings. It’s just before we hear Mrs. Chan’s off-screen voice saying, “I don’t want to go home tonight.” That’s the scene I wanted to draw.

I wanted to create a double portrait of this couple who are, as a BFI critic put it “ordinary mortals made movie-star beautiful by love”, and I stayed very close to the original shot, apart from cropping it to get both faces in an optimal position.

I used my preferred rough watercolour paper (Fabriano Artistico, 300 gsm, NOT), about 50 cm x 70 cm. I set up the drawing in ordinary pencil and then added tone with Conté pencils (from HB to 3B). Because the paper has such a rough grain, the pencils can’t fill the hollows in it, and I took care not to smudge the strokes. The effect is therefore not a deep, intense black but something more pointillist.

The drawing of the taxi scene

The banner is a crop of the still on which the drawing is based.

The small mystery of the Chinese inkstick

2023-06-12T00:00:00+01:00

I would like to tell a little story. I have always liked drawing, and sometimes I use ink and brush. Long ago and far away, in a country over the sea, a fellow PhD student from China made me present of an inkstone. It came in a box with a damasked cloth sleeve which opened like a book. The box itself was covered in bright cerulean fabric and inside it, the stone was cushioned in pink silk.

But it is not of the box that I want to talk, beautiful though it is, nor of the stone itself; nor do I want to talk about the inkstick that was enclosed in that same box. It was decorated with a picture of a bird of paradise on a tree with blossoms, all in gold, and it was so pretty I never could bring myself to use it.

But with the box came also three additional inksticks, each in its unassuming but stylish cloth-covered small cardboard box, with a white paper label covered in Chinese characters pasted on the top. I couldn’t read them then, and I did not pay much attention; but I noticed that, though the characters where the same on each label, the labels where nonetheless individual.

These inksticks are also very pretty, with a rustic river scene on one side and calligraphy on the other. But more on that later.

A few days ago, I was making a brush drawing using one of these inksticks, and I happened to look a bit closer at the other markings. On the top it says “油煙一〇一” and on the narrow side “上海墨廠出品”. That means “lampblack 101” and “made by the Shanghai Ink Factory”. I wanted to know more about the meaning of the “101”. And thereby hangs a tale.

The history

At the start of the Qing dynasty (1636), there lived in Shè Xiàn, Ānhuī province, a master ink maker and artist called Cao Sugong 曹素功 (1615–1689).

In the sixth year of the reign of the Kangxi Emperor (1667), he founded the Cao Sugong Ink Factory. Two hundred years later — yet still in the Qing dynasty, in the third year of the reign of the Tongzhi Emperor (1864) — the business moved to Shanghai. It gained a high reputation for the excellence of its ink and won numerous international prizes.

The Cao Sugong factory produced four grades of ink: 五石漆烟, 超貢烟, 貢烟, 頂烟, meaning “five minerals (wǔshí) lacquer soot”, “super tribute soot”, “tribute soot”, “top soot”. The grade 五石漆烟 marked the highest quality.

However, in 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, one of the most notorious campaigns was the Four Old Things campaign. The Four Old Things were: Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Customs, and Old Habits (jiù sīxiǎng 旧思想, jiù wénhuà 旧文化, jiù fēngsú 旧风俗, and jiù xíguàn 旧习惯). Characters like “貢” (tribute), with their feudal associations, became unacceptable, and so the grades were renamed to lampblack 101, 102, 103 and 104. In Chinese, lampblack 101 is written “油煙一〇一”, the marking on the top of my inkstick.

Furthermore, the Cao Sugong company was combined with several other ink factories and became the “Shanghai Ink Factory”, “上海墨廠”.

After the Cultural Revolution, in the 1980s, the Shanghai Ink Factory changed its name back to “Cao Sugong” and the use of the old grades was also reinstated.

I got these inksticks in 1992, long after this change back to the old the branding and grading. That means that they were then probably already quite rare items, as the factory only operated as Shanghai Ink Factory for about 20 years in its long and illustrious history.

I don’t know for how long these stick were out of production. However, today there are again inksticks sold that look exactly like mine, also labelled “油煙一〇一” (lampblack 101) and “上海墨廠出品” (made by the Shanghai Ink Factory), and these are high-quality items, used by professional ink artists. Like the ones I have, they are not intended for export.

These new “101” inksticks are made by the current incarnation of Cao Sugong, after its fusion with famous brush maker Zhou Huchen 周虎臣. Clearly, this particular product has a very high reputation in China, which makes it worthwhile for the company to produce it again, with the original grading and branding from the Shanghai Ink Factory era.

The making

Did I mention that, when you grind this ink on the inkstone, it produces a very pleasant smell?

Making an inkstick requires several steps: the lampblack is refined, mixed with glue and other ingredients. To improve the fragrance, lustre and insect resistance of the inksticks, more than 20 kinds of Chinese medicinal herbs are added, along with gold leaf. The ingredients are mixed by pounding the ingredients with an eight-pound hammer and is very tiring work. Lu Jianqing, the now-retired director of Cao Sugong recalls how, as an apprentice, having to do this thousands of times a day, he couldn’t lift his hand the next day.

They are then kneaded by hand, and finally pressed into a wooden mold. This mold is carved with a picture on one side and a related piece of calligraphy on the other. The stick is dried, gold leaf is applied and the decorations are painted on. The process requires four kinds of artists: the ink maker, the carver, the calligrapher and the painter.

Cao Sugong inksticks come in three standardised weights: 1 liang (31 g), like the ones I have; 2 liang and 4 liang. The small sticks need to be dried in the shade for six to eight months; the largest ones require up to two years of drying. During the drying period, they need to turned by hand every day because otherwise they would bend out of shape. The whole process is still very artisanal.

The poetry

The picture on my inkstick shows a bucolic scene along a river.

The artwork on the inkstick

It also has some beautiful calligraphy. I have always been fascinated by Chinese characters, and one day I hope to study Chinese. Not that it would help me with this text, as it is in ancient Chinese.

The calligraphy on the inkstick

The characters read

水光春色滿江天

At first, I could not find a proper translation, but based on a literal reading of the characters, I interpreted it as

river and sky, full of spring colours, light on the water

This is the first line of the poem “江南行”, which means “South across the river”. The poem was written during the Tang dynasty (around 831 CE) by the poet Chen Biao (陈标, or 陳票 in traditional characters). Only twelve of his poems are known to exist, but he must once have been a famous poet, as some of his poems are included in the “Shinpenshū”, a collection of poems compiled by the monks of the Kennin-ji temple in Kyoto in the 15th century.

Today, he is not well-known at all, which makes the choice of the poem on the inkstick intriguing. It is likely the influence of the artists and calligraphers of the “Chinese Painting Research Academy” (中国画研究院), created in 1981, who worked closely with the Shanghai Ink Factory.

This is the poem in full (in traditional characters):

水光春色滿江天，蘋葉風吹荷葉錢。
香蟻翠旗臨岸市，艷娥紅袖渡江船。
曉驚白鷺聯翩雪，浪蹙青茭瀲灩煙。
不怕江洲芳草暮，待將秋興折湖蓮。

I asked on the Fediverse if anyone could provide a translation, and the inimitable L.J. rose to the challenge to produce the following amazing poem:

South Across the River

The water-light and hues of spring
lap up to vaulting blue

While winds brush lily pads weighed down
with drops like coins aglow.

Blue flags and toxicating dregs
descend on city shore

Such luscious sweetness clad in red
across the river rowed.

Egrets affrighted by the dawn
flock on and on like snow

The rolling waves and fodder green
like swelling smoke o’erflow.

Be not afraid that virtue high
will quite desert Jiangzhou

Await the autumn days when we
will pluck the lotus blow.

Translation by L. J. Lee with suggestions from Zoë Camille and cynth

And on that wonderfully poetic note I conclude my story of the inksticks from the Shanghai Ink Factory.

The background

This little story is a patchwork pieced together from a large number of sources brought up by a deep trawl through the net. Here are the most interesting of them:

My starting point was the blog of an ink shop in Osaka (in Japanese), which has an article on the 101 grade and on the history of the Shanghai Ink Factory.
I found an articles about the history of the Cao Sugong ink shop and about the making of the inksticks.
I found a video on Youtube, with English subtitles, about the way inksticks are made at Cao Sugong. The person in the video, Lu Jianqing, started working at the company in 1978 as an apprentice, and became the director in 1989, so he might very well have been involved in the making of my inksticks.
There is also an article with great pictures about a different ink factory.
This is the site selling copies of my inkstick, there is a nice promo video.
This site has the full text of the poem.

Sweet red bean paste on toast

2023-04-23T00:00:00+01:00

This is a quick variant of the traditional Japanese red bean paste anko (餡子). One way of serving it is on toast with whipped cream.

The proper way to make anko is beautifully shown in the movie An (Sweet Bean); there is a good recipe on JustOneCookbook. It is similar to making jam. My recipe is much quicker and still delicious. I used blueberry syrup because that’s what I had going, but any sugar syrup will work.

vegetarian 45-minutes • 500 kcal per person

Ingredients

For two slices of toast:

6 tablespoons of tinned of adzuki beans (about 200 g)
2 tablespoons of sugar syrup (mine is 90 g sugar per 100 ml)
2 slices of bread for toasting (in Japan, this read bean paste is served on really thick slices)
75 ml double cream (cream with 50% fat)

Preparation

Drain the liquid, wash the beans in a sieve and let them leak out for a few minutes.
Combine the beans and syrup in a bowl. Crush with a fork, mix well.
Microwave for 2 minutes at 360 W.
Mix again, let it cool (I used au bain marie to speed it up).
When the anko is cool enough, whip the cream with an electric mixer.
Toast the bread.
Spread the bean paste on the toast, add a dollop of whipped cream and enjoy.

Pasta with carrots and mung beans

2023-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

This is a delicious vegan pasta recipe with some slightly unusual ingredients. The less common ingredients in this recipe are doenjang, a Korean-style soybean paste and tobanjan, a broad bean chilly paste, and mung dal ,skinned yellow split mung beans that are common in Indian cuisine.

vegan 60-minutes • 750 kcal per person

Ingredients

For two people:

Fresh ingredients & groceries
- 400 g carrots, chopped fine
- 100 g celery, chopped fine
- half a courgette (100 g), chopped fine (*)
- mung dal (150 g or 2/3 cup)
- garlic (to taste; I use one or two cloves)
- ginger (at least 1 cm, chopped fine)
- herbes de Provence (handful)
- doubanjiang, Chinese fermented chili bean paste (to taste; I use less than a teaspoon)
- doenjang, Korean soybean paste (to taste; I use less than a teaspoon)
From the store cupboard
- 1 can of chopped tomatoes (400 g)
- dried porcini mushrooms (handful) (*)
- dried tomatoes (2 small or 1 large, cut in strips) (*)
- 200 g pasta (I use linguine)

Ingredients with (*) are optional. Sometimes I use fresh mushrooms instead of dried porcini, and the courgette is optional, it depends on what you have available. I’ve even added parsnips instead.

Preparation

If you use them, soak the dried mushrooms and dried tomatoes in hot water for about half an hour.
I make this in the microwave.
First cook the carrots, celery, ginger and garlic for about 6-7 minutes on full power (900W).
Then add the dal, the mushrooms and tomatoes with their liquid, the canned tomatoes and some boiling water.
Cook for a further 3-4 minutes at 900W.
Then add the herbs, doubanjiang and doenjang.
Cook for 15-20 minutes at reduced power (360W), stir occasionally.
Meanwhile, cook the pasta on the hob as usual.
I like to top this with walnut pieces.

Midnight in Tokyo Story

2023-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

I wrote about the Japanese movie Tokyo Story (tōkyō monogatari, 東京物語) and a poster I drew in an earlier post. It is a black-and-white movie from 1953 directed by Yasujirō Ozu about an elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their grown-up children. It’s moving and poetic family story, slow-paced and without much overt drama. I very much like the cinematography, with long static shots of very carefully composed frames.

One of my favourite scenes in the movie is a scene in the apartment of the widowed daughter-in-law, Noriko, where the mother, Tomi, bonds with Noriko. The scene is when they’re about to go to sleep.

Besides the articles linked in my earlier post, the 1982 article by Keiko McDonald “Ozu’s Tokyo Story: Simple Means for Complex Ends” is one of the best analyses of the movie I’ve read. From that article, here is the description of the preamble to the scene:

The scene opens in a typical Ozu manner with a cut from the empty corridor to the inside of the apartment. The shot of the corridor is accompanied by the bong of a clock somewhere, Ozu’s favorite metaphor, which establishes the temporal setting for the dramatic action to follow. It is midnight.

Because there are very few indications of clock time in Tokyo Story, the clock chiming midnight is significant, even though the sound in the movie is really faint. In his article on the importance of time in Tokyo Story, Tetsuya Kumamoto explains that the length of the shot in the empty corridor is significantly longer than similar shots in the movie (more than 10 seconds, whereas usually it is about 7-8 seconds), and the only reason for this is precisely to provide enough time for the 12 bongs of the clock. At the same time that Tomi is quietly talking with Noriko, as shown in the preceding scene, Shūkichi is getting drunk with his old acquaintances. We get an indication of the time there as well, as he barmaid urges them to go home “because it’s already midnight”.

Keiko McDonalds commentary on the scene following the empty corridor shot:

Two quilt beds have already been made, and Noriko is rubbing Tomi’s shoulder. To Japanese audiences this familiar scene is the very index of domestic harmony illuminating the young’s caring for the aged.

And on the following scene:

After Noriko puts the quilt over her, Tomi hesitantly says that, as her mother-in-law, she feels badly that Noriko remains unmarried now that eight years have passed since her husband’s death. Noriko smilingly responds that she does not want to remarry, not because she is loyal to her late husband, but because she is more comfortable living alone. We must read between the lines of this conversation: there, we find a genuine mutual compassion as these two women articulate a kind of resignation in face of the merciless progression of time.

The movie then cuts back to now closed bar, to complete the symmetry. I think the scene is pivotal in the movie, because it leads to Noriko re-evaluating her life.

The drawing

In the movie, Tomi is played by Chieko Higashiyama and Noriko by Setsuko Hara. I wanted to create a double portrait of Tomi and Noriko, and I stayed very close to the original shot, apart from cropping it to get both faces in an optimal position.

I used my preferred rough watercolour paper (Fabriano Artistico, 300 gsm, NOT), about 50 cm x 70 cm. I set up the drawing in ordinary pencil and worked it in Conté pencil (from HB to 3B). I don’t sharpen the Conté pencils to a point. I also used kneaded putty and a piece of soft rag for blending.

The drawing of Tomi and Noriko

The banner is a crop of the still on which the drawing is based.

Tokyo Story

2022-10-30T00:00:00+01:00

Tokyo Story (tōkyō monogatari, 東京物語) is a probably one of the most famous Japanese films, and definitely one of my favourites. It is a black-and-white movie from 1953 directed by Yasujirō Ozu about an elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their grown-up children. It’s moving and poetic family story, slow-paced and without much overt drama. I very much like the cinematography, with long static shots of very carefully composed frames.

There is an article from the British Film Institute that provides a nice analysis of the movie and this article in FilmInquiry discusses the politics. The movie was released in 1953 and is quite critical of the Japanese society at the time.

There also is a very interesting article about the notion of time in this movie (in Japanese, abstract in French), “Recurrent time and irreversible time in Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story”. It explains how the parents, living in a traditional small village, experience time differently from the children living in the modern city, and how this is illustrated through the way time is handled in the movie.

Starting material

I wanted to make a drawing based on period posters for this movie. So I looked up a number of posters and composed a version with the three key figures of the final part of the movie, the father (Shūkichi), his daughter Kyōko and the widow of his son, Noriko.

Here are the two posters I used:

Japanese posters for the movie Tokyo Story

Selecting the text

For a poster, the text is an essential part of the artwork. I wanted to keep some of the original promotion text but also add some that is taken from the movie itself.

The promotion text

Of course I kept the title, I used the lettering as in the first poster.

I kept the original line of one of the posters:

香り高き詩情　美と哀愁の藝術作

The first part means literally “fragrant poetic sentiment”, so maybe “a strong sense of poetry”; the second part means “a work of art of beauty and sorrow”.

I slightly modified another line from one of the posters:

一年一作小津安二郎作品

became

最高の小津安二郎作品

which means “Yasujirō Ozu’s best work”

The most memorable lines

I also incorporated what I consider the most memorable exchange in the movie:

For me this has always been the most memorable exchange in Tokyo Story. Noriko, the widowed daughter-in-law is talking to Kyoko, the younger daughter.

京子：「いやぁねぇ、世の中って……」
紀子：「そう、いやなことばっかり……」

The English subtitles translate this as

Kyoko: “Isn’t life disappointing?”
Noriko: “Yes, nothing but disappointment.”

“disappointment” is probably too strong though. いや (iya) is a term meaning disagreeable, unpleasant etc. 世の中 “yo no naka” means “world, society”, and the って means something like “what you call … “ or “the so-called …”

This is the conclusion of a longer exchange in which Noriko explains to Kyoko that it is inevitable that children drift apart once they have their own lives to live. I like this exchange because it summarizes what it means to grow up.

I stylised this a bit differently for the drawing:

京子〜嫌なね、世の中って
紀子〜そう、嫌な事許り

The evening bell

At the end of the movie, a children’s choir sings the song “The evening bell” (yuube no kane, 夕べの鐘) and I incorporated the lyrics into the poster as well:

昔の人
    今や何處
訪れ来て
    佇めば
黄昏ゆく
    空を辿
通いて来る
    鐘の声
家鳩の
    羽搏きに
乱れて消ゆ
    軒の妻
緑の風
    岸を戦ぐ

I only incorporated the lyrics that are sung in the movie, there is a little bit more:

川のほとり
    さまよえば
黄昏ゆく
    路地を越えて
おとない来る
    鐘の声
牧の童が
    笛の音に
消えては行く
    村はずれ

I have not seen any mention of this song in articles about the movie, and yet it is significant, because it describes an evening scene in a small village by a river, the kind of village where the father and daughter live.

I could not find a translation, I did my best to translate it but the song is from 1908 and besides being poetry, it uses some archaic constructions.

the people of yore, where are they now
maybe they loiter and come to visit

the gathering dusk creeps across the sky
the sound of the bell coming and going

vanishing eaves, disturbed
by the flapping of pigeon wings

the green wind stirring the bank
wandering around the river

dusk creeps across the paths through the fields
the sound of the bell comes to visit

a shepherd boy with the sound of a flute
fading away on the edge of the village

The background to the choice of this song in the movie is interesting. This was a song taught to school children before the war, but after the war, by the time the movie was made, it had been replaced by another song, “Spring breeze”, with the same melody but different lyrics. So why did Ozu choose this particular song? This song is much more serious in tone than Spring Breeze, it has something of a requiem or elegy.

I read an interesting story about the possible reason for this choice. Yasujiro Ozu’s assistant director, Yoshio Tsukamoto, died from leukaemia at the age of 39 shortly before the filming of the movie had started. They had been very close and had been through the war together, in Singapore. They were interned there after the war and when a ship came to repatriate them, there were not enough places. Ozu ceded his place but Tsukamoto stayed with him.

Ozu was deeply affected by Tsukamoto’s death, and this song was his way of expressing his grief in the movie.

This may have been the case but even without this personal background, the choice of the song is perfect for the final scene, cutting between Noriko in the train and Kyōko classroom. There is even a nice connection with the two notions of time: Noriko on the train steaming to Tokyo, looking at the watch signifying the irreversible time, and the temple bell in the song, which epitomises the recurrent time.

The drawing

The drawing process and the materials I used for this drawing are the same as for the drawings discussed in my previous posts, “The Blue Dragon of Kiyomizu-dera” and “Summer night in Shinbashi dōri”. This drawing is on a sheet of watercolour paper of 56 cm × 76 cm (30×22 inches) of Fabriano Artistico 300 g/m² “not”, cold pressed with a rough finish.

I only took one intermediate picture, of the the line drawing:

Pencil sketch with the guide squares

And this is the final result:

The finished watercolour

hiragana and romaji of the text

For learners of Japanese, here are the hiragana and romaji for the text on the poster.

The first line

香り高き詩情　美と哀愁の藝術作
かおりたかきしじょう　びとあいしゅうのげいじゅつか
kaoritakaki shijou bi to aishuu no geijutsuka

The second line

最高の小津安二郎作品
さいこうのおつやすじろうさくひん
saikou no otsu yasujirou sakuhin

The dialogue

京子：「いやぁねぇ、世の中って……」
紀子：「そう、いやなことばっかり……」
きょうこ：「いやぁねぇ、よのなかって……」
のりこ：「そう、いやなことばっかり……」
Kyouko: iyaa nee, yo no nakatte…
Noriko: sou, iya na koto bakari…

The movie’s name

東京物語
とうきょうものがたり
tōkyō monogatari

The song

ゆうべのかね

むかしのひといまいずこ
おとずれきてたたずめば

たぞがれゆくそらをたどり
かよいてくるかねのおと

いえばとのはばたきに
みだれてきゆのきのつま

みどりのかぜきしをそよぐ
かわのほとりさまよえば

たぞがれゆくやろをこえて
おとないくるかねのおと

まきのわらべふえのおと
きえてはゆくむらはずれ

yuube no kane

mukashi no hito ima izuko?
otozure kite tatazumeba

tazogare yuku sora wo tadori
kayoite kuru kane no oto

iebato no habataki ni
midarete kiyu noki no tsuma

midori no kaze kishi wo soyogu
kawa no hotori samayoeba

tazore yuku yaro wo koete
otonai kuru kane not oto

maki no warabe fue no oto ni
kiete wa yuku murahazure

The banner picture shows a black-and-white picture of the father and his daughter-in-law in the same pose as on the poster.

The Blue Dragon of Kiyomizu-dera

2022-10-30T00:00:00+01:00

A watercolour of the Blue Dragon of Kiyomizu-dera during the procession.

Kiyomizu-dera

Kiyomizu-dera (清水寺) is a famous temple in eastern Kyoto. It sits on a steep hill and its main hall is built on a high wooden platform that offers great views over the city.

There is an expression kiyomizu no butai kara tobioriru (清水の舞台から飛び降りる) which translates a “to jump off the stage of the Kiyomizu temple” and means “to make a leap into the dark, to jump in at the deep end”. In the olden days, (presumably rather desperate) people would jump off the platform of the Kannon hall of the temple in the belief that, if they got off scot-free, their wishes would be granted, and if they died they would enter Nirvana. The drop is thirteen metres.
Records from the Edo era show that 234 people jumped off the platform; 34 of them died. In 1872, the Kyoto city council issued an order forbidding this practice.

The Kannon with the Thousand Arms and Thousand Eyes

Kiyomizu-dera is a Buddhist temple and is dedicated to Kannon (観音, kan-on), the bodhisattva of infinite compassion. I wrote a previous post about this deity, “The mystery of the giant Kannon statues”.

The manifestation of Kannon worshipped in Kiyomizu-dera is the Thousand-armed Kannon (senju kannon, 千手観音), one of the most popular manifestations: the thousand arms symbolizes Kannon’s ability to embrace and alleviate the suffering of the world. In full it is the “Kannon with a Thousand Arms and a Thousand Eyes”, every hand holds an eye. People prayed to the Senju Kannon to avoid illness, eye problems, and blindness.

The Blue Dragon

In traditional Chinese astronomy, there are four mythological creatures that guard the four cardinal directions. They are the Blue Dragon of the East, the Vermilion Bird of the South, the White Tiger of the West, and the Black Tortoise of the North. In Japan these creatures are considered the guardian spirits of cities. So the Blue Dragon (seiryū, 青龍) protects the city of Kyoto on the east and Kiyomizu-dera is dedicated to it.

The Kiyomizu-dera temple legend says that the Kannon is incarnated as the Blue Dragon. The temple is built on the site of the Otowa waterfall (音羽の瀧) and according to the legend, every night the dragon comes flying to drink from the water.

The drawing

In March and September there is a procession called the seiryū-e (青龍会), in which a large (18 m long) dragon is paraded through the streets by a host of costumed actors.

Some years ago, I was staying in Kyoto for a while. I was lucky enough to just happen to pass by when the procession was being held. I made a drawing based on a picture I took.

The drawing is mostly a faithful rendition of the photograph, except for the sky and some of the colours (there is more blue in my drawing). Also, if you look closely, you see that the papier-maché head of the dragon is covered in Japanese characters. Because of the shape of the head and also the resolution of the picture, these were quite hard to read, but I could work out that they were taken from Buddhist sutras. So I searched for the text of a sutra and used that for the parts where I could not read the actual characters.

Although the dragon is called “blue”, and sometimes “azure” or “cerulean”, the scales of the dragon in the procession are a dark blue-green tint. In Japanese, the word aoi (青い) means both blue and green, for example a traffic light is aoshingō (青信号). In my drawing I tried to match the original colour of the scales.

I have explained my drawing process and the materials I use in a previous post, “Summer night in Shinbashi dōri”. This drawing is on a sheet of 56 cm × 38 cm, also known as “half imperial”, of Arches 300 g/m² “not”, i.e. cold pressed with a rough finish.

Here are a few intermediate stages:

The line drawing:

Pencil sketch with the guide squares and perspective lines

Some colour applied:

Pencil sketch with some portions coloured in with coloured pencil

Some washing done:

Pencil sketch with some portions washed

And this is the final result:

The finished watercolour

The banner picture shows part of the picture of the dragon on which drawing is based.

Yellow peppers and tofu sticks in Filipino-style creamy sauce

2022-10-09T00:00:00+01:00

This is a vegan version of a Filipino recipe, Binagoongan Baboy sa Gata. It’s a variant of my own recipe with yellow peppers instead of aubergines, and a few other changes in ingredients. The less common ingredients in this recipe are dried tofu (bean curd) sticks, doenjang, a Korean-style soybean paste and tobanjan, a broad bean chilly paste.

vegan gluten-free 30-minutes • 900 kcal per person

Ingredients

For two people:

Fresh ingredients & groceries
- 2 cm ginger, finely chopped
- 1 stick celery, finely chopped
- 2 cloves garlic
- 2 medium yellow peppers, cut lengthwise into strips
- 1 can of chopped tomatoes
- 50 g tofu sticks
- 50 g creamed coconut
From the store cupboard
- a handful of dried shiitake mushrooms
- 1/2 cup of cashew nuts, coarsely ground
- 1/2 teaspoon tobanjan paste
- 1 teaspoon doenjang paste
- 1 tablespoon cooking wine (e.g. mirin or shaoxing)
- 1 tablespoon vinegar
- 2 tablespoons rice bran oil
- 1 cup of rice (preferably jasmine rice)

Preparation

Soak the tofu sticks in very hot water for 30 minutes.
Soak the shiitake in very hot water for 30 minutes.
Grate the creamed coconut
Meanwhile
- Cook the peppers 6 minutes in the microwave at full power (900W).
- Drain the cooking liquid into a small bowl. Add the cooking wine, doenjang and tobanjan and stir to dissolve.
- Heat the oil in a deep pan. When the oil is hot, add the ginger, celery and garlic and fry for a few minutes over medium heat.
- Add the peppers to the pan and stir fry for a few minutes.
- Drain the tofu sticks and cut them into pieces.
- Add the tofu sticks and the ground cashews to the pan and cook until lightly browned.
- Add the dissolved doenjang and tobanjan, tomatoes and vinegar and cook, stirring occasionally, for a few minutes.
- Add about a cup of hot water to the grated coconut, stir to dissolve and add to the pan
- Simmer for a few minutes over lower heat. Add some of the soaking liquid of the mushrooms if required.
- Let it reduce for a few minutes
Serve with rice

Kitchen

2022-07-06T00:00:00+01:00

I would like to try an explain why Banana Yoshimoto’s novel “Kitchen” is my favourite novel, because I think reading it might make you happy¹. You may think, well, that’s easy, it’s about cooking and food and Japan. But that is true for many Japanese novels; also, when I first read it, I was not as much into Japan or into food as I am today.

I read this novel first in 1997 or so, in any case a few years after the English translation came out in 1993. I borrowed it from the library in Gent, where I was living at the time. When I moved to Scotland, I bought the paperback and that is when it became my favourite. My edition, the UK edition from faber and faber, 2001, has a very simple cover: just a uniform deep pink with the large Japanese characters 台所, and in a thin, wide-kerning sans-serif font “kitchen”. The word 台所 (daidokoro) means kitchen in Japanese².

It’s a small and thin book containing the short novel Kitchen and the novella Moonlight Shadow, 150 pages in total. So what makes Kitchen so special for me? I could of course point to the sales figures (in Japan, it was reprinted sixty times and sold millions of copies; it was translated into more than twenty-five languages) and accolades (several literary prizes), or the many scholarly articles and dissertations that have been written about it (some of which I have read with interest) but I didn’t know about all that until later. The reason it was translated at all was of course because it was such a best seller in Japan.

It is a book that has always comforted me. The main topics are about dealing with loss and grieving and being alone in the world. Nevertheless, the story is never depressing (it’s also about love). It’s a slice-of-life novel so the plot is not important, and when summarised does amount to very little.

But what really makes it my favourite is the writing and in particular the imagery used. The English translation made a deep impression on me. I think that what I like is how the protagonist observes the world, nature and people, and puts it into words. There is a lot of images of light and darkness, which I like in particular. It is very poetic, but at the same time casual as well. Banana Yoshimoto’s writing manages to make the most banal and everyday scenes beautiful.

The translation by Megan Backus has been variously criticised (for not being true to the original; for being too literal; for being sentimental,… ) and praised (for being true to the original, for being poetic and beautiful). I have now finally read the novel in Japanese, and it was a wonderful experience. Unsurprisingly, I think the Japanese version is better than the translation. Banana Yoshimoto’s writing is very special, and very difficult to translate (even more so than for example Yoko Ogawa, who also writes very beautiful Japanese).

The language in Kitchen is strongly influenced by shoujo manga (Japanese comics for adolescent girls and young adult women), and therefore a combination of very casual language and literary and poetic language; also, Banana Yoshimoto uses many grammatical constructions that don’t translate easily into English. Japanese typically has a topic/comment structure rather than subject-verb-object, but in many cases sentences can be rearranged to match the English structure more closely; Banana Yoshimoto’s writing style makes that harder.

Nevertheless, even though it is not flawless (because of course I now notice the flaws), I still love the translated version. I have read other works by Banana Yoshimoto in translation (Lizard, N.P., Goodbye Tsugumi, all translated by Ann Sherif; Asleep, translated by Michael Emmerich); of those, I have read Lizard in Japanese as well. And I would say that in the end it does not really matter: all translations will be different, but in the hands of a competent translator, the voice the original author will be mostly preserved.

As an experiment, I tried to translate a short passage from Kitchen myself. The context: Mikage, the young woman who is the narrator of the story, is on a work trip and has gone out late to find something to eat because she’s starving. While waiting for her food, she phones her friend Yuichi, who is also on a trip and, it turns out, is also very hungry. When she tastes the delicious food (katsudon), she decides to order a takeaway meal and take it to him, by taxi — a ride of many hours. When she gets there, in the middle of the night, the ryokan where Yuichi is staying is closed, so she scales the wall of the building to his room is, a dangerous climb which she only manages with great difficulty.

My translation:

I dropped my backpack at my side and, lying face-up looking up towards the roof of the ryokan, I gazed at the bright moon and clouds and got thinking. (I thought, really, how could I be thinking of this kind of things in such a situation? It was rather a desperate one after all. But I’d like to be called a philosopher in action.) People all think that there are many roads and that we can choose them for ourselves. It’s probably closer to say that we dream of the moment of choice. It was like that for me. But there and then, I knew. I knew so that I could put it clearly into words: although by no means in a fatalistic sense, the road has always been decided. Every day’s breath, every look, repeated day after day, is spontaneously decided. And so in my case, before I realised, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, my katsudon and I had to be lying flat in a puddle on a roof in a strange place in the middle of winter, looking up at the night sky.
—Ah, the moon was so beautiful!
I got up and knocked on the window of Yuichi’s room.

From the official translation by Megan Backus:

I shrugged off my pack. Lying there on my back, I looked up at the roof of the inn and, staring at the glowing moon and clouds, I thought, really, we’re all in the same position. (It occurred to me that I had often thought that in similar situations, in moments of utter desperation. I would like to be known as an action philosopher.) We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously. I think I did – but now I knew it, because now I was able to put it into words. But I don’t mean this in the fatalistic sense; we’re constantly making choices. With the breaths we take every day, with the expression in our eyes, with the daily actions we do over and over, we decide as though by instinct. And so some of us will inevitably find ourselves rolling around in a puddle on some roof in a strange place with a takeout katsudon in the middle of winter, looking up at the night sky, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Ah, but the moon was lovely.
I stood up and knocked on Yuichi’s window.

The Japanese text:

リュックを横に放り出して仰向けに寝てままで旅館の屋根を見上げて、その向こうに見える光る月や雲をみつめて私は思った。（よくもまあその状態でそんなことをかんがえたものだとおもう。やけくそだったのだろう。行動する哲学者と呼んでもらいたい）人はみんな、道はたくさんあって、自分で選ぶことができると思っている。選ぶ瞬間を夢見ている、と言ったほうが近いのかもしれない。私も、そうだった。しかし今、知った。はっきりと言葉にして知ったのだ。決して運命論的な意味ではなくて、道はいつも決まっている。毎日の呼吸が、まなざしが、くりかえす日々が自然と決めてしまうのだ。そして人によってはこうやって、気づくとまるで当然のことのように見知らぬ土地のやねの水たまりのなかで真冬に、カツ丼と共に夜空を見上げて寝ころがらざるをえなくなる。
—あぁ、月がとてもきれい。
私は立ち上がり、雄一の部屋の窓をノックした。

Romaji:

RYUKKU wo yoko ni houridashite aomuke ni nete mama de ryokan no yane wo miagete, sono mukou ni mieru hikaru tsuki ya kumo wo mitsumete watashi ha omotta. (Yokumo maa sono joutai de sonna koto wo kangaeta mono da to omou. Yakekuso datta no darou. Koudou suru tetsugakusha to yonde moraitai) hito ha minna, michi ha takusan atte, jibun de erabu koto ga dekiru to omotte iru. Erabu shunkan wo yumemite iru, to itta hou ga chikai no kamoshirenai. Watashi mo, sou datta. Shikashi ima, shitta. Hakkiri to kotoba ni shite shitta no da. Kesshite unmeironteki na imi deha nakute, michi ha itsumo kimatte iru. Mainichi no kokyuu ga, manazashi ga, kurikaesu hibi ga shizen to kimete shimau no da. Soshite hito ni yotte ha kou yatte, kidzuku to maru de touzen no koto no you ni mishiranu dochi no yane no mizutamari no naka de mafuyu ni, katsudon to tomo ni yozora wo miagete nekorogarazaru wo enaku naru.
—Aa, tsuki ga totemo kirei.
Watashi ha tachiagari, Yuuichi no heya no mado wo NOKKU shita.

[¹] unless you are anti-trans, anti-gay or anti-pineapple. Or anti-Japan of course.
[²] The Japanese title is however キッチン KITCHIN, the English loanword.

The banner picture shows the kind of large pink telephone Mikage used to phone Yuichi.

Summer night in Shinbashi dōri

2022-07-06T00:00:00+01:00

I’ve finished another watercolour, on a sheet of 56 cm × 76 cm ( 30×22 inches) so quite large. The paper is Fabriano Artistico 300 g/m² “not”, cold pressed with a rough finish. The materials I used are my usual combination of plain pencil and Derwent Inktense and Conté Aquarelle watercolour pencils. I started it at the end of March so it took about three months.

The finished watercolour

Topic

The topic is a night view of an alley in Kyōto, based on picture I took during my stay in 2018. I picked it because I wanted something with a lot of colour and detail, in portrait format. And because I love Kyōto. Working on that drawing takes me straight back there, to the warmth of the summer night, the typical smells, sounds and visual impressions. And just the feeling of being there.
In Japanese there is a word for this feeling of happy memories, natsukashii (懐かしい). It’s close to “nostalgic”, but without negative connotations. The dictionary says “fondly-remembered”.

Making a detailed drawing of a night scene is fun and challenging: because of the limitations of taking night shots with my compact camera without tripod, the original image is not entirely sharp; also, some of the brighter signs are washed out. And of course the details in the darker parts are quite lost. So I try to work out the signs and other missing parts by comparing various pictures and searching on the internet for additional, daytime pictures of that alley.

Especially the kanji (Chinese characters) on the signs are hard. If I would copy them without really understanding the characters, then the strokes would be wrong and that would be obvious to anyone who can read them. So I need to work out which kanji the often very stylised calligraphy represent. Then I can attempt to write them in the same way.

One of the things I like about drawing is that I can change whatever I like. A picture is already a lie, but in a drawing there are so many more ways in which you can alter the reality. Most of what is shown in the drawing was there on the picture. I only lied a little bit.

Context

The alley is called Shinbashi Dōri (真橋通り). It comes out onto a bridge over the Takasegawa (高瀬川), which is a narrow canal bordered with cherry trees. The bridge is called Shinbashi (真橋) and the alley takes it name from the bridge. It’s close to the much more famous Pontochō Alley (先斗町通り) and not far from the Gion Bridge over the Kamo river. The scene in the drawing is observed from the entrance of the alley from Kawaramachi Dōri (河原町通り), one of the main north-south thoroughfares.

Shinbashi Dōri runs parallel with Shijō Dōri (四条通り), one of the main roads running east-west. Already in the Heian era (around 800 CE), Kyōto (then called Heian-Kyō) was laid out on a grid pattern with the imperial palace facing south after the Chinese fashion and the main east-west roads counting up from the palace towards the south. The roads were simply numbered from 1 to 9 starting with Ichijō (#1) just to the north of the palace grounds, Nijō (#2) just to the south, then Sanjō (#3), Shijō (#4) and so on and ending at Kujō (#9). If you’ve read the Tale of Genji, you will recall that Genji had a Nijō residence and one of the important women in his life live was called the Rokujō have because her residence was on Rokujō.

Today, Shijō Dōri is the most well-known as it is a major shopping street and it runs to Gion bridge and the Gion quarter. Amazingly, all of these roads still exist, or at least there are still roads and alleys in Kyōto with those names in roughly the same place as the original ones.

Drawing process

The way I make a drawing like this is quite straightforward: I crop the image to the scene I want, then divide it into squares using guides. I divide the paper in the same number of squares, with pencil and ruler. For detailed parts, I divide the squares into smaller squares. Then I set the drawing up in pencil with the picture on my screen as reference.

For this particular drawing, I also looked at the position of the vanishing point and put in perspective guide lines.

Pencil sketch with the guide squares and perspective lines

When I’m happy with that I will usually do some very rough shading and work out some of the details.

Pencil sketch with rough shading

I like using watercolour pencils. You can apply the colour first like ordinary coloured pencils and then wash them. I usually don’t put on all colour before starting to wash. Maybe that would be more systematic but I tend to postpone the parts that I am unsure about.

Pencil sketch with some portions coloured in with coloured pencil

Colouring in a large drawing like this is much like completing a jigsaw puzzle. Until a certain amount is done it is really hard to say what it will look like, and finding the best way to colour in some small part is also a bit like hunting for the missing pieces.

The drawing is taking shape, large portions are now washed to bring out the colour

Rules

I have a few “rules” for myself when it comes to drawing and watercolours:

use rough, heavy paper
don’t sharpen the pencils too often
don’t use too fine a brush
don’t correct mistakes

Look, that’s why there’s rules, understand?
So that you think before you break ‘em.
– Terry Pratchett, “Thief of time”

The banner picture shows part of the original picture I used for the drawing.

Quiet crystallisation

2022-05-19T00:00:00+01:00

“The Memory Police” (hisoyaka na kesshō, 密やかな結晶) is a novel from 1994 by Yoko Ogawa, one of Japan’s most renowned writers.

It’s set on an island but the community there is otherwise quite similar to mainland Japan. Things disappear from the community’s life, and people forget about them. They don’t simply disappear. For example, when the “perfume” disappears , people pour out their perfume bottles in the river. Then they forget that perfume ever existed. And when “birds” disappear, people set free their caged birds, and totally forget all about birds.

The book centres on three characters: the narrator (watashi わたし, “I”), the old man (ojii-san おじいさん, jii is old man and o and san are honorifics) and the narrator’s editor, “R” (R-shi, shi 氏 is a formal form of referring to a person, typically someone one is not close with).

I started reading near the end of February and it took me three months to read the novel in Japanese, reading a few pages most evenings.

I would recommend this book because it is very taught-provoking. Although nothing really bad happens explicitly, it is a very sad story. The book has 28 chapters and the real turning point is by the end of Chapter 25. It’s very beautifully written, with a great eye for small details and remarkable control over specificity: early on, the setting of the story seems very generic but as the book progresses, there are more specific Japanese cultural references; towards the end they disappear again. I really like the way the author expresses e.g. unease of a character by describing how he keeps putting his feet into his slippers and pulling them back out, or the details about the type of shoe that makes a specific sound, so you can tell the wearer is a young woman, etc.

In the title in Japanese hisoyaka means quiet, still, surreptitious; kesshou means crystal or crystallisation but also fruits of labour etc. So it is “Quiet crystallisation”. (The French title is “Cristallisation secrète”.) According to the afterword, the Yoko Ogawa was thinking of “crystallised” memories we carry inside us. The English title puts the focus on the Memory Police themselves but they are not the focus of the novel. The problem with the English title is that it leads the reader to expect some totalitarian political novel, which it is not. The memory police serve as a cause for fear because of their control of the population, but that is not the point at all. To my mind, the novel is really about the acceptance of loss. Loss of memories, loss of many good things in life, loss of loved ones, loss of abilities.

Issues of translation from Japanese

I am increasingly interested in issues of translation from Japanese. Reading a Japanese novel does not require full translation, because I don’t need to turn a Japanese sentence into an English one (or a Dutch one, as that is my native tongue) to understand it. I’ve written a few blog posts on reading Japanese, especially as a learner.

But while reading this novel I did think a lot about how it could be translated. What is peculiar in this novel is that there are hardly any typically Japanese elements. It could be set anywhere. Mentions of food are very unspecific; people drink coffee, black tea or cocoa and sometimes wine. Even terms that could have been specific such as the mention of an altar to the sea gods in an old ferry, are not: the word used is umi no kamisama no saidan 海の神様の祭壇 rather than the more common Shinto term watatzumi no kamidana 海神の神棚. There are the typically Japanese politeness levels and honorary pre- and suffixes, but if I were to translate it, I would not try to emulate them. Especially the old man is very polite, and always refers to the narrator as ojousama お嬢様, a very formal way of saying “Miss”. The word used for clothes is youfuku 洋服, Western clothes, but I feel that is purely for the benefit of the Japanese audience, so I would just translate it as “clothes”. The climate is definitely not Scotland but not specifically Japan either, nor is the vegetation that is mentioned.

So it is carefully unspecific, at least in the initial chapters. It made me wonder if there was any benefit at all in reading it in Japanese. The translation is excellent, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020. And yet, I find the Japanese very beautiful and I think impossible to convey entirely in translation.

The translator, Stephen Snyder, says in an interview: “Yoko Ogawa’s prose in Japanese is extraordinarily beautiful, so it’s always a challenge to try to find a way to capture even a vague sense of that beauty in English.”

And I just like reading Japanese, slowly.

While reading I noted down some typical Japanese cultural elements that caught my eye.

(Indented sentences are quotes. English quotes in italics are from the translation by Stephen Snyder, other translations are mine.)

Roses

For about the first quarter of the novel, there are no Japan-specific references, but then, in Chapter 6, with the disappearance of the roses, there was one after all: primary school kids with randoseru ランドセル , firm-sided school backpacks made of leather. A less specific word would have been 学生鞄 gakusei kaban (school bag). The word randoseru derives from the Dutch “ransel”; they are very typical for Japanese schoolkids. Still, when I was in primary school in Flanders, I had one too, with a slightly different shape, wider and less deep; we just called it “boekentas” (book bag). I loved the sound the clasps made. And when you ran with it on, the books and pens etc would rattle inside, which is exactly what the writer describes as well:

The children took off running along the river, their backpacks rattling behind them.

子供たちはランドセルを鳴らしながら、流れを追いかけていった。

kodomotachi ha RANDOSERU wo narashinagara, nagare wo oikakete itta.

With rattling school bags, the kids went chasing the flow.

And another, perhaps less obvious, cultural reference, occurs at the start of Chapter 7:

At the base of the bridge next to my laundry platform stood an elegantly dressed woman.
“What lovely roses,” I told her.
This was the first thing that came to mind.

洗濯場にかかる橋のたもとにも、お金持ち風の婦人が一人、たたずんでいた。
「気品のあるバラですね」わたしは言った。
それでふと頭に浮かんだ修飾語を、そのまま口にしたのだった

sentakujo ni kakaru hashi no tamoto ni mo, okanemochi fuu no fujin ga hitori, tatazunde ita.
“kihin no aru bara desu ne” watashi ha itta.
sore de futo atama ni ukanda shoushokugo wo, sono mama kuchi ni shita no datta.

The “What lovely roses” in Japanese is “kihin no aru bara desu ne” (what elegant roses), and the narrator comments on her random choice of “kihin no aru” with the term shoushokugo 修飾語 which is the general grammatical term for “modifier” (she is after all a novelist). That is because it is an adjectival sentence rather than an adjective (“roses that have elegance”).

Once her work was done, she turned and, without a glance at the stream, gave me the sort of graceful bow typical of people of her class and left.

すべての作業が終わると婦人は、川の流れを目で追い掛けようともせず、上流階級の人独特のゆったりとしたお辞儀をして、わたしから離れていった。

subete no sagyou ga owaru to fujin ha, kawa no nagare wo me de oikake you to mo sezu, jouryuukaikyuu no hito dokutoku no yuttari shita ojigi wo shite, watashi kara hanarete itta.

The “graceful bow” is a jiki 辞儀, a bow accompanying a greeting, rather than rei 礼, a bow to thank someone. The narrator uses the words jouryuukaikyuu no hito 上流階級の人 (upper class person) and yuttari to shita ゆったりとした (easy, leisurely) bow.

Iriko

In Chapter 8, where R visits the narrator’s mother’s workshop in the basement, the narrator recalls her mother eating iriko イリコ (also written 炒り子). This is quite specific: the term is only used in the West of Japan (and also in Hawaii, because of immigrants from Western Japan). It refers to Japanese anchovy fry (kataguchi-iwashi, 片口鰯), boiled in brine and then dried. In the rest of Japan they are called niboshi or jako. The writer was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture in Kansai, so that is probably why she uses the word iriko rather than niboshi. To translate it in a culturally context-free way, you could of course just say dried anchovies.

“My mother always kept dried sardines wrapped in newspaper on the desk in her studio, and she would snack on them as she worked.”

「母は仕事場の机に、いつも新聞紙にくるんだイリコを置いていたんです。それをムシャムシャ食べながら仕事をしていたの。」

haha ha shigotoba no tsukue ni, itsumo shinbungami ni kurunda IRIKO wo oite itandesu. sore wo MUSHAMUSHA tabenagara shigoto wo shite ita no.

The Secret Police does not take prisoners

In Chapter 13, the narrator is at the head office of the secret police and talking to a kind of receptionist. She says 「差し入れ」 (“sashiire”) and the person she’s talking to says 「さしいれ？」(“sashiire?”).

The word 差し入れ (sashi-ire) has the following meanings: (1) Insertion, letter drop. (2) Things sent to a prisoner. (3) Supply of provisions, refreshments, etc. to someone carrying out a task.

In the novel the meaning is clearly “Things sent to a prisoner”

The subtext is that the receptionist pretends not to understand this word (because of course the secret police does not take prisoners). The use of hiragana for this word normally written in kanji makes that very clear, but is difficult to bring across in translation: use of italics or quotes do not have quite the same effect.

“I have a package I’d like to have delivered to an acquaintance…” My voice trailed off, echoing from the ceiling before being lost in the vastness of the hall.
“Package?” He paused, twirling his pen in his fingers, and repeated the word as though trying to recall the meaning of some rarely used philosophical term.

Kanji and the Latin alphabet

In the second chapter of the novel, the narrator refers to her father’s documents about birds with containing “”鳥”という字” (“tori” to iu ji). You can translate that as “the word ‘bird’, but although ji can mean “word”, it usually means “character” and is anyhow more specific than kotoba (word).

When they came upon something they considered dangerous—in other words, anything that contained the word “bird”—they threw the item unceremoniously on the floor.

危険とみなされたものはーーつまりどこかに一つでも”鳥”という字がみつかったものはーーどんどん床に放り投げられていった。

kiken to minasareta mono ha – tsumari nanika hitotsu demo “tori” to iu ji ga mitsukatta mono ha – dondon yuka ni　hourinagerarete itta.

In the third chapter there is a scene of the narrator writing a novel, and she describes the typical genkouyoushi 原稿用紙, i.e “paper for manuscripts”, Japanese writing paper lined with a square grid, one square per character. Of course as a translator you could just say “writing paper”.

But in Chapter 14 there is a scene where the narrator, still in the HQ of the secret police, mentions specifically that someone is writing using the alphabet (arufabetto アルファベット ):

His papers were thickly covered with numbers and letters in a script I did not understand.

書類には意味のよく分らない数字やアルファベットが、びっしり書き込んであった。

shorui ni ha imi no yoku wakaranai suuji ya ARUFABETTO ga, bisshiri kakikonde atta.

If I would have translated the earlier kanji-specific terms in a generic way, then I would have to say

The forms were densely filled in with numbers and letters the meaning of which I didn't understand very well

Whereas if I had been specific about the earlier writing being in kanji, I could translate

The forms were densely filled in with numbers and characters in the latin alphabet, the meaning of which I didn't understand very well

It does not matter much of course, but in the latter case the story would be more clearly set in Japan than in the former.

Onomatopoeic and mimetic words

As an aside, Japanese has many words with the structure like the word bisshiri びっしり (densely written) used in that sentence: four hiragana characters, the second a small tsu っ which indicates a glottal stop, and the last one ri り. For example, bikkuri　(surprised, frightened), tappuri (plentiful), sappari (feeling refreshed) etc.　Someone at made an attempt to enumerate them and counted 158 of them.

The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics says that 103 of these words with pattern AっBり are onomatopoeic and mimetic words. Japanese has about two thousand of these onomatopoeic and mimetic words; there are many forms but the most common is ABAB (like wakuwaku わくわく, nervous, trembling, excited; or mushamusha ムシャムシャ, munching); the pattern ABり (like shikiri しきり, frequent, continual) is also quite common.

Yoko Ogawa makes liberal use of such words and it is one of the aspects that is hard to convey in translation, especially the mimetic words.

Baumkuchen

At the end of Chapter 13 is a very specific Japanese cultural reference, the mention of baumukuuhen バウムクーヘン, “Baumkuchen”. This is a kind of cake of German origin that looks like a cross-section of a tree trunk with a hole in the middle, as it is baked on a spit. It is very popular in Japan. I used to buy them in the konbini to have with my coffee. And it is specifically popular as a gift to guests at weddings, which is exactly the case in the novel.

“My parents had come home from the wedding, but neither of them seemed to realize that I’d slept the entire day. They were animated and wanted me to taste the cake they had brought home from the reception.”

「両親が結婚式から帰ってきたんです。二人ともわたしが眠り続けていたことに、気づきもしませんでした。さあ、お土産のバウムクーヘンを食べましょうなんて、うきうきしているだけなんです」

“ryoushin ga kekkonshiki kara kaette kitandesu. futari tomo watashi ga nemuritsdzukete ita koto ni, kidzuki mo shimasen deshita. saa, omiyage no BAUMUKUUHEN wo tabemashou nante, ukiuki shite iru data nandesu”

If as a translator I wanted to avoid the cultural reference I could replace it by “wedding cake”, and that would at least work in Anglo-Saxon countries. In other countries where guests don’t get to take a piece of cake home (like in Flanders), the text gives me a way out because it refers to the Baumkuchen as omiyage (お土産, local specialty or souvenir bought as a gift while travelling) so I could simply call it “the local speciality cake” or something similar.　

On the whole, if I were to translate this novel, I think I would prefer to keep the few Japanese cultural references as they are. It would fit better with other culturally specific elements such as the politeness levels, which it would be rather a shame to remove entirely in translation.

Loanwords

Japanese has a lot of loanwords that are written in katakana. Most of them are from American English, to the extent that it is a running joke that you can speak Japanese with only katakana-English.

I am generally more interested in the katakana loanwords that are not from English. In this novel there are quite a few. I already mentioned randoseru and baumukuuhen. Other examples are mesu メス from Dutch “mes” – Japanese meaning “scalpel”, Dutch meaning knife; kokku コック from Dutch “kok”, “cook”; karute カルテ from German Karte – Japanese meaning “clinical record”, German meaning “card”; and noruma ノルマ from Russian “norma” – Japanese meaning “quota”, Russian meaning “norm”.

I like such words because they relate to Japan’s history, for example Japan imported the German medical system in the 19th century; the Baumkuchen were created by a German baker, an ex-prisoner-of-war, for the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition in 1919. The Dutch words are even older as they were one of the few nations allowed to trade with Japan in the Tokugawa era (early 1600s), together with the Portuguese from which amongst others パン “pan”, bread was loaned.

In the novel, the bread is usually ロールパ roorupan which means “breadroll”, the rooru (roll) borrowed from English, or furansupan フランスパン “French bread”. In common Japanese, the most common word is shokupan 食パン which is typically a white square loaf; shoku just means “food”.

An English loanword that is interesting from a translation perspective is ショートケーキ shootokeeki, “shortcake”, because this is a typical American cake also popular in Japan. If I were translate this novel into Dutch with Japanese cultural references I would leave it as “shortcake”; but it’s a type of cake not so well known in Flanders so otherwise I would probably use “gâteau” as that is a similar cake for a Flemish audience. (And yes, that is a loanword from French into Flemish.)

Cherry blossoms

If there was still any doubt about the Japanese setting of the novel, the following sentence in Chapter 16 puts an end to that:

Even if we couldn’t recall the exact date, I knew that his came around every year just as the cherry blossoms were budding out. I was quite certain that time was fast approaching.

日付けは思い出せなくても、毎年桜がわずかに開き始める季節だったことは確かで、そろそろそういう時期が近づいてきたという予感は間違いなくするのだった。

nittsuke ha omoidasenakute, mainen sakura ga wazuka ni hirakihajimeru kisetsu datta koto ha tashika de, sorosoro sou iu jiki ga chikadzuite kita tou iu yokan ha machigainaku suru no datta.

Even though I couldn't remember the date anymore, it was certainly around the time when every year the cherry blossoms just started to open, and I had the unmistakeable premonition that that season was soon drawing near.

The sakura, cherry blossoms, are quintessentially Japanese.

Music box

In Chapter 16, another nice loanword appears, again from Dutch: orugooru オルゴール from “orgel”, meaning music box. The word “orgel” literally means organ. The mechanism for music boxes were initially based on the barrel organ, “draaiorgel” in Dutch. According to Kotobank, the first mention in Japanese is in a publication from 1750.

The scene where this orugooru is introduced is one of my favourite scenes in the novel. Such a nice description of the emotions that listening to the melody played by a music box evokes. It is all the more poignant because the narrotor and the old man have no memory of music boxes anymore.

This is one of the two Japanese words kept in the English translation:

“It’s not really magic,” R said. “It’s an orugooru.”

「魔術だなて大げさなものじゃありません。これはオルゴールです」R氏が言った。

“majutsu da nante oogesa na mono ja arimasen. kore ha ORUGOORU desu” R-shi ga itta.

Yamato and wa

In Chapter 19, there is an explicit reference to Japan: washitsu 和室, Japanese-style room. The character 和 (wa) means both harmony, peace and Japan, Japanese-style.

Needless to say, I offered them the Japanese-style room on the first floor, as far as possible from the hidden room.

もちろんわたしは一階の和室ーー隠し部屋から一番遠い部屋ーーを提供してあげた。

mochiron watashi ha ikkai no washitsu – kakushiheya kara ichiban tooi heya – wo teikyou ageta.

The story behind the use of this character to mean Japan is quite interesting. Long ago, Japan was called Yamato. Originally, that was a region in what is now Nara prefecture, where the first capital was. Eventually it came to mean all of Japan. (Later it came to be called Nihon (日本) but that’s another story; as is why it’s called “Japan” in English.)

From the 3th century CE, the Japanese adopted the Chinese writing system and until the 7th century, “Yamato” was written 倭, the character the Chinese had been using for a long time to refer to the inhabitants of the Japanese islands.

As I explained earlier, most kanji have two types of readings, “onyomi”, which is based on the Japanese rendition of the ancient Chinese pronunciation of a character, and kunyomi, which is the native Japanese reading. The kunyomi for 倭　is yamato; the onyomi is wa.

Then at the start of the Nara period, in 713 CE, the empress Genmei decreed that Yamato (and in fact all important place names) should be written with two “auspicious characters”. Therefore 倭 was prefixed with the character 大, “great”. So it became 大倭, pronounced in full Ooyamato but usually just Yamato.

Then, for reasons lost in time, later in the Nara period, 倭 became replaced with 和 which has the same onyomi (wa), but also means “peace, harmony”.

Both writings coexisted for a long time but eventually 大和 became the preferred writing. And so now 和 wa is used to mean “Japanese”.

Writing practice

In Chapter 20, the narrator writes out a series of characters. The sequence she writes is the first two rows of the standard organisation for the Japanese syllabary, a table with ten rows and five columns, one colum for each vowel sound and one row for each starting consonant.

To warm up my fingers, I tried writing a, i, u, e, o. Then, taking care to match the size of the characters to the lines on the paper, I continued with ka, ki, ku, ke, ko.

指慣らしのために最初、あ、い、う、え、お、と書いて見る。ますめと字の大きさのバランスを確かめながら、か、き、く、け、こと続ける。

yubinarashi no tame ni sasho, a, i, u, e, o to kaite miru. masume to ji no ookisa no BARANSU wo tashikamenagara, ka, ki, ku, ke, ko to tsudzukeru.

The word masume means a square on Japanese manuscript paper.

A childrens’ game and candy

In the later chapters, there are more specifically Japanese references, for example in Chapter 22, there is a mention of おはじき ohajiki, a traditional Japanese children’s game similar to marbles, played with coin-shaped pieces made of coloured glass or plastic.

So I sounded out the children’s songs my nurse had taught me or the tune we had used to count for tiddlywinks.

仕方ないで、昔ばあやさんが歌ってくれた子守歌や、おはじきの数え歌をただただしく吹いた。

shikatanai de, mukashi baayasan ga utatte kureta komoriuta ya, ohajiki no kazoeuta wo tadatadashiku fuita.

There is also a mention of　ramune ラムネ, fizzy soda candy, a typical Japanese type of candy. This is the only other place in the novel where the translator has kept a Japanese word.

“Is it medicine?” I asked.
“No, it’s called ramune. I’m impressed that your mother tried to preserve something as ordinary as this.”

「何かの薬かしら」わたしは言った。
「いいや。ラムネだよ。君のお母さんはこんなささやかな物まで、大事に取っていたんだね」

“nanika no kusuri kashira” watashi ha itta.
“iiya. RAMUNE da yo. kimi no okaasan ha konna sasayaka no mono made, daiji ni totteitanda ne”

And further:

“It’s a lemon-flavored candy. When we were children, all the stores sold them and there were countless ramune on the island, but now there are only these few left here.”

「砂糖菓子さ。子供の頃はお店にいくらでも売っていた。島中には数えきれないくらいのラムネがあった。でも今残っているのは、ここにある数粒だけだ」

“satoukashi sa. kodomo no goro ha omise ni ikurademo utteita. touchuu ni ha kazoekirenaikurai no RAMUNE ga atta. demo ima nokotte iru no ha, koko ni aru suutsubu dake da”

The Japanese word satoukashi 砂糖菓子 means simply “sugar candy”.

Trains

Chapter 23 features a train journey. Train is normally densha 電車 which literally means “electric vehicle”, but the novel always uses kisha 汽車 “train, esp. long distance, but originally steam train” (ki means steam). And as it mentions a whistle, I think it is actually a steam train.
The other word used is ressha 列車 the term for “train” used by the railway companies; retsu means “file”, so it is literally a file of cars.

There are mentions of several types trains: kyuukou 急行 “express” and tokkyuu 特急 “limited express” (faster than an express) and also of the kaisatsuguchi 改札口, ticket gates.

Trains are of course universal but this terminology is quite specific to the Japanese railway system. Also, for me personally, it evokes memories of taking the train in Japan.

The hands of the old man made many things

In Chapter 24 there is a beautiful description of the hands of the old man, with a list of objects his hands had made.

I have always loved his hands, from the time I was a little girl. They could make almost anything: a toy box, a plastic model, a cage for a rhinoceros beetle, a beanbag, a desk lamp, a bicycle seat cover, smoked fish, an apple cake.

子供の頃から、わたしはおじいさんの手が大好きだった。みんなで一緒に出掛ける時は、いつでもおじいさんと手をつないだ。それはおもちゃ箱や、自動車のプラモデルや、カブト虫の飼育箱や、お手玉や、電気スタンドや、自転車のサドルカバーや、魚の燻製や、リンゴケーキや、とにかく何でも作り出すことができる。

kodomo no goro kara, watashi ha ojiisan no te ga suki datta. minna de issho ni dekakeru toki ha, itsudemo ojiisan no te wo tusnaida. sore ha omochabako, jidousha no PURAMODERU ya, KABUTOmushi no shiikubako ya, otedama ya, deki SUTANDO ya, jitensha no SADORUKABAA ya, sakana no kunsei ya, RINGOKEEKI ya, tonikaku nandemo tsukuridasu koto ga dekiru.

Some of these are very typical: カブト虫の飼育箱 kabutomushi no shiikubako, a cage for rearing a Japanese rhinoceros beetle;　お手玉 otedama (translated above as “beanbag”) are balls of colourful fabric filled with rice or beans.

There is a small phrase left untranslated:

みんなで一緒に出掛ける時は、いつでもおじいさんと手をつないだ。

minna de issho ni dekakeru toki ha, itsudemo ojiisan no te wo tusnaida

When we all went out together, I was always holding the old man's hand.

It doesn’t work so well in English because for the narrator, ojiisan is a term of endearment, and “the old man” does not carry that connotation.

All in all, there are very few explicit Japanese cultural references in the original novel, only about one for every two chapters. It’s interesting to see that the English translation keeps enough of them that the Japanese setting of the novel is still clear to the attentive reader.

The banner picture shows green tea Baumkuchen in a shop in Kyoto.

Parsnip pizza

2021-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

This is a traditional thin-crust pizza with a non-traditional topping: parsnips seasoned with tomato purée, tobanjan and garlic oil. It is easy to make but takes some time as the dough has to rise for two hours.

Fermented broad bean paste (called doubanjiang in Chinese, tobanjan in Japanese) is a key ingredient, as it adds both umami and spicyness to the parsnips. Make sure to check the ingredients as there are many types of chilli bean paste and a lot of them are not vegetarian. The Chinese characters are 豆瓣酱. If it says 辛豆瓣酱 then it will be very spicy. The brand I got is Pearl River Bridge Chilli Bean Paste.
What I call tomato purée is called tomato paste in the US.

vegetarian • 600 kcal per person

Ingredients

For two people:

for the base
- 130 g white flour (I use half “00” pasta flour and half bread flour)
- 80 ml water
- 7 g dried yeast
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 2 g salt
for the toppings
- 1 pack (250 g) of mozarella slices
- 200 g parsnips
- 100 g chestnut mushrooms
- a handful of dried funghi porcini
- 50 g grated parmezan or grana padano
- 2 tablespoons pine nuts
- 1 tablespoon tomato purée
- 1 teaspoon garlic oil
- 1/2 teaspoon tobanjan

Preparation

Making the dough

Put all ingredients in a pot and mix them, then knead until you have a smooth dough.
Let the dough rest, covered, for one hour.
Knead the though gently for a second time.
Let it rest, covered, for another hour.

The toppings

Soak the porcini mushrooms for 30 minutes in freshly boiled water.
Wash and peel the parsnips and slice them as thinly as possibly.
Cook the parsnips in the microwave at 900 W for 3 minutes 30 seconds.
Put the cooking liquid in a broad, shallow bowl and add the tomato puree, garlic oil and tobanjan. Mix into a smooth paste.
Add the cooked parsnips and mix so they are evenly covered with the seasoning.
Slice the mushrooms as thinly as possible.

Making the pizza

I make a rectangular pizza on a baking tray covered with baking paper.
I don’t use a rolling pin but flatten the dough by pushing with my fingers.
Preheat the oven at 250 ºC.
When the pizza base is ready, cover it with the mozarella slices, parsnips and mushrooms.
I have a hot air oven so I bake the pizza for 5 minutes, then turn, then bake it for another 5 minutes.
Take the pizza out of the oven.
Add the porcini mushrooms, pine kernels and grated hard cheese.
Put the pizza back in the oven and bake for another 3 minutes.

Aubergine salad

2021-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

This is a nice summery salad of aubergines, chick peas and fresh mushrooms, served with Japanese rice in a separate bowl. It’s very simple, the secret is in the dressing.

vegan gluten-free 30-minutes • 600 kcal per person

Ingredients

For two people:

Main ingredients
- 1 tin of chick peas
- 100 g fresh mushrooms
- 300 g aubergines
- 1 cup Japanese rice
Ingredients for the dressing:
- 1 tablespoon chopped ginger
- 1 tablespoon tomato puree
- 1 teaspoon tobanjan (chilli bean sauce)
- 1 tablespoon vinegar
- 1 tablespoon soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon yuzu juice
- 1 teaspoon garlic oil
- 3 tablespoons pumpkin seeds ground in a mortar
- the cooking liquid from the aubergines

Preparation

Cook the rice.
Wash the chick peas.
Wash and dice the aubergines and cook them for 12 minutes in the microwave at 900 W.
Slice the mushrooms.
Put the chick peas, cooked aubergines and mushrooms in a bowl and add the dressing. Mix well.
Serve the rice in a separate bowl.

The mystery of the giant Kannon statues

2021-05-01T00:00:00+01:00

Some time ago I stumbled across an intriguing random fact: of the fifty tallest statues in the world, fourteen are of the Buddha but eighteen are of a being called Kannon in Japanese (Guanyin in Chinese). Thirteen of these tallest statues are in Japan and twelve of these are Kannon statues (the other is a statue of the Buddha).

So who is this Kannon, and why are some many of the tall statues of it, in particular in Japan?

First of all, there is little mystery in the tall statues themselves. They are almost invariably built either as tourist attractions or as war memorials. What is more interesting though is why so many of them represent the Kannon.

Buddha and Bodhisattva

Buddhism originated in India sometime between the sixth and fourth century BCE, and spread to Japan via China in the first half of the sixth century CE. By that time, it had already developed a long tradition and forked into several branches. There are three major schools of Buddhism: Theravada, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayana.

In general in Buddhism, a bodhisattva (a sentient being, sattva , that develops enlightenment, bodhi) is any person who is on the path towards Buddhahood. Specifically in Mahāyāna Buddhism, a bodhisattva refers to anyone who has developed a mind that strives toward awakening (attaining Buddhahood), empathy, and compassion for the benefit of all sentient beings. (This is known as bodhicitta.)

Kannon

In Japanese, bodhisattva are know as bosatsu (菩薩). One bosatsu that is especially popular is Kannon (観音). The word is a contraction of Kanzeon (観世音), which in its turn is the most commonly used translation of the bodhisattva known in Sanskrit as Avalokiteśvara. Kannon is the bodhisattva associated with compassion. The name means “[The One Who] Perceives (観) the Sounds (音) of the World (世).”

The Sanskrit term was originally Avalokitasvara with the ending svara (“sound, noise”), which means “sound perceiver”, literally “he who looks down upon sound” (i.e., the cries of sentient beings who need his help). Over time, the name changed to Avalokiteśvara. The ending īśvara means “lord”, so the meaning became “lord who gazes down (at the world)”, but kannon retains the original meaning.

This bodhisattva is also referred to as Padmapāṇi (“Holder of the Lotus”) or Lokeśvara (“Lord of the World”). In Tibetan, Avalokiteśvara is known as Chenrézig and the Dalai Lama is considered the reincarnation of Chenrézig.

In summary, Kannon is the bodhisattva of infinite compassion who gazes down at the human world, hears all the cries of suffering, and works tirelessly to help those who call upon its name.

The gender of Kannon is rather vague (I will explain that below) so in what follows I will use the pronouns “they/them” to refer to Kannon.

Buddhism in Japan

Outside of Japan, Japanese Buddhism is usually associated with Zen Buddhism, but there are many different Buddhist sects in Japan, and Zen sects are actually a minority. This Tofugu article gives a good overview. The dominant form of Buddhism in Japan is Mahāyāna: of the main thirteen sects, eleven are Mahāyāna, including the three Zen sects; only the Ritsu (Theravāda) and Shingon (Vajrayana) sects are not Mahāyāna.

In Mahāyāna (and Vajrayana) Buddhism, several Buddhas are venerated that are not found in early Buddhism or in Theravada Buddhism. They are considered to be living in other realms, known as “Pure Lands” (Jōdo 浄土), and are sometimes called “celestial Buddhas” as they are not of this earth.

The most important of these is Amitābha (Amida 阿弥陀, “Buddha of Infinite Light”). This is the principal deity of worship for the Pure Land Buddhist sect and sects that derive from this tradition. Kannon is a spiritual emanation of Amida Buddha and therefore occupies a major place in the pantheon.

Kannon is mentioned in numerous Mahāyāna sutra (religious texts), but especially in Chapter 25 of the Lotus Sutra (Hokekyō 法華経). Because they are the bodhisattva of of infinite compassion, they became the favourite deity. Today, Kannon worship is very widespread and essentially non-denominational. Their statues are everywhere, and there are hundreds of pilgrimage routes.

Gender

The Lotus Sutra describes Avalokiteśvara (Kannon) as a bodhisattva who can take the form of any type of god, any type of Buddha, as well as any gender, adult or child, human or non-human being, in order to teach the Dharma to sentient beings.

Avalokiteśvara was originally depicted as a male bodhisattva and sometimes even has a light moustache. Although this depiction still exists, in modern times Kannon is more often depicted as a woman or as an androgynous figure. According to the doctrines of the Mahāyāna sūtras themselves, it does not matter whether Kannon is male, female, or genderless, as the ultimate reality is in emptiness (kū 空, śūnyatā).

Manifestations

A total of 33 different manifestations of Kannon are described in Chapter 25 of the Lotus Sutra depending on whatever a living being needs to be saved. One might think that 33 different forms would be plenty. However, when we look at the Kannon statues, we find that some are indeed part of these 33:

The Byakue Kannon (白衣観音, White-robed Kannon), “A persistent femininity clings to this kannon even though the figure is shown as a male.”

The Ryōzen Kannon 霊山観音 of Kyoto, a Byakue Kannon.
Guze (救世 , salvation or Shou 聖, holy), a male Kannon. The most famous Guze Kannon statue can be found in the Hōryū-ji Temple (法隆寺) in Nara. It was made in the image of prince Shōtoku Taishi (聖徳太子), the first great patron of Buddhism in Japan, in the early 7th Century. Many statues are copies of this one.
Gyouran (魚籃, Kannon carrying a fish basket), a female Kannon. There is an interesting story about this kannon (and the same story as a comic) and another nice one.

But there are also some that are not part of the 33 canonical ones:

Jibō Kannon (慈母, loving mother), a female Kannon holding a baby, patron of motherhood ans children (koyasu 子安), and both protect the souls of aborted or stillborn children (mizuko 水子). Despite not being in the canon, this is a very popular Kannon.

The Jibō Daikannon of Aizu.
Heiwa Kannon (平和 eternal piece), usually male or androgynous, to to pray for world peace and commemorate the war dead. Most of these were built in the 1950s but an interesting example from 1997 is the Awaji Heiwa Kannon. Some of the Kannon dedicated to world piece are Byakue, like the Ryōzen Kannon above and the Ofuna Kannon in Kamakura.
Maria Kannon (マリア観音, Virgin Mary), a female Kannon. Christianity was banned in Japan during the Tokugawa Era (1615-1867). In the 17th century, the Japanese crypto-Christians created statues of the Virgin Mary disguised as Kannon. These effigies, called Maria Kannon, looked like Jibō Kannon but they were venerated by the Christians silently praying to Mother Mary. Many of the statues had a Christian icon hidden inside the body or in the artwork.

References

I consulted many references for this post but these are the most noteworthy:

The banner picture is a detail of the Ryozen Kannon (霊山観音) in Kyoto.

Four portraits

2021-04-10T00:00:00+01:00

I made a series of four portraits based on a scene from the 2015 movie “海街 diary” (umimachi diary) by Hirokazu Kore-Eda, called “Our Little Sister” in English. The movie is based on a manga from 2007 of the same name by Akimi Yoshida (吉田秋生) [1]. The title means “diary of a seaside town”. The seaside town in the story is Kamakura (鎌倉市), an ancient capital of Japan on the Pacific coast. The banner picture shows a view over the town which I took in 2018.

Illustration by Akimi Yoshida for the first chapter of her manga Umimachi Diary

The manga and film tell the story of four sisters: after the funeral of their estranged father, the three Koda sisters Sachi, Yoshino and Chika invite their younger half-sister Suzu to come and live with them at the old family home they share in Kamakura. The film covers a year in Suzu’s life and the portraits are from a scene in summer at the end of that year.

The film is not so much about the sisters as about how things change with the passage of time, and that passage of time is beautifully suggested in the manga as well as in the movie through subtle references to the seasons. The story starts out in late summer (late August or early September) with the sound of the cicadas: the manga’s first chapter is called semijigure no yamu koro (蝉時雨のやむ頃) which means “the time when the chorus of the cicadas stops” (semi means cicada and jigure is literally “rain shower”). Suzu moves in with the sisters after the traditional Buddhist 49-day period of mourning (chuin, 中陰) for her father’s death, so by then it is early autumn. A bit later, when she joins the local soccer team, the colourful maple leaves (kouyou, 紅葉) show us it’s late autumn, and later yet the sisters are huddled around the kotatsu (a low table with an electric heater attached underneath) in the deep of winter. Then the cherry blossoms (sakurabana, 桜花) herald spring, and the hydrangeas mark the rainy season (tsuyu, 梅雨). At the end of this, the sisters pick the green plums from the plum tree in the garden to make plum wine, and then summer comes, with the fireworks (hanabi, 花火).

The scene I have chosen for the portraits is when the sisters are having their own fireworks in their garden.

The senkō hanabi scene from the movie "Our Little Sister"

I like it because they are all absorbed in the sparklers; because of the yukatas (summer kimonos) they are wearing for the occasion, which give the scene a timeless quality and provide interesting graphical patterns; and because of the reflection of the light from the sparklers on their faces.

The sparklers are called senkō hanabi (線香花火, literally “incense-stick fireworks”). They date back to the Edo period (17th century) and are quite sophisticated:

“Well manufactured senkō hanabi are renowned for having 5 phases in the course of its life: birth, infancy, youth, middle age, and old age. In the birth phase, the firework composition burns to leave a wire-like cinder. In the infancy phase, the cinder gradually shrinks and produces a fireball that increases in brilliancy. The youth phase then displays large pine needle shaped sparks that project from the surface of the fireball. Next, in the middle age phase, many small sparks are emitted from the fireball. Then finally, energy fades in the old age phase as the sparks die down and become willow-like.” [2].

That same paper [2] makes the following observation on watching senkō hanabi:

“Watching senkō hanabi is like a meditation, mesmerising and calming, allowing thoughts and earthly worries to be temporarily cast aside. Although senkō hanabi only lasts approximately 20 seconds, its brief existence manages to express the sentiment and emotion of an entire life. As the senkō hanabi briefly transitions through each phase, comparisons can accordingly be drawn to the various transitions of one’s own life. The observer is reminded of the rapid change and development in birth and infancy; the vivacious energy of youth; refinement in middle age; and finally, withering in old age. Moreover, the irregular nature of the sparks stresses the randomness and uncertainty of life.”

In my portraits the senkō hanabi is not visible but I wanted to capture the meditative atmosphere of the scene. When I make a portrait I want it to be as close to the photograph I start from but at the same time to reflect the subject’s character.

I used the senkō hanabi scene to make four individual portraits. The reference picture is quite small, however: if it was printed each part corresponding to a portrait would measure about 5 cm x 7 cm. The drawings are on paper of 38 cm x 56 cm. Scaling up from such a small photograph is one of the challenges.

Furthermore, I like to use cold pressed watercolour paper, in this case Arches 300 g/m². This kind of paper has a very coarse grain. It contributes a lot to the texture of the final work, but on the other hand, the coarse grain imposes a limit on the precision with which details can be drawn.

Finally, I prefer to use Conté pencils, because they have a much richer, blacker tint than ordinary pencils. But they have a thick, brittle lead that can’t be sharpened to a fine point. Also, Conté pencil strokes can’t be erased. So once they have been drawn they are part of the drawing, right or not. Because of all this, the final outcome of the drawing is not entirely under my control, and I like it that way.

For the first portrait, that of Yoshino, I used only Conté pencil and Faber-Castell Graphite Aquarelle pencils, and I washed the drawing to get a deeper black. I was not entirely happy with it, mostly because of the texture of the hair and the background, although the highlights on the face had turned out the way I wanted them and I was pleased with the ginkho pattern on the yukata as well.

First portrait of Yoshino

For the portrait of Sachi, I used essentially the same approach but I decided to add a touch of blue colour to the yukata and use it for highlights as well. I used a Derwent Inktense watercolour pencil for this. Compared to other watercolour pencils, these give a much more intense colour. I rendered the background differently, more abstracted.

Portrait of Sachi

For the portrait of Suzu, I used pale pink and blue for the pattern of the yukata, and a slightly more magenta-like colour for the obi (sash), for highlights on the face and for the hairband.

Portrait of Suzu

The final portrait was that of Chika, and it was a bit more challenging because it is very dark and also more cropped than I wanted it for my composition, so I had to extend the right part of it. I again used the same blue with just a few accents of the pink. It is the most abstracted of the four portraits.

Portrait of Chika

When these three portraits were done, I was no longer satisfied with the first one of Yoshino so I redid it. The composition is different, with the figure much larger, and I changed the position of the torso so that more of the yukata is visible. I used the same Derwent Inktense blue as for the other portraits on the yukata, and the same style of background treatment.

Final portrait of Yoshino

References

Per Tiziana

2021-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

Eidon wrote a beautiful short piece called “per Tiziana”, with two different arrangements. Listening to these two quite different versions, I wondered if I could make a third arrangement.

This is again a twin post, the other version is on Eidon’s blog.

Eidon says:

“Conjure is an interesting word. It comes from Latin, from “cum iurare”, which can be translated back as “command on oath” (late 13c.) or “summon by a sacred name” (c. 1300). Indeed, my experience with composing music is often one of inverted conjuring. Inverted because I do not conjure anything – it is I that am commanded, in fact; and the sacred name, the kotodama if you like that puts me in motion and turns me into its servant, is the music theme that visits me.

That is what happened with “Per Tiziana” too. Its theme came to me and made me swear that I would serve her well. In practice, this meant that, for days and days and days, the theme of “Per Tiziana” stayed with me all the time. Although I was doing other things, the background (and often the foreground) thoughts were “per Tiziana”. In retrospective, rather than composing it, I was trying to remember it – reconstruct it…

Multiple times I tried to put it down and found myself thinking: “That’s not it”. When I finally got it (to some extent) right, I found that its decoration with other voices would take me much less than I had expected. Flute, vibraphone, alto sax, cellos, pizzicato strings, timpani, drums, and electric guitar were my initial choices. You can listen to the result here. I also produced a second take, only based on piano, timpani, and drums.

And yes I was happy with the result! I thought to myself, “This is the track that best represents me thus far”. So much so that, even after the finishing touches, I found myself still “conjured” by this track: I could still not think of anything else but her…

But dear friend Wim came to my rescue and released me from my oath! He had liked “Per Tiziana” and told me that he had a new instrumentation in mind. I was very happy of this – Wim has a special gift for instrumentations, and that was also a way to sign my contract off with that piece, in a sense.

Oh my god, by any chance did I pass on the conjuring?! I’ve just realized that! Ouch, not so nice of me…

And so Wim took over. For some reason, I had expected an instrumentation with classical music instruments, though Wim truly surprised me with something radically different. And I liked it very, very much! The new manifestation truly resonated with me, and I’m very happy of this wonderful present that Wim had for me. Thank you very much, Wim ^__^

When listening to the new instrumentation I realized that I wanted to have an extra final note to the piece.

I hope one day we may truly write a piece together from beginning to end: maybe a new piece for our Wim and Eidon album!

Wim says:

“My original idea was to try and merge both of Eidon’s versions into something new. But when I listened very carefully to both versions, I realised that wouldn’t work. Each in its own way was already complete. So I had to try and create an entirely different arrangement. I started from the original arrangement which as Eidon explained has six voices: vibraphone, two cellos, electric guitar, timpani and drums. Eidon kindly provided the MuseScore files.

As Eidon has guessed, my first attempt was an orchestral version, because I am comfortable with that: strings, cellos, bass, a clarinet for the main melody, orchestral percussion. It was easy to do and the result sounds nice enough but it did to my ears not really “work”. One issue is the note duration and range which are not a perfect fit for the string instruments. The other is more fundamental: the complex drum pattern in the second part of the piece simply does not work with a symphonic arrangement.

This got me to think about the percussion. Because it is a repetitive pattern, I wondered if it would sound good on a drum machine. For some reason – I guess by association with the band 808 State – I thought specifically of the Roland TR-808. That lead to the idea of using old synthesisers for the other voices as well. I experimented with a few and at a certain point I literally laughed out loud because the combination I hit upon worked so beautifully!

I shared a first cut with Eidon and he suggested to bring out one of the voices more. I had also commented on the note duration and he explained that the initial instrument he had chosen was a vibraphone that had large preset values for sustain/reverb. I also was not satisfied with my choice of instrument for the timpani voice, and the volume of the drumset voice.

My final arrangement is as follows: polysynth for the lead voice, synth bass 1 and 3, Moog pad, Roland Brightness from RKHive for the timpani and the TR-808 drum machine. I changed made the last note in each phrase of the main melody longer and simplified the electric guitar score a bit so that it sounded more natural for the Moog pad. I kept the percussion volume relatively low.

Eidon did a final tweak, adding an extra note to complete the piece, and we’re both very happy with the result. I really enjoy making these alternative arrangements of Eidon’s work, so really it is I who should thank him for creating these wonderful pieces. “

Here is the finished track. We hope you like it!

Your browser does not support the audio element.

The track is also available:

on Funkwhale
on Peertube
on Youtube <!–

–>

Ukifune

2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ukifune (浮舟) is a song from 2002 by the Japanese band GO!GO!7188 and one of my all-time favourites. It is a song about broken love, with very poetic lyrics inspired by story from very long ago.

春の匂いも芽吹く花も立ちすくむあたしに君を連れてはこない

haru no nioi mo mefuku hana mo
tachisukumu atashi ni kimi wo tsurete wa konai

“When spring comes, I’ll still be frozen and the scents and budding flowers won’t bring you back to me.”

夏が来る頃は明け方の雨静かに寄り添って　かけら拾い集める

natsu ga kuru koro wa akegata no ame
shizuka ni yorisotte kakera hiroiatsumeru

“When summer comes, the rain at dawn.
Snuggling quietly, I gather up the fragments”

秋が過ぎたらきっとあたしはのびた黒い髪を切り落としてしまう

aki ga sugitara kitto atashi wa
nobita kuroi kami wo kiriotoshite shimau

“When autumn is gone I’m sure I will
finally cut off my long black hair.”

愛しい人よ離れ顔なんて　3日もすりゃすぐに忘れてしまったただ染みついて消えないのは煙草の匂い

itoshii hito yo hanare kao nante mikka mo surya sugu ni wasurete shimatta
tada somitsuite kienai no wa tabako no nioi

“Darling, you’ve been gone only three days and already I have totally forgotten your face.
All that remains is the ever-lingering smell of your cigarettes.”

君を待つ日々は足りない　切ない　鳴り止まない不協和音が響き合って

kimi wo matsu hibi wa tarinai setsunai nariyamanai
fukyouwaon ga hibikiatte

“Waiting for you day after day —
it’s futile — heartrending — incessantly ringing —
a crashing dissonance.”

それがあたしの枯れない　溶けない　鳴り止まない孤独の唄　来来来…

sore ga atashi no karenai tokenai nariyamanai
kodoku no uta rai rai rai

“That is my unwithering, unthawing, incessantly ringing
song of solitude.
Come, come, come!”

かすかな別れを漂わすこともなく足音は突然　絶切れたあぁ悲しくも美しき白い冬

kasuka no wakare wo tadayowasu koto mo naku
ashioto wa totsuzen tachikireta
aa kanashiku utsukushiki shiroi fuyu

“Without even a faint hint of parting —
The sound of footsteps suddenly cut off.
Ah, the sad and beautiful white winter.”

会えるものならば他に何も望まない降り積もるは　あの日も雪

aeru mono naraba hoka ni nanimo nozomanai
furitsumoru wa ano hi mo yuki

“If I could only meet you I would not wish for anything else.
The snow was falling thickly that day.”

君を待つ日々は足りない　切ない　鳴り止まない不協和音が響き合ってそれがあたしの枯れない　溶けない　鳴り止まない孤独の唄　来来来…

kimi wo matsu hibi wa tarinai setsunai nariyamanai
fukyouwaon ga hibikiatte
sore ga atashi no karenai tokenai nariyamanai
kodoku no uta rai rai rai

“Waiting for you day after day —
it’s futile — heartrending — incessantly ringing —
a crashing dissonance.
That is my unwithering, unthawing, incessantly ringing
song of solitude.
Come, come, come!”

The title of the song, “Ukifune”, is the name of a character in the “Tale of Genji” (Genji monogatari,源氏物語), a masterpiece of Japanese literature from the early 11th century (Heian period), written by the noblewoman and lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu.

The word ukifune (浮舟) is the title of the chapter where the story starts. It can be translated as “A Drifting Boat”. As is common in the Tale of Genji, the name of the chapter is used as a nickname for the character. In this case, the title and the character’s name were based on a poem she wrote in which she calls herself “a drifting boat” to express her uncertainty and inner turmoil:

橘の小島の色は変はらじをこの浮舟ぞ行方知られぬ

tachibana no
kojima no iro ha
kawaraji wo
kono ukifune zo
yukue chirarenu

“The enduring hue of the Isle of Orange Trees may well never change, yet there is no knowing now where this drifting boat is bound”

The poem is written in winter, with all the land around Uji deeply covered in snow. With her suitor, they have gone out on the Uji river in small boat and moored at the Isle of Orange Trees.

Later in the story, when she finds herself caught between two powerful suitors, and it seems that whichever one she choses it will end badly, Ukifune tries to drown herself in the Uji river. She fails and becomes a nun. In the Heian period, when noble women became nuns, they would cut off their very long hair. And in the tale, it is indeed autumn by the time Ukifune becomes a nun.

The song has many other classical references, such as the use of 〜き adjectives (美しき) and the on reading (i.e. the reading derived from the original Chinese proncunciation of the character) rai of 来 (“come”) used as refrain: rai rai rai. The word for “song”, uta, is usually written as 歌 but here as 唄, this more specifically refers to songs accompanied my shamisen, the traditional three-stringed lute. The song’s mode and melody reflects those traditional songs. It is often said that GO!GO!7188’s music is influenced by the enka musical genre, but for this song it is probably more correct to say that it is influenced by the traditional music that gave rise to enka. And although lost love and loneliness are typical enka themes, they are universal themes that are also very common themes in the Tale of Genji.

The song starts with a huge reverberating chord, reminiscent of the sound of a biwa (琵琶), a traditional type of lute that in the Heian period was played at the Imperial court.

Then follow three verses that repeat the same melody (A) in crescendo. The first word of each verse is a season: spring 春, summer 夏 and autumn 秋. Then a two new melodies (B/C) are introduced, and a new lyrical theme: the verses address the departed lover. This is followed by the refrain, the single character 来 rai (“come”) repeated over and over again.

Then follows and instrumental version of A, followed by a dissonant part reflecting the dissonance in the lyrics. After this interlude comes a verse in melody B that is the heart of the song, the moment when the lover left. Its final word is “winter” 冬. The following verse in melody C ends in “snow” 雪 and blends into a repetition of the first verse in melody C and the refrain D: the single syllable ki is both use as the last syllable of the verse, the ki of yuki (“snow”) and the first syllable of the next verse, kimi (“you”).

The references to the seasons in the song reflect the important role the seasons play in traditional Japanese culture. The Tale of Genji is full of allusions to the seasons, season-specific rituals and poetry. Traditional Japanese poetry (waka) is also often inspired by the seasons, I discussed some of them in my article “The Beautiful Japan of the Mind”.

The banner picture of this article is the statue of Ukifune in Uji, near Kyoto, where the story is set. It is a picture I took during a visit in the summer of 2017.

Here is a live version of the song, recorded at Nihon Budokan in 2005.

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The Beautiful Japan of the Mind

2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Yasunari Kawabata (川端康成) was the first Japanese novelist to receive the Nobel prize in Literature. I had read his novel “The Master of Go” (名人) and recently I listened to the BBC dramatised version of “A thousand cranes” (千羽鶴). This led me to look up his Nobel lecture “Japan, the Beautiful and Myself” and it made a great impression on me, in particular his discussion of poems by Zen Buddhist monks.

The English translation by the eminent Edward Seidensticker is excellent, but inevitably some features of the original get lost in translation. This is why I prefer to attempt to read the original Japanese text. The Nobel Prize site provides a Japanese version of the lecture but unfortunately it is a series of images of handwritten text. The handwriting is incredibly regular but the images have such a low resolution that the text is very hard to read. Because of the poor quality, to read it I first created a readable version of the Japanese text.

There have been two other Japanese Nobel laureates, Kenzaburo Oe and Kazuo Ishiguro (who was born in Japan but moved to the UK at the age of five). Both these authors wrote and delivered their lectures in English, so there is no original Japanese version. Kenzaburo Oe discusses Yasunari Kawabata’s lecture in his own Nobel lecture, titled “Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself”, a clear reference to the title of Kawabata’s lecture:

“Kawabata Yasunari, the first Japanese writer who stood on this platform as a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, delivered a lecture entitled Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself. It was at once very beautiful and vague. I have used the English word vague as an equivalent of that word in Japanese aimaina. This Japanese adjective could have several alternatives for its English translation. The kind of vagueness that Kawabata adopted deliberately is implied in the title itself of his lecture. It can be transliterated as ‘myself of beautiful Japan’. The vagueness of the whole title derives from the Japanese particle ‘no’ (literally ‘of’) linking ‘Myself’ and ‘Beautiful Japan’.”

“The vagueness of the title leaves room for various interpretations of its implications. It can imply ‘myself as a part of beautiful Japan’, the particle ‘no’ indicating the relationship of the noun following it to the noun preceding it as one of possession, belonging or attachment. It can also imply ‘beautiful Japan and myself’, the particle in this case linking the two nouns in apposition, as indeed they are in the English title of Kawabata’s lecture translated by one of the most eminent American specialists of Japanese literature. He translates ‘Japan, the beautiful and myself’. In this expert translation the traduttore (translator) is not in the least a traditore (betrayer).”

I will come back to Oe’s views on Kawabata’s lecture later.

The Nobel lecture by Kazuo Ishiguro is also very much worth reading. I like in particular his description of his realisation that “his” Japan is a mental construct:

“I was starting to accept that ‘my’ Japan perhaps didn’t much correspond to any place I could go to on a plane; that the way of life of which my parents talked, that I remembered from my early childhood, had largely vanished during the 1960s and 1970s; that in any case, the Japan that existed in my head might always have been an emotional construct put together by a child out of memory, imagination and speculation. And perhaps most significantly, I’d come to realise that with each year I grew older, this Japan of mine — this precious place I’d grown up with — was getting fainter and fainter.”

I have always been convinced that any place we visit, or a place where we come from but no longer live, is essentially a place “of the mind”, and that is why everyone’s experience of visiting the same place is so different. Our minds best retain the memories that made the strongest impressions on us, and what these are is different for everyone.

I have been to Japan several times, twice for visits of several months. During these visits I’ve worked with researchers at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute of Kyoto University, and explored the temples and shrines of Kyoto. Kawabata’s views and ideas resonate with me because they are close to my “Japan of the mind”.

Source text and translation

Spelling

Kawabata was born in 1899 and received the Nobel prize in 1968. This means that he learned to write in the period between 1900 and 1946 when the usage of kana was based on historical principles, i.e. they reflected the historical pronunciation rather than the actual one. For example, the verb iru “to be” was written in hiragana as ゐる (wiru) rather than いる (iru). The noun kao “face” was written かほ (kaho) rather than かお (kao). In general, many kana writings used the “h”+vowel (ha, he etc.) and “w”+vowel (wo,wi etc.) were in modern Japanese only the vowel is used; for some words, what is now ka was kwa, written くわ. Other difference were the spelling やう (yau) instead of よう(you), せう(seu) instead of しょう (shou) and similar.

In 1946 the kana spelling was reformed into the simpler, pronunciation-orientated spelling that is still the standard in modern Japanese. Many kanji were also simplified. Nevertheless, Kawabata’s Nobel lecture is largely written in the old spelling, and uses some of the old-style kanji (旧漢字, kyuukanji). This gives the text a peculiar old-fashioned character that is not obvious from the translation.

Note for example the spelling of 言へる (now 言える) and してゐます (now しています) in one of the first sentences in the essay, a commentary on a poem by the Zen poet Myoe:

明恵のこの歌には、歌物語と言へるぼどの、長く詳しい詞書きがあって、歌のこころを明らかにしてゐます。

Myoe no kono uta ni wa, utamonogatari to iheru hodo no, nagakukuwashii kotobagaki ga atte, uta no kokoro wo akiraka ni shitewimasu.

The limits of translation

As Kenzaburo Oe pointed out above, exact translation is impossible.

For example, Kawabata comments that the explanatory note (kotobagaki, 詞書き ) by Myoe on this own poem is so long and detailed that it could be said to be an utamonogatari(歌物語, meaning a “short Heian period tale in the form of a poem”), a level of detail not present in the translation which simply says:

“The second poem bears an unusually detailed account of its origins, such as to be an explanation of the heart of its meaning”

In the essay, many poems are quoted, most of them by Buddhist monks. The translator, Edward Seidensticker, received help from a Buddhist scholar (Jikai Fujiyoshi,藤吉慈海) for the quotations and references. They had to translate them in a great rush as Kawabata was still writing his lecture in his hotel on the morning that he had to deliver it.

In the original Japanese text, the old poems are written in classical Japanese (kobun, 古文) which is a very different language from modern Japanese, with different grammar and vocabulary. As it is impossible to render this in English, we get a modern translation instead. To a Japanese reader, the poems therefore have an entirely different feeling, probably similar to what an English reader experiences with the original Beowulf, or a Dutch speaker reading Karel ende Elegast. This is of course not essential to the message of the lecture but it illustrates the difficulties facing the translator.

Zen Buddhism and poetry

Most of the poems quoted are tanka, (短歌 meaning “short poem”), a poem consisting of 31 mora in five units, usually following a 5-7-5-7-7 pattern of mora per unit. For example, the first poem (written here a unit per line to show the structure) is

春は花
夏ほととぎす
秋は月
冬雪ざえて
冷しかりけり

“In the spring, cherry blossoms, in the summer the cuckoo.
In autumn the moon, and in winter the snow, clear, cold.”

and the second one

雲を出でて
我にとちなふ
冬の月
風や身にしむ
雪や冷めたき

“The winter moon comes from the clouds to keep me company.
The wind is piercing, the snow is cold.”

What I find most interesting is Kawabata’s observation on this second poem. Myoe provided the following note about his inspiration for this poem:

“When the hour of the midnight vigil came, I ceased meditation and descended from the hall on the peak to the lower quarters, and as I did so the moon came from the clouds and set the snow to glowing. The moon was my companion, and not even the wolf howling in the valley brought fear. “

Kawabata says:

“My reason for choosing [this poem] has to do with its remarkable gentleness and compassion. Winter moon, going behind the clouds and coming forth again, making bright my footsteps as I go to the meditation hall and descend again, making me unafraid of the wolf: does not the wind sink into you, does not the snow, are you not cold? I choose the poem as a poem of warm, deep, delicate compassion, a poem that has in it the deep quiet of the Japanese spirit.”

Kawabata further discusses a particular poem that is very easy to understand, but nevertheless loses a lot in translation, because the visual effect and structure are untranslatable:

あかあかやあかあかあかやあかあかやあかあかあかやあかあかや月

aka aka ya
aka aka aka ya
aka aka ya
aka aka aka ya
aka aka ya tsuki

Notice that even this poem is a tanka! The translation is

“Bright, bright, and bright, bright, bright, and bright, bright.
Bright and bright, bright, and bright, bright moon.”

Kawabata observes:

“Seeing the moon, he becomes the moon, the moon seen by him becomes him. He sinks into nature, becomes one with nature. The light of the “clear heart” of the priest, seated in the meditation hall in the darkness before the dawn, becomes for the dawn moon its own light.”

Zen monks like Dogen and Myoe spent a lot of their time in meditation. As a result, they were able to live as much in the present as possible and to have as little sense of self as possible.

Dogen and Myoe lived in the 13th century. The final poem I want to highlight is the deathbed poem of the priest Ryokan who lived much later (1758-1831):

形見として何か残さん舂は花山ほととぎす秋はもみぢ葉

“What shall be my legacy? The blossoms of spring,
The cuckoo in the hills, the leaves of autumn.”

Kawabata says

“In this poem, as in Dogen’s, the commonest of figures and the commonest of words are strung together without hesitation — no, to particular effect, rather — and so they transmit the very essence of Japan.”

and further

“Ryokan pursued literature and belief in the benign spirit summarized in the Buddhist phrase “a smiling face and gentle words”. In his last poem he offered nothing as a legacy. He but hoped that after his death nature would remain beautiful. That could be his bequest.”

The phrase “a smiling face and gentle words” is a “four-kanji idiom” (yojijukugo,四字熟語), pronounced as wagan aigo. Its origin is from a Buddhist text called “The Sutra of Immeasurable Life”:

“With an expression of tenderness in his face and with kindness in his speech, he spoke to others in consonance with their inner thoughts.”

It carries the connotation that the bodhisattva speaks gentle words to guide people. The web site of the Honganji temple in Kyoto has a nice explanation (in Japanese).

Why did Kawabata include these poems in his lecture?

In his own Nobel lecture, Kenzaburo Oe expresses his views on the use of classical poetry in Kawabata’s lecture:

“Even as a twentieth-century writer Kawabata depicts his state of mind in terms of the poems written by medieval Zen monks. Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth. According to such poems words are confined within their closed shells. The readers can not expect that words will ever come out of these poems and get through to us. One can never understand or feel sympathetic towards these Zen poems except by giving oneself up and willingly penetrating into the closed shells of those words.”

“Why did Kawabata boldly decide to read those extremely esoteric poems in Japanese before the audience in Stockholm? I look back almost with nostalgia upon the straightforward bravery which he attained towards the end of his distinguished career and with which he made such a confession of his faith. Kawabata had been an artistic pilgrim for decades during which he produced a host of masterpieces. After those years of his pilgrimage, only by making a confession as to how he was fascinated by such inaccessible Japanese poems that baffle any attempt fully to understand them, was he able to talk about ‘Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself’, that is, about the world in which he lived and the literature which he created.”

Daffodils

2020-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

A whimsical fedi music collaboration between Eidon and Wim. This is a twin post, the other version is on Eidon’s blog.

Here is the finished track. We hope you like it!

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Eidon says:

“It all started from the title, really. “Daffodils”. Nice word, which reminds of many things – an Arcadia of beautiful flowers and their scent, or Wordsworth’s famous poem, for instance. Among the many spurious thoughts that such a word could evoke, there was one that triggered the resolve to create a piece of music from it: the presence of letters that can be interpreted as note names, together with others that can not. Of the many possible mappings, this one was chosen:

The theme of "Daddodils": ‘D’, ‘A’, ‘F’, ‘F’, rest, ‘D’, rest, rest, (rest)

where ‘real’ notes where used when a music counterpart existed, and `imaginary’ (inaudible) notes otherwise. The singular form led to 8 quavers and an easy 4/4 metre. The result was found sufficiently interesting and worth pursuing, and a composition was started from there. Three voices, initially appointed two two electric guitars and electric bass, with the theme exposed and repeated by the first guitar, soon joined by the cortege of its companions, all moving in an ostinato slow-pace.

In retrospective, it is possible that, from the very beginning, it all was leading to Wordsworth’s poem – the choice of the tempo, for instance. Whatever the actual case, at some point it became clear that the connection with “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” had to be made explicit. At first we thought to only sing the poem’s final verses; and then Wim had the great idea to recite the whole poem.

The track was created with TuxGuitar, a nice tabulature editor whose notes input interfaces include guitar fretboards. So yes all the instruments you can hear in Daffodils have been composed… on guitar ^_^. Some of the sounds were produced via the Timbres Of Heaven soundfont, while for others we used MuseScore, after importing MIDI files exported from TuxGuitar.

The TuxGuitar UI

MuseScore is much more powerful than TuxGuitar. It allows to orchestrate voices from multiple soundfonts at the same time, for instance, and to export the voices as separate audio files. Once the voices have been chosen and isolated, we used Audacity to orchestrate them together. The original TuxGuitar voices were then mixed with MuseScore voices from the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra, and the Nice Keys Suite soundfonts, plus that of a Steinway piano.

Audacity is perhaps not the best tool one could use, though it has certain valuable features. One such feature is so-called Envelope Tool: with it, it is possible to finely control the volume of each voice.

Each voice is wrapped in a “control envelope”, which changes the volume of the track proportionally to the ‘height’ of the envelope.

This allows fade-ins and fade-outs, and thus can simulate the entrance and exit of instruments. This has been used extensively in Daffodils! “

Wim says:

“Eidon wrote this great track “Daffodils” as he explained above, and he sent me a draft and asked if I could recite the verses from Wordsworth’s poem. I don’t know what he thought my voice would contribute to the work, maybe he wanted a Flemish-Scottish accent?

Eidon had in mind that I would recite the final two verses only:

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

But I misunderstood him, and I recited the entire poem. That turned out to be serendipitous, as we are both happy with the final result. But I’m running ahead of myself.

I used my laptop’s built-in mic as that is all I have. The audio quality is acceptable but far from great, so from the start I had this idea that I wanted to apply some distorting effects to the voice. I thought it might work well with the track which is quite modern and rather different from what a more conventional composer might associate with the image of daffodils.

I’d never done this before, so it was an interesting experiment. I used Audacity for the recording and for all processing.

I recorded the audio in two takes, and combined the best parts. There is nothing to say about the recording: I just read the poem out loud, at a pace that seemed natural to me.

First I improved the audio quality. I knew from past experience that a good way to do it is to apply the following effects: • Noise Reduction with default settings • Equalisation (Graphic EQ) with the “Bass Boost” preset • Compressor with default settings • Reverb with the “Vocal I” preset

I then also doubled the voice, with a very slight shift between the tracks, so there is no perceptible echo but the sounds is a little bit fuller.

Initially I had wanted to use only the vocoder. But Audacity’s Vocoder effect is not quite what I had in mind.

The default setting for the Vocoder results in a rather tame distortion. My settings are

    Distance: 50.0
    Output choice: Both channels
    Number of vocoder bands: 60
    Amplitude of original audio (percent): 100.0
    Amplitude of white noise (percent): 0.0
    Amplitude of Radar Needles (percent): 50.0
    Frequency of Radar Needles (Hz): 80.0

The result is a bit like speaking through a tube, with added radar needles, a series of short pulses which give a robotic effect.

I found that the Phaser could introduce some interesting distortions. Again, the default effect is quite tame. I used the following setting, on a separate copy of the voice track:

    Stages: 20
    Dry/Wet: 180
    LFO Frequency (Hz): 0.6
    LFO Start Phase (deg.): 50.0
    Depth: 120
    Feedback (%): 75
    Output gain (dB): -3.0

The result is a space-like oscillator sound overlaying the speech.

I was still not happy with the result so I added another copy of the voice track Reverb using the “Church Hall” preset, which gives a huge echoing sound.

I combined these three tracks with the original one, taking care that I did not entirely drown out the recitation.

I then combined this track with Eidon’s music. I tweaked the pauses between the verses to match the music and tweaked the volume of the voice here and there.

The final verses are repeated three times, because somehow I thought that fit with the music. “

Eidon says:

“No greater bias than the authors’ opinion, maybe, though we are quite pleased with the results. Music and verse dance together, and hearts with pleasure fill. Therefore, it is likely that this first move into musical/poetical co-creation shall be followed by new experiments soon! “

The track is available on:

Our album “Daffodils and Other Flowers” is available on Funkwhale.it.

“Daffodils” and “Daffodils and Other Flowers” is © 2020 Eidon and Wim. https://octodon.social/@wim_v12e, Eidon@tutanota.com.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Quick & Tasty

Shanghai Express

Why I love this film

The actresses

The drawing

Trial drawings: portraits of Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich

The large drawing: Hui Fei and Shanghai Lily

References

Further reading

The Island where Red Spider Lilies Bloom

What others have said

The story

Language in the novel

Three languages

kanji or no kanji ?

The noro

umi

yona

The kamiuta

The queen of heaven

Plants

higanbana

Other medicinal plants

Play

Rituals

Vegetation

Food plants

Conditions for Utopia

Spring in a small town

About the characters

The drawings

The ink

A trial drawing: a portrait of Yuwen

The second drawing: Yuwen and Liyan

The actors

Liyan

Yuwen

The director’s aesthetic views

Filming during the Second Sino-Japanese War

The era and location

The making of the masterpiece

References

Further reading

Yokohama kaidashi kikou

Why it is a good story to read now

Why I like it

Robots that are forever young

Coffee and the state of the world

The Taapon and the other Alpha

Further reading

Onigiri (Japanese style rice balls)

Ingredients

Preparation

Green beans with paneer in tomato sauce

Ingredients

Preparation

The age of bloom

A novel

A song

The drawings

The stair scene

The taxi scene

The small mystery of the Chinese inkstick

The history

The making

The poetry

The background

Sweet red bean paste on toast

Ingredients

Preparation

Pasta with carrots and mung beans

Ingredients

Preparation

Midnight in Tokyo Story

The drawing

Tokyo Story

Starting material

Selecting the text

The promotion text

The most memorable lines