nnozomi

Reading The Tempest with yaaurens and company; I think it’s the first time I’ve read it through. I was Sebastian, who is a minor conspirator nobody’s ever heard of and gets some remarkably good lines (“He receives comfort like cold porridge,” “[in response to “He misses not much”] No; he doth but mistake the truth totally,” “Thou dost snore distinctly; there’s meaning in thy snores”). The play also inevitably brings to mind Jason of Jason and the Bard, dreaming up a quaint device to make the banquet vanish, and of course Antonia Forest’s production—Ginty finding Ferdinand interesting only when he’s played by Patrick (not unreasonably, I think), Lawrie relishing Caliban’s most colorful speeches, Miranda longing for Jan as Prospero and making Nicola laugh with her line readings, and then her eerie, wistful “…were I human.”

Went to graduation at the nighttime junior high (from which you graduate after you acquire a certain number of credits, not a certain number of years; many people take five or six years or more and that’s fine). Nine people graduating: a big cheerful young Nepali guy, an equally big cheerful fortyish Japanese lady, and seven middle-aged to elderly Korean ladies, at least one in her eighties. C, the Japanese lady, has a son in his late teens who graduated from the same nighttime junior high school the previous year; he was there to cheer his mom on, and she will be following him to nighttime high school, as will M, who is in her late fifties or sixties, quiet and modest and very bright. They were both in snazzy skirt suits; several of the other women had on glorious chima chogori. Lots of enthusiastic applause and speeches, singing the school song and also 乾杯, not to be confused with its Chinese counterpart 干杯 lol (although I think the Chinese one would work as a graduation song too!). Curiously, there were very few family members there apart from C’s son F; I wonder how many of the older Korean women were only able to start school once their husbands were out of the picture.

The nighttime junior high is in a neighborhood with a skyrocketing Vietnamese population (judging from the fact that every time I go there there’s a new Vietnamese restaurant or grocery); since I won’t be back there for a few months I took the opportunity to go into a little café and buy a couple of banh mi for dinner. Immediate positive impression because the song playing when I went in was 小幸运! (not Bai Yu’s version, but still). There was a bookshelf behind the cash register containing the complete Harry Potter series (I know, but) in both Japanese and Vietnamese. The sandwiches were also pretty good—one roast pork and one ham-and-fried-egg, with all the tasty trimmings (although my idea of a good sandwich is one with just barely enough bread to retain its structural integrity, the bread is always too thick for me regardless of what kind it is, oh well).

It's high school baseball time and I have been collecting the most remarkable names among the players, as usual; this season’s bunch includes 慈愛久 (Jake), 満詩 (Miuta), 空飛 (Takato) and his teammate 蒼海 (So), whose “sky and sea” combination I like; 覇 (Howl, I am not kidding, a) how do you get that pronunciation from the character, and b) are his parents fans of DWJ and/or Ghibli); 芽空 (Hisoka, God knows how), and 夢生愛 (Muua, poor kid), whose older brothers are 飛美希 (Hibiki) and 輝夢 (Kiramu). It’s not even that none of these are nice names, they’re lovely! If not necessarily what you’d expect from tanned crewcut kids whose main preoccupation is getting to first base. Just, parents all, please think of your kid having to spend his whole life explaining how to spell and/or pronounce his name!

Music for today: something I came across at random on YouTube, a concerto for flute and flute orchestra. The piece itself isn’t all that exciting, but the sound of so many flutes together is fantastic, mellow and melting and cool as water, why aren’t there more pieces for this kind of group?
Also listening to Seong-Jin Cho play the Chopin Scherzos, just dazzling.

Y’s project of getting me to watch 1980s anime movies continues; this time it was Oshii Mamoru’s Patlabor, which was really surprisingly good. Not as pretty visually as the Gundam ones, on the whole, but (except for some comic distortion here and there) realistic in a way that makes you feel you’re watching live-action postwar Japan with big robots, including wonderful visual scenes of ordinary-Showa-era downtowns and abandoned areas. There’s a lot less in the way of big robot fights than in Gundam, and the ones they do have are significantly plot-related as opposed to “big battle scenes are fun” (sorry, Gundam, I’m oversimplifying, but still); the whole thing is almost like a murder mystery in the way they gradually work out what’s happening and why and how to stop it, it’s fascinating. Also, nobody dies! I was sure Captain Gotoh was going to be a dead mentor guy, having made his stirring speech and gone off on his own into the storm, but nope, he was fine. Shinohara the male lead is actually not nearly as annoying as he might be, and again there are more women and less fanservice than I would have expected from the eighties—Izumi is fine too (and I do like it that she’s the pilot and Shinohara is the data guy), but I love Nagumo and her ponytail and her professionalism.

I finished reading The People at No. 1 Siwei Street (or rather I finished reading the Japanese edition; now I have a copy of the Chinese original from the library which I am trying to work my way through before I have to return it. It is mostly not hard to follow, except reading in 繁体字 gives me a headache; my brain has no problem reading 历史 as lìshǐ, but it insists on reading 歴史 as rekishi, and as for something like 號, my brain wants to know why I’m suddenly reading something published before the war (this book is from 2023). Oh well, if I lived in Taiwan for a while I’d get used to it). It was a lot of fun, with very memorable characters (including a Jiajia whom I keep picturing as the one from Guardian, since she’s happy and feisty, even though this one is explicitly described as strongly featured, beautiful, and very tall, plus she’s 家家 instead of 佳佳, but still). Happy ending allowing for a sad flashback which I still don’t understand in full, other than as a way to examine late-twentieth-century Taiwanese sociopolitical history through the relationship of two not-quite-cousins who hate each other but have a close bond). I would love to make an English translation and may play with one, but it really should be done by someone who can read the original fluently and really knows from Taiwan.
Also reading The Luka/Chika Sisters by Nagano Mayumi, an old favorite who likes to play around with gender and sexuality in interesting, weird, low-key ways; will report back.

Photos: Magnolia, forsythia, some things that are probably not pink lilies-of-the-valley, and some early cherry blossoms. The most unexpected vending machine I’ve seen yet, with flavors from dark chocolate to raspberry, pistachio, and yogurt. Scenes from a recent day trip, including three gorgeous vessels, holding respectively sake, abalone stew, and the most delicious yokan I’ve ever tasted, containing raisins, figs, and apricots. (One of the deer around here, not pictured, is recently said to have wandered about 30km to our city to prowl around eating people’s gardens; maybe even deer get bored in the countryside?).

Be safe and well.

I lost most of this week to an atmospheric-pressure headache, the usual “not bad enough to put off things I have to do (like meet deadlines) but bad enough that I can’t enjoy doing things I want to do,” ugh. Still, if it’s the worst health problem I have in middle age I should be relieved, knock wood. (I went to the doctor for an MRI a few years back and they said “oh, your brain is fine, your neck is just fucked up, sorry about that.”) Catching up now, and grateful for everyday things.

Instead of a Jiang Dunhao song this time around, here’s one by one of his brothers: Li Hao’s I should be with you is absolutely haunting for me, in all senses, the chorus just gets me where I live. Also, listen to this song without checking the singer names and tell me whether you think you’re hearing two women, two men, a man and a woman, or what?

Still reading The People at No. 1 Siwei St.; there are definitely lesbians, along with non-Taipei regionalisms (the characters come from Taichung and Tainan and Chiayi and Taitung) and delicious-sounding food and a grad student who writes BL novels in her spare time, and it’s a lot of fun. Maybe I will just go ahead and translate it (from the Japanese version, until I can get my hands on the original) for my own amusement? It’s a quick read, except for figuring out all the Taiwanese food names.

Elen and I have been watching season 2 of Under the Skin--about halfway through, or maybe two thirds?—and it’s very enjoyable, although maybe that’s not the word I want; it’s quite brutal, a chronicle of all the ways society finds to victimize women (and sometimes other vulnerable people, but especially women). But not completely bleak, at least not so far (we’ve counted at least two stealth-lesbian couples up to this point, both with tentatively happy endings, the scene with the wedding cake was one of the best things I’ve watched in ages). It is often stunning to look at, not that I know anything about cinematography whatsoever, and thoroughly, thoughtfully characterized down to (or especially) the one-off roles, a gold-mine of gifted middle-aged character actors of both sexes. I like Shen Yi and Du Cheng, but am not as gripped by them as I was in s1; Shen Yi as the all-knowing psychologist doesn’t really work for me, and the rest of the time he needs the services of one himself, the man has no common sense/self-preservation to the point where it’s just frustrating. (Having also encountered Shen Wei and Wu Xie along the line, I would now really like to watch a drama where the main character does have common sense and acts accordingly, i.e. throwing yourself into stupid danger is not required to move along the plot! Any recs?) My favorite regular characters remain Zhang-ju (competent older woman in a position of authority who has retained her sense of humor and looks very good in a uniform—and now we know her first name!) and Jiang Feng (straightforward loyal floppy-eared puppy). Also I was delighted that Lu Haizhou, my very favorite character from s1, showed up again briefly in s2 and was still very very Lu Haizhou—fair, stern, unemotional, and not unwilling to make enemies in the course of his duty, but also prepared to flirt outrageously with more than one of his male colleagues likewise. (Somebody please give Zhang Tao bigger roles? He still reminds me of a younger Wang Yang, and should be able to follow in his footsteps.)

Reading A Winter’s Tale with yaaurens and company; among other roles I was assigned the unspectacular-sounding Second Gentleman, who has this wonderful line: “Nothing but bonfires: the oracle is fulfilled; the king's daughter is found: such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it.”

In cooking news, I recently invented a new and sinful form of TKG. Tamago kake gohan is a Japanese diner standard of raw egg served over hot rice with soy sauce; unfortunately I won’t eat raw eggs (they’re safe to eat here, I just can’t stand the texture), so instead I started by chopping up some garlic and sautéing it in sesame oil until browned and sweet. Then I broke a couple of eggs into the saucepan and let the egg whites fold in the garlic, until the eggs were sunny-side-up with hard whites, soft yolks, and very crispy, garlic-studded bottoms and edges. Eaten over rice with a dash of soy sauce, delicious.

Sometimes I wonder why Brahms’ contemporaries/fellow composers didn’t just go “okay, forget it, I’m going off to sell insurance or run a sheep farm” or something. Listen to the quintet here, my God, it’s doing so much. (Okay, among Brahms’ contemporaries was Wagner, who wouldn’t have run out of musical confidence if God Himself came down and said “Richard, you’re not getting it,” but still.)

Photos: Lots of plum blossoms, some citrus, and some winter daphne (I have to look up the English name every time), which is boring to look at but has a lovely fragrance you’ll just have to imagine.

Be safe and well.

So it’s entrance exam time, and all the ninth-graders have Red Books (collections of past exam questions for practice, which have red covers). At the junior high school attended by some of the kids from the Saturday juku, it is apparently a thing to write each other encouraging messages on the Red Book covers, like a yearbook in advance. Most of these are very sweet. I was looking at Sakura’s while she worked her way through a practice test, noticing that one long and enthusiastic message was signed with a boy’s name and included 사랑해 at the end. “Sakura, did you know this kid is confessing to you?” “Oh, sure. He said I could rub it out if I wasn’t interested.” Since she left it there, I’m curious to know whether Yusuke-kun will have some good news after exams are over… (I still don’t know why Japanese teenagers are using Korean to say “I love you” to each other, but I think it’s another fad. Very cute regardless.)

I noticed that both Japanese and Chinese have adopted the English word “get,” but in different senses, both legit in English. Japanese uses it to mean “acquire,” usually but not always in the physical sense (Y will occasionally text me to say 苺ゲット, ichigo get, meaning he’s laid his hands on some of the hometown strawberries the supermarkets don’t sell here; I might text him back to say Kuro-chan get, meaning that I ran into Kuro-chan the cat who deigned to let me do some stroking). Chinese, on the other hand, uses it to mean “understand, empathize with, grok,” usually with the completion-complement as in “get到.” (Baidu offers sample usages as in 突然get到, to understand all at once, 永远get不到, an eternal lack of understanding, and 被get到, he gets me etc.) (Japanese also doubles the final consonant while Chinese pretty much swallows it, but that’s a thing the two languages will be 永远get不到 about each other.)

Courtesy of the farmboys I have learned that Winnie the Pooh in Chinese is 小熊维尼, Weini the Little Bear, and Tigger is 跳跳虎, bounce-bounce-tiger. (Also I did not expect to find out while looking this up that Winnie the Pooh is quasi-banned in China for use in political satire? Surprised that the farmboys were allowed to reminisce happily on camera about their favorite characters, also including 屹耳 the donkey.)

I’ve been watching little snatches of the Winter Olympics on TV while I do other things; I like all the flying events, ski jump most of all, although I can’t imagine how anyone ever makes it to Olympic level without breaking themselves into little pieces along the way. Along with everyone else in Japan I was very happy to see Rikuryu (Miura Riku and Kihara Ryuichi) win a gold in pairs skating, coming back from fifth place after their short program. Very touching and amusing that Kihara, nine years older than his partner and three times her size, is the one who bursts into tears on the spot (happy or sad) while little tiny Miura keeps her cool and comforts him.

Reading a new book by Yang Shuangzi (author of Taiwan Travelogue) called The People at No. 1 Siwei Street or words to that effect; the edition I have is a Japanese translation (also by Miura Yuko), I don’t know if there is an English version and I can’t get my hands on the Chinese original. I’m only about a third in but it is very fun, modern-era but with callbacks to the colonial period, about four young women renting rooms in an old Japanese-style house (and falling in love with each other along the way, I think, will keep you posted). Maybe I should trouble A-Pei to go out to a bookstore and send me everything by Yang Shuangzi she can lay hands on.

A new favorite and an old one: Schumann Six Canonical Studies, arranged by Debussy for two pianos, one of his love letters to Bach. Why isn’t there an orchestration of this? (I have found some chamber-music versions, but it’s not the same. Also the Pergolesi Stabat Mater, a version with soprano and countertenor that I wasn’t familiar with (and just to show that poor short-lived Pergolesi had a range, my favorite aria from his comic opera).

Y and I went up to the outdoor track one station over this morning to run for a while. He has very mild asthma and prefers to start and stop—“or I could just run slower?” “Sweetheart, you know what it’s called if you’re running slower than me? Walking.” I do have some staying power, however, and today I got through twenty laps of the little track without stopping for a break, so about 6K if my arithmetic is right. We were entertained along the way by an invasion of hiyoko-chan from the nearby nursery school, little knee-high kids in bright yellow hats, running and somersaulting and in one case meandering along hand in hand like it was a romantic date opportunity, adorable. (Their teachers wear signs on their coats saying “No photography please” in three languages, so I can’t record it for you.)

Photos: Flowers, a very patient dog outside the supermarket, an alarming bakery sign (I was good, I didn’t go up and tell them about it), actual snow on my balcony plants (a once-a-year occurrence if that), and somebody’s paper art on their doorstep, with a sign saying “Help yuorself” [sic]. I took a little tiny origami star.

Be safe and well.

It’s been shared in many places on my f-list but here again: https://www.standwithminnesota.com/ . 心疼.

Reading Cymbeline with yaaurens and company, mostly striking for the “Fear no more the heat of the sun” song—which works backward in me, calling up the books I’ve read where it’s quoted, including the chilling and well-judged use in Pamela Dean’s The Dubious Hills, and Nicola Marlow singing it and making first her mother and then herself cry with its associations of Jon and Jael.

A couple of Chinese jokes with A-Pei: she’s an expert baker who recently ventured into brownies and then into blondies, which we decided should be called 小金发 in Chinese. Also, an exchange about work thus. Me: I had to translate something about the Abominable Snowman for a psychological test of some kind, can you believe it? What is that, 雪男? A-Pei: lol, that sounds like the husband of 雪女, you know that Japanese goddess Yuki-onna? We’d say 雪怪 for the yeti. Me: somehow I don’t think Yuki-onna has plans to marry a yeti…

I learned from grayswandir that 搞掂 in Cantonese is what you say when you finish a job or a task, and was delighted to discover that the similarly used Mandarin term 搞定, which I already knew, is actually a borrowing from this Cantonese word!

Argument against machine translation #179544: Pink plastic tray with a Kitty-chan theme, which lists as its first raw ingredient 人民解放军, the People’s Liberation Army. Your country needs YOU to be transmuted into Kitty-chan!? I thought, and then figured it out… plastic --> pla --> PLA…

New musical discovery: Piano Sonata #1 by the extremely hyphenated Sophie-Carmen [Fridman-Kochevskaya] Eckhardt-Gramatté , which starts out a la maniere de Bach and very quickly gets much weirder and more Romantic, a lot of fun.

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 你要的爱, a duet with Li Hao ideal for the combination of their voices.

Once in a way I like to act like the good Japanese housewife I’m really not, and one way is to make buri daikon in the winter—yellowtail and daikon radish stewed with the classic Japanese holy trinity, or rather 3+1, of soy sauce, cooking sake, mirin, and sugar, plus ginger on top. It’s very simple and usually turns out pretty well (see photo below); Y eats most of it, because I’m cursed to like the taste and texture of fish but hate anything that might have tiny bones in it.

Last week I had two in-person events of a purely social nature in three days, which never happens. One was a girls’ night out of sorts, women from the company I used to work at (and still freelance for), some former close colleagues, including Misa who was the most patient boss I could have asked for and Yu-jie who helps me practice Chinese, as well as others I used to know and some I’d never met, about two dozen of us, mostly middle-aged, eating cheap Chinese food and drinking according to capacity and chattering. Someone got me a glass of coffee liqueur with milk which was delicious and evil and I got much tipsier than I usually do. Yu-jie and another Chinese woman, Cho-san (Zhao or Zhang but I don’t know which) and I sat around talking in two languages; Cho-san and I delighted each other because she’d heard of my farmboys and I had heard of her own recent obsession, that hockey gay romance show. (“I know I wouldn’t really meet them if I went to Canada, but I still want to go!” “I feel just the same way about going to China!”). Rina-san, the organizer, played around with the group photo we took to results as shown below (I don’t usually post my own face online but this time I feel I can get away with it, especially since the app didn’t know what to do with me and made me look East Asian like everyone else there).

The other event was lunch with my former student D; we stay loosely in touch and meet up every couple of years. As usual he did most of the talking, mostly about his work and what he hopes to do, a little about his marriage and the other kids he went to high school with and so on. It’s funny. The gap between teens and early thirties, as we were when I was teaching him high school English, is enormous; the gap between early thirties and late forties, where we are now, is a lot less momentous. We’re not the same generation, but we’ve both lived in other countries, worked various jobs, married, lost a parent, and so on, we can and do interact as fellow adults with shared experiences. At the same time, he…damn, there is no good way to say 甘える in English (or in Chinese as far as I know), he knows I’ll let him get away with things? because I was his teacher when we met, and I’ve known him since he was fifteen, more than half his life. So he can be self-centered with me in a way he might not with someone he’d met as an adult. I’m very fond of him.

Something reminded me of The Young Visiters for the first time in ages, and I looked it up on Gutenberg; didn’t reread all of it but found this delightful romantic passage from near the end. (I think I like “well some people do he added kindly” in particular, but it’s all great.)

Bernard at once hired a boat to row his beloved up the river. Ethel could not row but she much enjoyed seeing the tough sunburnt arms of Bernard tugging at the oars as she lay among the rich cushons of the dainty boat. She had a rarther lazy nature but Bernard did not know of this. However he soon got dog tired and sugested lunch by the mossy bank.
Oh yes said Ethel quickly opening the sparkling champaigne.
Dont spill any cried Bernard as he carved some chicken.
They eat and drank deeply of the charming viands ending up with merangs and choclates.
Let us now bask under the spreading trees said Bernard in a passiunate tone.
Oh yes lets said Ethel and she opened her dainty parasole and sank down upon the long green grass. She closed her eyes but she was far from asleep. Bernard sat beside her in profound silence gazing at her pink face and long wavy eye lashes. He puffed at his pipe for some moments while the larks gaily caroled in the blue sky. Then he edged a trifle closer to Ethels form.
Ethel he murmured in a trembly voice.
Oh what is it said Ethel hastily sitting up.
Words fail me ejaculated Bernard horsly my passion for you is intense he added fervently. It has grown day and night since I first beheld you.
Oh said Ethel in supprise I am not prepared for this and she lent back against the trunk of the tree.
Bernard placed one arm tightly round her. When will you marry me Ethel he uttered you must be my wife it has come to that I love you so intensly that if you say no I shall perforce dash my body to the brink of yon muddy river he panted wildly.
Oh dont do that implored Ethel breathing rarther hard.
Then say you love me he cried.
Oh Bernard she sighed fervently I certinly love you madly you are to me like a Heathen god she cried looking at his manly form and handsome flashing face I will indeed marry you.
How soon gasped Bernard gazing at her intensly.
As soon as possible said Ethel gently closing her eyes.
My Darling whispered Bernard and he seiezed her in his arms we will be marrid next week.
Oh Bernard muttered Ethel this is so sudden.
No no cried Bernard and taking the bull by both horns he kissed her violently on her dainty face. My bride to be he murmered several times.
Ethel trembled with joy as she heard the mistick words.
Oh Bernard she said little did I ever dream of such as this and she suddenly fainted into his out stretched arms.
Oh I say gasped Bernard and laying the dainty burden on the grass he dashed to the waters edge and got a cup full of the fragrant river to pour on his true loves pallid brow.
She soon came to and looked up with a sickly smile Take me back to the Gaierty hotel she whispered faintly.
With plesure my darling said Bernard I will just pack up our viands ere I unloose the boat.
Ethel felt better after a few drops of champagne and began to tidy her hair while Bernard packed the remains of the food. Then arm in arm they tottered to the boat.
I trust you have not got an illness my darling murmured Bernard as he helped her in.
Oh no I am very strong said Ethel I fainted from joy she added to explain matters.
Oh I see said Bernard handing her a cushon well some people do he added kindly and so saying they rowed down the dark stream now flowing silently beneath a golden moon.

Photos: Not a lot this time around, it’s been too cold out to photograph things. Miké-chan enjoying the sun, the front half of a gorgeous Siamese (?) cat which came and chattered at us and looked annoyed when we didn’t respond by feeding it (when humans talk to each other they get fed, don’t they?), the afore-mentioned buri daikon, a bridge and river view, my standard train-station view at sunset (I’m often in this place on the platform and I just like the natural composition it makes), and the promised view of the girls’ night out.

Be safe and well.

I’ve had a dispiriting week—nothing seriously wrong other than the usual perennial personal and global worries, just a variety of little demoralizing things—and so I am posting a bunch of silly bits of things that have been piling up.

Y and I took a walk early in January and found one of the big shrines still full of people for the New Year; we did our own 初詣 elsewhere (up in the north of the city where I used to live there’s a small shrine on a hill with a beautiful, ancient camphor tree), but we stopped at the stalls offering food outside. These included such traditional Japanese snacks as candy apples, fried chicken, and of course takoyaki, as well as corn on the cob and kebab. The corn stall was run by several Chinese ladies, one scolding another “talk Japanese in front of the customers!” and the kebab stall, as far as I could tell, by a genuine Turkish guy. Both were delicious.

Music: chestnut got me to go listen to the Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto (this one is my 偶像 Seong-Jin Cho’s version) and it’s wonderful; I need to spend a lot more time with it. Prokofiev is hit-or-miss for me but this one’s a hit.

Tickled by a Chinese song (this one, very comforting lyrics-wise) which uses the English term “happy ending” in passing, pronounced “HAPpy enDING” with a strong back-of-the-throat Chinese h sound; the English ability of Chinese singers seems to cover a range from Zhou Shen, among whose many talents is sounding like a native speaker whatever language he’s singing in, to a number of others who apparently consider consonants one hundred percent optional. Still, they’re all doing better than me singing in the shower in Chinese.

Where Japanese says “mofumofu” for petting a fluffy cat or dog, Chinese slang has “rua,” written in roman letters—you see “想rua” for something (or someone) fluffy and adorable.

In Chinese you sometimes hear 哈 (ha) at the end of a sentence, apparently in the sense of “—right?” “—okay?” “—yeah?” (It’s one of the invisible speech particles, i.e. (in non-scripted speech) subtitles sometimes don’t include it even when it’s there; 嘛 and 嘞 are others.) I’m curious if anyone has investigated whether it’s related to its soundalike, the similar English “—huh?”

My morning running course goes past a large boys’ school, and one day I encountered some of their junior high baseball team (in semi-uniform) on the uphill past the entrance, where a teacher/coach was checking off their times. Some of them were not faster than me, which means they were pretty slow. Around the corner on the flat, where the coach couldn’t see them, they slowed down to a walk/trot; I couldn’t resist teasing “don’t let this old lady beat you! 頑張って!” as I went past, and one gave me a big grin and shouted back “Thank you! 頑張ってください!”

Because Client N can’t make up their minds about terminology from one month to the next, I had to spend some time lately changing all the terms translated as “Post Type” to “Pillar Type” and I’m very sorry it wasn’t the other way around, so I could have worked from pillar to post.

Y took me to see an old Gundam movie from his childhood, prudently making me read a plot synopsis first. Gorgeous animation, they knew what they were doing in the 1980s, very strange plot (everyone is motivated by both complex political opinions and high-school-level “I’ve never forgiven him for taking my girl” or “She doesn’t get to have you!” emotions). Very good worldbuilding, both the beautifully realized settings and giving a lot of nameless characters throwaway lines that made them three-dimensional, and also thinking through things like people working at weird angles to each other in zero gravity. Speaking of which I could have done without the damn miniskirts, but that said there were more women as competent pilots, soldiers, and mechanics than I would have expected from the era. Not surprisingly I rather fell for the minor character in glasses who has his own little tiny rebellion.

Photos: Three from a New Year’s Eve visit to a temple: the raw material of mugwort mochi ready for pounding, some thousand-crane strings, and the temple roof with its sky. Also persimmons, ducks, and something pink (a rose? a camellia?). The last one is for maggie, a poster I saw in a subway station of Machida Keita warning the public not to get caught up in fraud.

Be safe and well.

Mostly an ordinary post, I didn’t mean to make it the last one of the year. I am very grateful to all my DW friends for companionship and interaction over this year as well; wishing everyone good health and good fortune all the way around in 2026, with much love.

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 少女, a cover in Chinese of an OST song from a slice-of-life Korean drama called Reply 1988, new to me but apparently very good. The song itself is sweet and gentle and sits really nicely in his voice.

Tickled that there’s a Chinese song called 夏日漱石; it took me much longer than it should have to figure out that it’s not actually named after the venerated Japanese author (whose name is 夏目漱石; spot the difference). Cheeky!

Listening to the Dvorak 8th Symphony, an old favorite which I have played more than once and listened to a zillion times. This one conductor mentioned in passing once that the development of the fourth movement feels like a war, and ever since there has been a detailed story in my head for it (timestamps for this recording, which has a score). The movement begins at 26:14, with a trumpet fanfare hinting at martial events to come; at 26:40 is the pastoral cello melody, the innocent young shepherd from the village. Happy village life continues until 29:12, when you can hear the army on the march, and from there the war begins, with more and more violent clashes until the victorious brass sounds at 30:37. At 31:08 the original cello melody returns, but it’s more wistful now, looking back on what was before things changed, especially so from 32:30 and 33:39. At 33:58 there’s a kind of coming to terms with how things are now. In the coda at 34:30 the village is happy again, but it never feels quite genuine again, especially with the frenzied trombone slide in the last few bars reminding us of what the brass can mean. …I’m sure Dvorak had nothing of the sort in mind, I don’t know where any of this comes from, it just works that way in my head!

I have slightly fallen for this Japanese professor called Ito Tsukusu (or Tsukushi, except I think that was an error, or Jinn) whom I’ve never met and probably never will; he supervised the various elvish languages for the Japanese subtitles on all the Lord of the Rings movies, and studies philology and Norse sagas and other things Tolkien would have approved of, and talks (in this very long and fascinating National Geographic article, which I won’t link here because it’s in Japanese) about getting a C.S. Lewis-esque sense of “Northernness” from the Grieg Piano Concerto as a child, and reading the Anne of Green Gables series in the original English as a sixth-grader with limited English skills and being fascinated by the language as much as the story (quoting from Anne of Ingleside, “’Transubstantiationalist,’ said Jem proudly. ‘Walter found it in the dictionary last week...you know he likes great big full words, Susan...’”) and then becoming devoted to everything Tolkien-related (and spending a year in Iceland to learn Icelandic: “…when I came back to Japan I was speaking English with an Icelandic accent and Icelandic grammar”), and now researching how Norse myths show up in manga and anime, as well as the triangulations of Tolkien in WWI with Wagner’s Ring in Japan and…I’m tempted to write to him just because.

I was rereading some of the Chalet School books online, as one does, and ran across a character quoting from their idea of a quaint old book, called Barbara Bellamy, Schoolgirl; out of curiosity I looked it up and it exists and is certainly quaint. May Baldwin, the author, wrote many other things including A Schoolgirl of Moscow, which I found on openlibrary.org and adored. Published in 1911, it describes Nina Hamilton’s eventful few months living in Russia with her businessman father, her aunt Penelope, and her maid Anna. It only kind of has a plot, which is enough to make it clear that even in 1911 it was possible to see 1917 coming on the horizon; in between conspiracies (the conspirators are young and attractive if rather obsessive), there are bits reminiscent of those interwar children’s books where Jane and Jim tour somewhere in Europe with their erudite Uncle David and learn all about the relevant history and geography (I will say that the description of Russian Orthodox Easter is genuinely moving). I like it that Nina (who starts out speaking French with all her classmates because she doesn’t know Russian and they don’t know English) takes the language seriously and learns fast (…Nina protesting against an alphabet which contained thirty-six letters and three ways of writing them, and the ‘class-lady’ insisting that it was not so bad as a word spelt one way and pronounced in two different ways, acccording to meaning, such as ‘tear,’ or spelt different ways and pronounced the same, such as ‘way,’ ‘weigh,’ ‘wae.’ I’m not sure what “wae” is doing in there.) Anna is the comic relief but also has a lot of interesting points to make for herself (demanding to have her profession changed on her passport from “maid” to “gouvernante”), and Aunt Penelope is a triumph, a classic maiden aunt but also one with her own unique opinions and, when she decides to take action, remarkable boldness and originality. “I like a woman who is ready to die for her country!” announced Miss Hamilton.

Reading Pericles with yaaurens and company; typically I got distracted by a character who literally never appears on stage and is mentioned about twice, Philoten, the daughter of hapless Cleon and villainous Dionyza, who constitutes an excuse for her foster sister Marina to be murdered because she’s not as pretty or as good at anything as Marina is. Now I want to know what Philoten thought about the whole thing! I want an AU where she and Marina get wind of Dionyza’s plans and run away together like Celia and Rosalind!

I saw a signboard the other day offering “Gee Pie hot sandwiches” and only got it when I read the extra text saying “Taiwanese-style fried chicken!” Gee Pie i.e. 鸡排 i.e. jīpái, duh. A-Pei thought this was hilarious. I tested her on the classic Japanese “G-pan” and “Y-shatsu” and confused her completely: she came back with “G胖 [G-páng/G-fat]? Y虾子 [Y-xiāzi/Y-shrimp]???” G-pan are in fact jeans (ジーンズ・パンツ [jeans pants] to ジーパン jiipan to G-pan; Y-shatsu are men’s dress shirts, ワイトシャツ [white shirt] to ワイシャツ waishatsu to Y-shatsu (and you can have a Y-shirt in any color, the “white” is no longer a meaningful descriptor). A-Pei and I decided that G胖 are the jeans we buy when we need to go up a size!

Photos: Bionic cat (no, just me being a bad photographer), kumquats and…grapefruits? pomelos? in various stages of ripening, canal trees, and seasonal reds.

Be safe and well.

Things are a little up and down, but I got two really lovely Yuletide gifts, so making sure to note them here: What Abigail Did When She Housesat, a Rivers of London fic with wonderful Abigail and Indigo and an absolutely inspired original character of sorts creating the plot, and Names Give Us Away, which is exactly what I wanted with regard to Rachel Abramoff at the Crater School. Delighted with both of them <3 <3 <3
Best mid-holiday-or-otherwise wishes to everyone!

Good wishes and hugs as wanted to people on my f-list (and others too!) who are having a hard time right now; a lot of people seem to be sick and stressed, even aside from the usual global issues.

More adventures with Kuro-chan the cat, no photo this time: I went past the park gates one evening to find Kuro-chan curled up on the wall outside, so naturally I stopped to say hello. Me: aw, your fur is so cold, 小冷猫猫, let me pick you up-- Kuro-chan: [hiss, growl, snap] Me: okay okay, I get it! Kuro-chan: [looks around, stretches, jumps off the wall to suri-suri around my ankles] Mrrowr? Me: …okay, if you say so? Kuro-chan [contentedly settles into my arms to relax langorously throughout the very short trip across the street to their putative actual home, while being stroked and crooned at in whatever language came into my head]. Cats.

I was thinking about what my family always called “household words” meaning phrases either from books/movies/etc. or heard in real life which we started using on a regular basis. Five cents, please (courtesy of Lucy van Pelt the psychiatrist, also allowing me to link my favorite Peanuts strip of all time here); long time no interface, I have no idea where this one came from or if anyone else says it, but I use it with online friends often; that’s life on a crocodile isle (from T.S. Eliot, sometimes used in full with “You see this egg? You see this egg?” too, I say it to myself when frying eggs); Study now, dance later. Plato AD 61, a graffito my mom saw once, which we use as shorthand for “get down to it”; after the opera—my dad ran a semi-professional opera company in his spare time, and was always exceptionally busy with rehearsals in the last few weeks before a performance, so that any normal household duties would be postponed until “after the opera,” a time sooner but not much more definite than the twelfth of never. What do you guys have of this kind?

I posted my Yuletide fic, considerably later than I’d planned but well before the deadline; it could still use (and will hopefully get) a brisk edit, but I think it hangs together. Big relief! Knock wood I will manage to write a couple of short treats before the 25th, we’ll see.

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: a couple of new ones from a music program, 好盆与 and 小孩与我, not all that exciting musically but fun to watch and listen to, the former in particular has a couple of really lovely vocal moments.

It’s the season when vending machines in Japan offer hot drinks of all kinds; many varieties of coffee and tea, to begin with. I’m not much of a coffee drinker except when very sleep-deprived, so I favor 焙じ茶 or roasted green tea (I also like to make it from teabags at home and soak dried fruit in it as a late-night snack). Corn tea is also much rarer but delicious (I was wondering if cornsilk tea, known in both Korean and Japanese as “corn beard tea,” is correspondingly 玉米胡茬茶 in Chinese…). I love hot chocolate, but vending machine cocoa is usually repulsive, basically hot brown water full of sugar and chemicals. Other standards include corn soup (with corn kernels in), お汁粉 hot sweet red-bean porridge, and Hot Lemon (just what it sounds like, hot flat lemon soda with honey, stickily sweet but very satisfying on a cold day). The less standard offerings are getting weirder and weirder every year, this year I took some notes: miso soup with clams, yukkejang soup with rice, sundubu soup with tofu, extra-fancy corn soup scented with truffles (at an extra-fancy price), Starbucks caramel macchiatos, and “milkshakes,” which as far as I can tell are hot sweet slightly thickened milk with caramel?

The download problem never ends! cobalt.tools was so great and now it’s not; it doesn’t do YouTube any more, which is YouTube’s fault, of course (and I’m still not sure of a decent YouTube downloader, none of them seem actually safe?) and now cobalt.tools won’t recognize bilibili URLs any more either, although it says it should work. And you can’t ask for support help with error messages without signing up to a github account, and… (Yes, it’s a free service! I would be happy to pay them some money and get some support in the normal way!) oh dear.

Rereading Melissa Scott’s Dreaming Metal, the second volume of her Dreamships SF duology (the eponymous first volume is also very good). I really love these, they are far and away my favorites of anything Melissa Scott has written. They are about, among other things, AI but not in the way we think of AI right now (although the first volume bears a little more resemblance). The worldbuilding is wonderful—everything is in there, technology and language and clothes and entertainment and politics and ethnic groups and class issues and public transit and food and jobs and religion and family structures and God knows what else, but it’s not infodumpy, you just get to live in the world for three hundred pages or so and see it all there. Spoilery thoughts on the central conceit of the book: where it’s also amazing is the ideas about what kind of music an AI musician might want to make, how it would be derived and what it would sound like, and the way human musicians might react to it and work with it—in a way that’s both plausible and sounds like something exciting that I actually want to hear.

Reading another book of essays by a Taiwan-born writer who lives in Japan and writes in Japanese; unlike Li Kotomi|李琴峰, who grew up in Taiwan, taught herself Japanese, and came to Japan as an adult, 温又柔 came to Japan with her parents at age three and has lived here ever since (she’s Wen Yourou in the Chinese reading and On Yuju in Japanese; her romanized name on the copyright page splits the difference and uses “Wen Yuju.” I’ll settle for the latter for convenience. She also comments on how much her real name sounds like a pen name). I’ve only read one of her novels, 祝宴, which is about a middle-aged Taiwanese businessman, resident in Japan for many years, and his family—he’s 外省人 and his wife is 本省人, their younger daughter is marrying a Japanese man and their older daughter has a girlfriend. Very little actually happens but it was affecting and hopeful without veering into melodrama or Japan Sentimental. I found a lot to resonate with in her essays (reminded also that for me, with no original connections to Japan or Taiwan or anywhere else in Asia at all, studying/writing in Japanese or Chinese can be a much less fraught matter for good or ill). Like me Wen Yuju was fascinated by Lee Yangji’s short story Yuhee—she’s the editor of a Lee Yangji collection, which she says drew her some criticism from Korean-Japanese readers who argued that a Taiwanese-Japanese woman shouldn’t be doing it, another complex issue.
In some ways she covers a lot of familiar ground—growing up as a first- or 1.5-generation immigrant, more comfortable with the new country’s language than her parents’, sometimes accepted and sometimes dealing with microaggressions and blank majority ignorance, struggling with identity and complicated relationships with her parents’ country and family, and so on. It occurs to me that though there are so many anglophone novels, both YA and adult, now that go into this—just from a quick look through my shelves right now, Elizabeth Acevedo, Bernadine Evaristo, Tanuja Desai Hidier, Jean Little, Melina Marchetta, Naomi Shihab Nye, Chaim Potok, Nina Mingya Powles, Isabel Quintero, Joyce Lee Wong, Lois Ann Yamanaka, and that’s just a tiny sample—and still so, so few in Japanese, so that Wen Yuju and just a few others are reinventing the wheel because they have to. It’s not like the “monoethnic Japan” myth was ever true, I wonder when this will change.

Photos: Seasonal leaves, flowers, and skies; Koron-chan, who doesn’t seem to feel the cold and maybe I wouldn’t either if I were that nicely rounded; a bakery with an interesting tagline; kumquat jam made by Y from the produce of his father’s kumquat bush, which was as delicious as it was beautiful, although the photo isn’t very good. I’ll take a better one next time.

Be safe and well.

While I’m thinking of it: December’s coming up and about time for me to think about sending New Year’s cards. You know the drill: if I haven’t sent you a card before and you’d like one, DM me with a name and address to send it to, likewise if your name/address/etc. has changed, or if you’d rather not get one this time around.

Silly language stuff: I realized the other day that I’d inadvertently done a Tom Swifty in the thing I was writing, along the lines of “he was making tea adroitly with one hand.” (Of course, it could have been his left hand! But still. I guess in that case he would have been making tea gauchely, or else sinisterly… .) Also, I keep seeing people refer to the well-known dictionary as “Miriam Webster,” and now I want to work a minor character with that name into a story somewhere, just for fun. I always liked the name Miriam.

While Y is not what I would call fannish per se, he is sort of fannish-aware thanks to a long history with manga, anime, and games, plus he looks tolerantly on my fandom-related hobbies (“oh, is it time for the Christmas transformative-creation event already again? good luck!”). He texted me the other day to say “there are two girls in archery-club gear sitting in front of me on the train canoodling like nobody’s business, pure yuri!”

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 赫马佛洛狄忒斯, an enormous transliterated mouthful of a title that renders down to “Hermaphroditos” (nicknamed 小赫马 by fans). The lyrics, by the pseudonymous 沃特艾文儿 (“Whatever”), always strike me as really surprisingly queer for a mainstream Chinese song, when you put together 每个名词都分男女，标签贴给我也贴给你，可仍有人坚信不疑牵手同行就能做情侣 (all the nouns are divided between male and female, with labels stuck on me and you, but there are still people who never doubt that you can be a couple if you hold hands and journey together) and 愚人的眼光里才没彩虹悬挂天际 (it’s only the fools who can’t see the rainbow hanging in the sky) and 世界是个什么东西，是个巨大的柜子而已…容纳谁都容纳不了你 (what is the world, it’s just a giant closet…no matter who they enclose, they can’t enclose you) and 深知爱就该百无禁忌 (deeply knowing love means having to ignore all taboos) and 我爱你是你，只因你是你 (I love you being you, just because you’re you). All that aside, it’s also a just plain good song with an irresistible rhythm in the chorus.

In ongoing architectural exploration, we went to see another Vories building, the Osaka Church, which is very simple and very lovely, although I have to say if you’re going to have a rose window I want it to be stained glass, not plain. Planned down to the angle of every pew. Old-fashioned portative organ in very beautiful wood sitting next to a modern piano, plus a pipe organ up in the loft. The church is open to visits on condition that visitors attend a service first, so we sat through half an hour of a noonday service: organ music (a Messiaen piece and something from the Messiah, I forget which one, and one I didn’t know), hymn-singing, the Lord’s Prayer (having spent six months in my youth attending a CoE school for reasons, I found I could still back-translate from the archaic Japanese to the “hallowed be Thy name” version), and a short sermon by a young woman pastor, possibly Chinese or Korean from her first name and very faint accent, wearing an immaculate trouser suit. No proselytizing of the visitors, much appreciated; if I lived nearby I might even visit the services regularly for the organ and the windows.

Because I do some volunteering for the local YMCA (very long story), I spent a day as a volunteer interpreter for…how can I explain this succinctly…a group of professionals (social workers, pastors, farmers, teachers, etc. etc.) from various developing countries who are spending several months in Japan studying to become “rural leaders.” They were visiting the day laborers’ district here, with a tour in the morning and a lecture and discussion in the afternoon.

All of them speak some amount of English but very little Japanese (although they had all picked up “daijobu”), so interpreters were needed. There was me and a younger American woman and two older Japanese women, one a high-school English teacher and one a sometime tourist guide, as well as two adorable high school girls. My group for the morning tour was me and the former-guide lady and half a dozen of the rural leader students (from India, Indonesia, Zambia, Cameroon, Vietnam and I forget where else), as well as the Japanese tour leader; I ended up doing all the interpreting (I urged the other lady to jump in but she just said “oh I couldn’t possibly)," which was not bad because I already know the district and its history quite well (a friend wrote a book about it that I might translate some day).
For the lecture in the afternoon, five of us switched off interpreting: it was clear that the two high school girls could only get through with constant help and even so managed only a sketch of the original lecture, while the American girl and the older Japanese lady did okay but missed some of the nuances in each direction; to brag unrestrainedly, I think I was the clearest and the most stable and accurate of the five. And really I should be ashamed not to be, after all, being the closest to a professional among them (although interpretation and translation are very different).
I had fun—interpreting is always exhausting, but almost always exhilarating as well—and enjoyed getting to interact with the visiting students a little (a very serious woman from Vietnam with a series of complicated questions, a Cameroonian pastor with a long beard and shorts, and so on). I was also really annoyed (typical, I’m afraid) at the way the whole thing was run. Mostly the people in charge of the event just sort of sat there looking hopeful rather than doing anything useful, and the group discussion was particularly badly run (the discussion questions were TERRIBLE, and I signed on to be an interpreter, not a facilitator. Although I did get to explain to a doubtful Zambian guy just why the Japanese birth rate hasn’t gone up in sociopolitical terms, with an Indian lady cheering me on). Also, in theory I am absolutely in favor of giving high school kids a chance to try out interpreting, but if the participants are actually going to get anything out of the event, the interpreters have to have more or less professional-level skills even if they’re not getting paid even professional-level peanuts.)

Translation work can give you a lot of access to other people’s family privacy. I felt very bad for the little girl whose documents passed through my hands the other day, to the tune of her baby immunization record, second- and third-grade report cards (it’s always a little surreal to translate report-card comments like “She paid attention in class very well this year, but needs to work on forgetting fewer things”), and her parents’ divorce and custody agreement. Then there was another little girl of similar age, transferring from a prestigious private elementary school in Kyoto to a similar one in Tokyo, maybe a professor’s child subject to the whims of university employment. Also a family register in which the date of marriage preceded the first son’s date of birth by only six months, making me wonder as always where it actually fell on the range from 100% shotgun to “well, we’re getting married soon, why wait.”
One of the other issues with this kind of work is that young children in particular tend to have far-out names, and the clients usually don’t advise you how to pronounce them. Japanese is (I think) unique this way, in that a) the writing system is mostly not phonetic and b) while there are standard character readings, most characters have multiple standard readings plus you can basically decide to pronounce them any way that comes into your head, which is the way a lot of parents name their children, presumably without considering that the kids will have to spend their whole lives explaining how their names are pronounced and spelled (speaking from personal experience, albeit through a different process). So all you can do with names is take a wild guess. Place names are just as bad, since they are often distorted by long history into weird forms; I had hundreds of addresses to transl(iter)ate lately and had to look up almost every single one, just to be sure. I think the worst offender this time around was a place called 福谷, which could be Fukuya or Fukutani or Fukudani just in normal terms; in context it turned out to be Ukigai, God help me. Places like this constitute regional shibboleths of sorts; a couple more I’ve come across personally include 酒々井 and 柴島, where you just have to know how to read them or you’ll never guess.

Photos: Lots of seasonal fruits and leaves. Persimmons usually look much nicer than they taste, but we recently received bounty from my father-in-law’s kumquat bush and the fragrance is wonderful. Also the railway at sunset, and Kuro-chan the elder who noticed me passing by and stopped me with an imperious meow, in order to make use of me as a heating device usefully equipped with a mofu-mofu function (not a good picture, but my other hand was occupied).

Be safe and well.

I'm sorry I've been so lax about DW commenting lately; work and other things have been kind of crazy, as always at this end of the year. Why is it that the busier you are the busier you get, and vice versa?

I was looking for a Chinese idiom equivalent to “pie in the sky” and found 画饼充饥 (feeding hunger on a drawing of a cake) which is not quite the same but kind of related; I also found 天上掉馅饼, meat pies falling from the sky, which sounds related and actually means more like “serendipity” lol (in Japanese 棚から牡丹餅, botamochi cakes falling off the shelf, or tanabota for short. Do other languages have serendipity idioms which involve falling food items, I wonder?).

Jiang Dunhao song(s) of the post: 命名, one of his signature songs—I’m not actually wild about the chorus, too rock-vocal for me, but the verse and the last line raise the hairs on the back of my neck (in a good way). Warning for flashing lights! And for something completely different from the same singer, 又是艳阳天, an adorable duet with the Taiwanese singer Claire Kuo, over on the jazz end of pop. (*Because there are a lot of bilibili.com links here—if you’re not logged in it stops playback a minute in, but if you close the pop-up and hit play again the video goes on. I almost don’t notice at this point.)

Also Jiang Dunhao-related (I’m sorry, I’ve been this obsessed for a while now), I’ve been watching a program for young singers on which he is a mentor. I hate the competition part—why do people always do this with music—but I’ve found it very entertaining otherwise, the young singers are VERY fun. I’m pleased to notice that several of the twenty-odd women contestants are not just not c-ent standard skinny but well over on the plump side, including Niu Mengyao, who has a fantastic contralto, and the Chinese-Malaysian Vanessa Reynauld (莎莎 to her Chinese colleagues), who is all-round adorable with her slangy English-Chinese, as well as Zhang Jiayu with a pretty floaty soprano. Long Yuxun also has an amazing deep voice: a talented and sort of nerdily self-absorbed young man called Jing Shenghui fell in love with her voice at first hearing, grabbed her to form a group with (they all have to make groups of three or four people), and has basically been glued to her side ever since, while she treats him with a kind of amused, impatient fondness and everyone else ships them. (A lot of what makes this program interesting is seeing which singers end up working together. I was tickled, and confused as usual by censorship rules, that not only were two women telling each other “I’m in love with you and your voice!” but everyone else was commenting 嗑到了, I ship it.) Other interesting contestants include Yin Yuke, who seems to want to be the next Zhou Shen only much more deliberately androgynous, and the delightful twins Xie Yuxuan and Xie Yu’ang, who compete and perform as a single entity (I just realized that their names must come from the chengyu 气宇轩昂); then there’s Chen Yang, a rock singer listed as from the mainland on Baidu and from Taiwan on Wikipedia (I know which one I believe), who clearly has a strong personality to match her strong voice and, well, I don’t have the strongest gaydar but this lady’s style… (Some very short links: Niu Mengyao and Vanessa Reynauld, Zhang Jiayu and Yin Yuke, Long Yuxun and Jing Shenghui, Xie Yuxuan and Xie Yu’ang, Chen Yang)

Orchestra stuff. I survived the previous concert—there were some places where I wish I’d done better, but at least one prominent little twiddle which I got right for the very first time during the concert itself, giving me a Mizutani feeling a character from the baseball manga Ookiku Furikabutte who says to himself at one point during a game, wow, I’ve practiced this really hard and I can actually do it! wow!. The new program is movie music, mostly dead boring, but the Totoro suite is actually quite fun here and there (although I think I’ll be tired of it in six months). And I’ve always loved the Star Wars suite, it’s a symphony and a good one, with the accompanying images it calls up from the movies (although sadly it doesn’t contain the Mos Eisley cantina jazz piece). At our first rehearsal I was joined by a high school senior, son of one of the bass players, who was of course a much better player than me (Japanese high school bands are brutal), very solemn and big-eyed and polite; we’ll see if he stays around, knock wood.

Bits of assorted reading: Antony and Cleopatra with yaaurens and company, where I by no means did justice to Enobarbus but enjoyed him anyway (and decided to adopt Charmian’s “keep yourself within yourself” line when in danger of losing my temper). Some Margery Allingham mysteries, which are very weird; I did enjoy her sub-Wimsey detective’s interpretation of “seems like Sweet Fanny Adams to me” into “I am not very sanguine about this.”

With encouragement from everyone around here and qian in particular, I have been sending off the agent query letters for my original thing at the rate of one a day since around the beginning of the month; so far three polite rejections, not that I’m expecting anything else. Reminding myself that some of the best authors I know (personally and otherwise) are self-published. One good thing unrelated to results is that I was reminded of the one effective way I know to get an intimidating task done: break it down into the tiniest components possible and tell myself I’m just going to do one of them and I don’t have to worry about the rest yet. One little tiny subtask at a time is usually surprisingly manageable.

Composers riffing on B.A.C.H.: Bach himself (or maybe not, authorship is disputed, but it’s certainly good enough to be Bach), and Schumann. I love both of these pieces, so helpful of Herr Bach to have a name with half-tones in it.

Photos: Mostly from another historical-building tour with Y, at the Chourakukan in Kyoto, plus some autumn sweets and some nice skies.

Be safe and well.

Amended from past years:
Thank you for writing something for me. With the exception of the do-not-like stuff, please take any and all of this as optional suggestions only, and do what works for you.

Do not like: darkfic in general, incest, humiliation, graphic violence, PWP or graphic parts-and-fluids sexual descriptions (no moral objections, it's just not what I enjoy reading), blatant out-of-characterness, rape/dubcon, Christmas themes (not Christian myself), coronavirus/quarantine references etc.

Enjoy in particular: work (in all definitions) and people being competent at it, hurt/comfort, futurefic, ensemble pieces, playing with language(s), cuddling, scenes from everyday life.

Genfic is good, shipfic is good, although in the case of the latter I’d rather have a story that has something going on as well as pure romance, whether it’s a separate plot thread or a characterization arc.

I'm open to treats if anyone is so kind.

By fandom/characters (alphabetical):
The Crater School – Chaz Brenchley (Any)
The mixture of “boarding school story” with “science fiction” absolutely delights me and basically I just want more (set specifically at the school rather than in the larger setting, ideally). Of the characters I nominated, I love Mary Ellen “Mae”’s relationship with reading and writing, and Levity’s arc of getting comfortable at school, discovering her inherited talent for art, and falling in love; as far as Rachel is concerned, honestly I just want to see her (along with Jessica, of course) be explicitly Jewish (in whatever sense) on page, I refuse to buy that all the way on Mars even a girl named Rachel Abramoff has to be Christian! However, you can use any or none of these three, and/or other existing characters, and/or make up a set of original characters altogether; I’d just like to see the school doing its thing. (Something leaning more toward Antonia Forest than Elinor Brent-Dyer would be wonderful, but that definitely falls under optional-details-are-optional.) ETA: I finished reading Radhika's book just barely too late to nominate her, but I love her and I would be delighted to see her in a fic if you feel like writing about her too.

The Incandescent - Emily Tesh (Worldbuilding)
I have a thing about administration-saves-the-day (not that it does exactly here, but I love how big a part school administration plays in the book) and I love magic integrated into a modern-day setting, so this book did good things for me. Here again more than anything I kind of want a slice of life at school, set during the book itself or otherwise; I loved the A-level students, especially Aneeta, and would be delighted to have a fic focusing on them, but something from the teacher/staff perspective would be great too, or else feel free to make up entirely original characters if you’d rather. If you want to look into what the school (or one of the new schools/programs!) looks like after the events of the book, that would be fascinating too.

Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary – Pamela Dean (Any)
I’m always about equally fascinated and frustrated by this book, and Gentian’s friends are what I like most about it—they have the most interesting takes on the themes of the novel, femininity and gender in general, religion, art and science, conventionality and unconventionality, romance and friendship, togetherness and solitude, what you have in common with people and what makes you different from them. I’d love a missing scene from the book, futurefic, or anything from their perspectives, especially if it provides a bit of comforting closure for the ending, or else a canon divergence where things go better in the first place. You can throw in romance in any combination among them if you’re interested or keep it to friendship, whatever works.

The Melendys – Elizabeth Enright (Rush Melendy)
I love all the Melendys and their friends (and would be happy to see any and all of them appearing, in and out of the tagset), but I’m especially fond of Rush, the sarcastic, cheerful, quick-witted, occasionally self-doubting polymath who spends hours at the piano; I would love to see Rush a little older and what he’s making of himself, in whatever context. Again, really an ensemble fic in which Rush has his fair share of page time would be great too. I’d rather no focus on romance for this canon (although if you want to give Willy Sloper a love life with any non-Melendy person, that would be delightful!).

叛逆者|The Rebel (Wang Shi’an)
I got a spectacular Wang Shi’an fic a few Yuletides back, and I have never quite stopped thinking about him and wanting even more. (You can find my thoughts on him AT LENGTH under the "pannizhe" tag here--please feel free to read or ignore as you like.) I can't help wanting a story in which, without necessarily being a better human being, he's compelled by circumstance to turn his talents (thinking on his feet, lying and deceiving as needed, planning ahead, balancing temper and calm...) to good purposes instead of bad ones. I know that is a weird, and weirdly specific request, and I will not hold you to it; basically anything Wang Shi'an-centric, whether canon-compliant or -divergent, would be wonderful.
I’ve requested only Wang Shi’an himself so as not to complicate matters, but please also feel free to bring in any other characters who occur to you—Lin Nansheng and Chen Moqun, with whom he has incredibly complex relationships; Lan Xinjie, Lao Gu or Lao Ji, Meng Annan, even poor dumb loyal Secretary Zhang or Wang Shi’an’s blink-and-you-miss-her wife. One request I do have for this canon is attention to the historical context--I don't mean you have to do a huge research project, but I feel like the story has to be grounded in the time and place for the characters to be who they are.

Rivers of London – Ben Aaronovitch (Abigail Kamara, Indigo)
Indigo and her foxspeak and her adoration of Abigail all delight me, and Abigail’s brilliance and teenage-ness and resilience likewise; I’d love to see them having an adventure of some kind, large or small, details up to you. Any other characters (original ones included) welcome too, although I especially enjoy the way Abigail looks to Nightingale as a mentor and her unlikely friendship with Simon. (My other favorite character is Kim Reynolds; I can’t exactly see how she could fit easily into an Abigail-focused story, but if something occurs to you, go for it!)

Taiwan Travelogue – Yang Shuang-zi (Any)
Because their futures are less determined by the canon, I’m especially curious to read about Ozawa Reiko and Tan Tshiok-bi (Chen Chueh-wei? Chin Jakubi? why is romanization so linguistically and sociopolitically complicated; come to think of it, should Reiko be piped with Ta-tse Li-tzu? sorry, just doodling); what their friendship/romance was like and what happened to them after the events of the book, in Taiwan or Japan or elsewhere, whether they mirrored Chizuko and Chizuru’s relationship, as they do in the book to some extent, or developed in their own unexpected directions. That said, if you want to focus on Chizuko and Chizuru (Chien-ho|Tshian-hoh…), either with missing scenes from the book’s history or giving them an alternate future, that would be lovely too. In either case, one request I do have for this canon is attention to the historical context--I don't mean you have to do a huge research project, but I feel like the story has to be grounded in the time and place for the characters to be who they are. (I speak Japanese and some Chinese, so the more of either, as needed, you want to throw into the fic the better, as long as you’re confident in it!)

Thank you again!

Just after I wrote up Makiko Vories at senzenwomen, Y said “let’s go out to Omi-Hachiman and see some Vories buildings,” entirely coincidentally. So we took a two-day trip, stayed in an inn by the lake with a hammock on the balcony, saw a lot of beautiful buildings in both Japanese and Western styles (they all have big windows everywhere, which I love), went on a punt trip down the river, took a cable car up the nearest mountain to see the site of an ex-castle, and enjoyed ourselves in general.

I’ve been working on one of those awful software translations—I hate software stuff, give me machine tools, screws and bolts, or motion control any day of the week—and it has various This Units and That Units, which is at least mildly amusing because it keeps bringing to mind Murderbot. I wonder if the SecUnits ever came with manuals and if anyone had to translate them.

I’m volunteering with a Japanese class for Chinese teenagers, eight fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds with only very rudimentary Japanese; tiring because they are reluctant and easily distracted compared to my Saturday juku kids (who vary hugely in motivation but are remarkably well-behaved and 乖乖), but a fun challenge, everything from a girl who looks like an aspiring idol (hair to her hips, very slim, very well-dressed) to a kid on the autism spectrum who sticks firmly to his OWN pace in everything to a shy little anime otaku to a smart-mouthed young man who tries to use his fluent English to get away with things with me (I resorted to 这小子! to put him in his place). I can follow maaaybe half their talk among themselves, it’s too fast and too slangy, but it’s good practice for me (although I’m so used to “Speak English! Not Japanese!” that deliberately trying to shift into Japanese and make them speak it too is a real challenge). Haven’t yet had a chance to ask any of them if we have any fannish interests in common.

So when I bought my bassoon it came with a repair contract at the store, a large, high-end-ish musical instrument chain store; I’ve taken it back a few times for tuning up, always with the store clerk who sold it to me in the first place, a helpful, personable young man I’ll call S here. Last week I got a letter from the store in very formal terms: “we would like to inform you that [S] has resigned under the provisions of Employment Regulations Article ###. If you have any concerns about his work with you, please contact either the woodwind department or the accounting department as below…”. I took this to Y to see if he had any ideas and he’d never seen anything like it either; we concluded that S must have embezzled something??? but I certainly wouldn’t ever have guessed at such a thing, and I kind of feel bad for him. Need to check and see if my bassoon teacher knows anything more (all bassoonists have about 1.5 degrees of separation). I feel like I’ve brushed up against the first scene of a detective story. (Also, who am I going to get to fix my bassoon now if I need it?)

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 最好的我们, a duet from some years ago with Zhou Shen (they are close friends). Apart from being musically lovely it’s kind of amusing visually: the two singers are rather similar in features and coloring to begin with, and on this occasion they had almost identical haircuts into the bargain, so there’s a kind of 水仙 effect an octave apart.

Photos: Just a few, I haven’t been taking that many lately. Might add some of Y’s Omi-Hachiman photos later on. Lake Biwa, decorations on a mountaintop shrine, and a striking evening sky seen from a train.

Be safe and well.

Many thanks for help and advice in my previous post. Of course as soon as I told myself I would start on query letters, a ton of day-job work fell on my head (not that I can complain, but still), but I am trying to move a little forward every day.

Orchestra news. For a while I was kind of dreading it, because of the senior bassoonist, an older lady who nagged me unmercifully about all the things I was doing wrong. She was quite right! And also she wasn’t doing it to be unkind, she was genuinely well-intentioned and concerned with helping me improve, but I found it very stressful and unwelcoming. So one week she texted me and said “can we talk before rehearsal tomorrow” and I thought, oh dear, she’s going to suggest I leave the orchestra because I’m just not good enough. So I went, full of trepidation, and the first thing out of her mouth was “Actually I’m leaving the orchestra.” (I was good, I didn’t say “what do you mean you’re leaving?!”) So she has moved on for reasons of her own, and we parted friends, and now I have some last-minute Dvorak Sixth (or Doboroku as it’s called among Japanese musicians) parts to learn. I can’t play the damn thing, but it’s a wonderful piece, an old friend from way back, and the second bassoon part is full of delicious low notes and it’s extremely exhilarating (and exhausting, but never mind that). Wish me luck, sigh.

If you are (by whatever definition) multilingual, how does your brain sort out what languages you think in when? I’ve never sat down and analyzed it, but I think I’m pretty predictable, English is my baseline, drifting into and out of Japanese depending on context and convenience. (When visiting my mom this summer, I had to have various practical conversations with people like electricians, bank tellers, and so on, and I kept rehearsing them in my head in Japanese and then reminding myself that no, they would actually take place in English.) Chinese creeps in here and there around the edges; more than once in moments of minor frustration I’ve caught myself saying “Aiyaaa mō!” which is Chinese and Japanese garbled together (but expresses my feelings very well). (The farmboys have also been helpful in providing innocuous but satisfying Chinese phrases for these moments, from 我真服了 to 完蛋了 and 玩儿呢!)

Music: Fourth movement of the Schubert Great symphony, which starts with a breath-holding “something is about to happen!” feeling and quickly moves into straight-up excitement. (For those who liked the Beethoven jazz a couple posts ago, I feel like Schubert gets into his own version here, even if not quite as syncopated, complete with walking bass.)
Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 轻轻 sung live, a folk-song-ish original lovely to listen to (and look at).

The overlap between Chinese and Japanese can occasionally be comical. A-Pei was very amused by the names of a couple of Japanese baseball players I passed on to her, 太贵 and 好贵, in Japanese the quite ordinary male first names Daiki (or Taiki) and Yoshiki (or Yoshitaka), in Chinese respectively “too expensive” and “quite expensive.” We haven’t found Chinese names that sound equally bizarre in Japanese yet, but I’m sure there are some.

Stack of new books! Behind cut: Brenchley, Cook, Edwards, Harrod-Eagles, Matuku, Samatar, Wells, Whiteley/Langmead.

Chaz Brenchley, Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost and Radhika Rages at the Crater School: Latest in the Crater School series. The Rowany novella is very slight and not very interesting, although I do enjoy her voice. Radhika is really fun, I think the best one so far; certainly it’s nice to see even one non-white character turn up, although I do feel like the setup suggests she would in fact run up against a lot worse than some well-intended microaggressions at school, but it is nice also to imagine a school where people are decent enough that that doesn’t happen. (Maybe next time around we could have, you know, non-Christian characters too, or some actual f/f?) Oh well, I love Radhika herself, complex and entertaining, and I love the ensemble cast. (I actually nominated this series for Yuletide, only nominations closed just a day or two before I read this installment…oh well.)
Ida Cook, The Bravest Voices: Courtesy of a post by cyphomandra. Autobiography in which two opera-obsessed English sisters, one a budding romance novelist, become friends with the great singers of their time and also save a large number of people from the Nazis, all improbable but all true. Ida’s voice is delightful (I’m sorry there wasn’t a chapter from her sister Louise, just to find out what her writing voice would have sounded like) and the opera parts are as fascinating as the rest, and inextricable. I think the best description is something like “Betsy and Julia Ray crossed with Naomi Mitchison in 1934 Vienna.”
Erin Edwards, Finding Hester: Also from somebody’s DW post but I can’t remember whose? Account of an online community’s successful attempt to track down Hester Leggatt, one of the people involved in the WWII Operation Mincemeat spy incident. It’s my period and I enjoyed it (and was envious and admiring of the research work), but felt that it was definitely written for people who have already read and/or seen Operation Mincemeat, given its wealth of details on background characters but very little about the incident and its principal players itself. Also I found the references to the Discord group a little tiresome; either take the traditional route and just keep the researcher(s) in the background of the text, or take steps to involve the reader more with the community (pocket introductions to the members, excerpted conversations, etc.). That said, the chapter which actually quotes Hester’s letters and diaries was a delight (reminding me a little of Olivia Cockett, another wartime civil servant with a mind of her own having an affair with a married man).
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, Before I Sleep and Easeful Death: Latest two in a very long mystery series which is one of my comfort reads. Not a whole lot new and amazing, but as always the characters feel real, the language is good, and there are dumb puns. Not pleased with Atherton’s latest girlfriend, I think he should have stayed with Emily; on the other hand it’s delightful to see Slider’s daughter Kate coming into her own.
Steph Matuku, Migration: Also from cyphomandra. This felt like two or three distinct books jostling together, and I had trouble assimilating “interpersonal struggles at military high school” with “end and new beginning of the world, at great cost.” I think I would have gotten over that if I’d felt more invested in the characters. I liked Farah and most of her friends fine, but you never get to know them in the way of characters who live in your head later on, they’re sketched in such broad strokes and generalized characterizations, plus the minor characters sort of fade in and out of frame as if there was a limit to the page count each of them was allowed. That said, it is really interesting worldbuilding (which would probably be more meaningful to me if I knew NZ better), and you could make several more books out of the possibilities there. It occurred to me that the whole thing might work well as a ballet.
Sofia Samatar, The White Mosque: Beautifully written, sad, thoughtful memoir/essay about traveling with a Mennonite research tour in Central Asia and being half German-Swiss Mennonite and half Somali. Predictably, I enjoyed the meditations on language a lot, as well as the small details of the places she visits. “The Mennonite game”—figuring out, when one Mennonite meets another, what their degrees of separation are (usually very few) and how—is what I’d call a lovely piece of worldbuilding if it were fiction.
Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy: I think I was right to start from the end of the series, I didn’t enjoy these quite as much as the others I read, although I will probably go back to reread. My problem with Rogue Protocol in particular was that it’s either everyone in sight being unhappy and/or unnerved, or action scenes, or both, and “too many action scenes” is one of my perennial complaints about books I otherwise really like, see also Rivers of London. Exit Strategy suffers from the same action-scene thing, but I enjoyed it more because the characters are more fun; also I like the way Murderbot teaches itself new skills, sometimes deliberately and sometimes under stress, which build on each other as they come into use.
Aliya Whiteley and Oliver K. Langmead, City of All Seasons: Elegant writing and a satisfying ending, but not quite suited to my id; a little too fairy-tale-ish for me.

Photos: One butterfly and some (?) goya vines, plus many from a visit to an ex-brothel. Y and I went on a tour of this beautiful old building which is now a fancy restaurant; the neighborhood around it has been a red-light district for a century and is not friendly to passing strangers with no business there (not in the sense of dangerous as far as I know, but you’ll get glared at, and the tour guide warned us not to stare rudely or take photographs on the street). The building itself was restored a few years back and is now stunning inside; don’t miss the sleeping cat imitating the one at Nikko Toshogu, or the round flower inlays (with mother-of-pearl), which are on the ceiling, luckily it’s a tatami room so you can just lie down on the floor and gaze.

Be safe and well.

So as you may have seen I spent some of my last post grumbling about the (emotional and practical) difficulties of starting to look for a publisher for my original thing (or rather, starting the Rube Goldberg process of finding an agent who... etc.). With helpful advice from qian and others, all much appreciated, I am trying to take some more concrete steps, but right now I'm stuck on finding comparative titles for my query letter. The thing is, a) I don't have access to all the books coming out in English (there are SOME in bookstores, and if I know what I want to read I can order it, but I can't just go down to the store or library and read everything that comes out) and b) I am a very fussy reader and I just don't read that widely among new books! I don't know what there is out there lately!

so please let me know if you have any ideas about books that partake of the following:
Essential:
-- published within the last three to five years (sigh)
-- SFF
Any of the below:
-- AU early 20th-century England or Europe
-- New magical system
-- Multiple protagonists who are friends but not lovers
-- M/M romance which is plot-relevant but not the main focus
-- M/M romance involving strangers/quasi-enemies to lovers
-- Male/female friendship between colleagues
-- Colleagues from wildly different backgrounds who share a passion for their work
-- Political machinations, preferably against a monarchy
-- Get-out-of-jail subplot

...that's all I can think of at the moment. Possibilities I have right now are Freya Marske's The Last Binding series and, although it's older than they're supposed to be, Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown. I want to say Emily Tesh's The Incandescent, because it chimes with my mind so well, but I can't actually think of any directly comparable points, oh dear.
(For the record, don't worry, I am not going to name a book in a query letter without having read it! I can get hold of promising possibilities if I need to, but I have to know what to look for first...).

To my relief, the stray cats didn’t forget me over my summer elsewhere; my morning run is now reliably interrupted by a belly-patting session with Miké-chan in the park, and one of the green-eyed cats near the nighttime junior high came immediately over to say hi when I went past, winding in and out of the fence and bonking its forehead into my hand.

How does everybody save (non-work-related) files as a rule? As with so many things I am old-school and inefficient; at the end of the month, the latest version of everything I want to save goes onto a couple of USBs, stored in different places. If it’s the middle of the month and I want to be sure to save something, I email it to myself. I never use GoogleDocs etc., everything is on my hard drive + memory sticks.

Work: Someone in a translation I was editing had come up with “adversary management,” which confused the hell out of me until I realized the intended meaning was “adversity management.” Presumably “adversary management” is a little more active…

I found a decent, simple recipe for limeade and have made it twice with very good results. Actually the first time, I couldn’t find limes in the supermarket and had to make sudachi-ade instead; even more of a pain to squeeze (it takes three or four sudachi to make up one lime), but just as good taste-wise. Lovely tart pale-green summer drink, and the kitchen smells deliciously limey as a bonus.

My mom reminded me of a piece of graffiti seen years and years ago which became a family joke: “I love grils. / [Different handwriting] You mean girls. / [Different handwriting again] Hey, what about us grils?”

Courtesy of the farmboys as usual, I learned the Chinese word for post-its (便利贴, convenient stickers) and duct tape (大力胶, really strong tape). Also 心急吃不了热豆腐, you can’t eat hot tofu when you’re fretting, roughly equivalent to “hold your horses, calm down.”
Earlier this year the actor Zhang Zixian was among the farmboys’ visitors; he’s the one whose nuanced performance as Wang Shi’an in The Rebel absolutely blew me away, and it was mind-blowing in another way to see him out of character: cheerful, comic, laid-back, with a bit of a stammer, obviously very likeable but coming off nothing like either poor screwed-up evil Wang Shi’an or one of the most gifted actors in the business, for all that’s what he is. Performers are something else.

Speaking of performance, Y and I went to Takarazuka a couple of weeks ago because they were reviving their production of Guys and Dolls, which has been one of my favorite musicals all my life. It was very disappointing on one front: the Japanese book and lyrics, dating from the 1980s, are limp and awkward and miss the point entirely more often than not, an extra shame because the original English ones are so sharp. (I know it’s a tall order to turn good English lyrics into good Japanese lyrics which are also singable and mean the same thing, but it has been done! The Japanese lyrics for the latter-day Gershwin musical Crazy For You are a masterpiece.) Also the audience was very subdued, hardly rippling with laughter even at the punchlines that survived into Japanese (“Tell him I never want to speak to him again! And tell him to call me here”), although Y figured this was just a cultural thing. Still, the dancing was very good (including the traditional Takarazuka Grand Staircase at the end), and the singing was a lot of fun: you get used very fast to the “men,” ie women playing otokoyaku, singing contralto instead of tenor/bass, and the second act in particular was riveting. This is from a much earlier production, but the staging doesn’t ever seem to change, and it gives you a good idea of what the otokoyaku sound like (Shibuki Jun as Sky Masterson singing Luck Be A Lady). Parenthetically, it amuses me that Takarazuka is obviously much stricter about policing YouTube than about B站. Also, we killed some time wandering through the theater shop looking at the vast quantity of performer headshots etc., reflecting that the gorgeously androgynous otokoyaku overlap interestingly with the occasional gorgeous androgyny of male C-pop (and J-pop and K-pop) singers, approaching from the opposite side as it were. I imagine there have already been papers written about this as a cultural/sexual/sociological phenomenon.

Music: I’ve probably posted it before, but Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32 devolves (or rather sublimates) into jazz in the middle of the second movement, which I can never resist. I’ve linked it with a timestamp here (Mitsuko Uchida’s recording, with notes on YT by the astute Ashish Xiangyi Kumar), but listen to the whole thing if you have a chance.
Also, Jiang Dunhao song of the post (because I can): his own 铁皮火车不停开, sung live sometime last year, which I find very comforting.

In purely personal stuff, I’m depressed and annoyed with myself for taking no steps AT ALL toward ever getting anything I’ve written or translated published, in spite of helpful suggestions on all sides. I’m struggling with the pessimistic feeling that it’s all pointless: I’m terrible at promoting myself (either to agents/publishers or to would-be readers), I’m probably not writing anything that would suit the publishing zeitgeist, I don’t have connections who would do the promoting for me and nobody will take on a writer cold at this point in time, I don’t know the ins and outs of the process of getting translation rights etc., I can’t bring myself to try to get a novel published through what now seems to be the typical route of short stories*, and so on and so forth. Obviously the solution is to get off my ass and at least TRY, and if I fail disastrously in terms of original writing, then to look into self-publishing, but it’s very hard to get rid of the WHY BOTHER YOU WILL FAIL (and probably poison the waters by doing it wrong the first time around) dark cloud.
*Short stories. I think I’ve said so before, but my mind just seems to work in novel lengths? I never can think of anything I want to write as a short story. I have written lots of short story-length fics, but by virtue of being fanfic they’re all kind of…within novel-length [or drama-length, you know, long-form] continuities, not completely freestanding. I don’t know. Ideas for doing something to deal with this?

Photos: Very few, because it’s been too damn hot and humid to be motivated to photograph anything. My limeade and some flowers and the balcony with sudare at sunset, Koron-chan taking her ease, and also WARNING for people who don’t like creepy-crawlies, a very elegant centipede. I thought it was a lot like Oliver Melendy’s encounter …something which looked like a tiny, elaborate trolley car. It was perched on a leaf, standing firmly on ten blunt little round feet that could have been wheels… The whole creature was a rich cinnamon brown color, and along each of its velvety sides was arranged an ornamental row of creamy scrolls., but if you are more Mona than Oliver, maybe don’t click.

Be safe and well.

Today is just assorted bits of Chinese-related things and photos.

Courtesy of A-Pei who likes to bake in her free time, I learned much to my disappointment that the Chinese word for “brownies” is 布朗尼 (bùlǎngní); I think it should be either 小褐蛋糕 (little brown cakes) or 巧克力正方形 (chocolate squares).

Also from A-Pei, the Taiwanese slang 麻吉 (májí), from English “match,” used to mean “close, getting along well” etc. (Not to be confused with Japanese slang マジ (maji), coming (I think) from 真面目　(majime) and used to mean “serious, for real.” There is a train station called 馬路 (Maji) where you can take pictures and caption them マジで, either “at Maji” or “for true.”)

And one more from A-Pei, the Taiwanese word for avocado, 酪梨 or “cheese pear”—I’m not sure which is weirder, that one or the mainland 牛油果, “lard/butter fruit.” On the other hand, when you think of the root word of avocado, English can’t talk either.

嘛 (ma) is a sentence-ending particle which just means something like “y’know,” “right” as far as I can tell; for phonetic reasons I’m always tempted to translate it as “man” (in the interjection rather than literal sense).

At the Saturday juku I was practicing English vocabulary with eighth-grade Yuki, who is bright and knows it and has no hesitation about arguing his corner when he thinks he’s right; it took me quite a while to convince him that the difference between “success” and “succeed” was grammatically significant. It occurred to me later on that while this is easy enough to explain in Japanese (成功 vs 成功する, with a verb ending on the latter), it would be much harder in Chinese, where 成功 alone does double duty.

逆苏 (nìsū, also written 泥塑) is a Chinese fanword I ran across which was new to me; originally from “reverse Mary Sue,” believe it or not (the sū part is phonetic), referring in general to “feminizing” your idol (I am not wild about this term but it’s the shortest explanation I can find). I’ve definitely seen comments on Weibo etc. along the lines of 爱你老婆 and so on, from female fans to male celebrities, which seem to count as an example.

Photos: Assorted flowers, a container port with bonus mountains, chibi-chans on the march (you have to look closely to see them in their little pink hats, for obvious reasons I refrained from photographing unknown small children close up), Kuro-chan from the park and their friend Ushi-chan, fancy desserts in a fancy blue-lit café, a duck couple camouflaged by sunlight, a poster that cracked me up (it’s just a political poster for one of the rightwing asshole parties, but especially since the text down the middle reads “Love and Politics,” all I could think of was “this is an ad for a movie about two women politicians from opposing parties who fall in love during their campaigns”), and one of my farmboys who slipped in there somehow.

Be safe and well.

this is mostly just self-satisfaction

I passed HSK6! Well, technically apparently you don’t actually pass or fail levels 5 and 6, you just get a numerical score, but the pass/fail line for the other levels is around 60% and I ended up with 76%, so I feel okay about saying I passed. The listening test was a bitch, pardon my French; listening is so hard without context, plus my mind tends to wander…but I scored just about the same as I’d been doing on practice tests, so at least not worse. For some reason my score on the reading/grammar part was MUCH higher than on any practice test, thanks Xi-laoshi for going over the awful grammar questions with me a million times (I hate this section, you have to choose which of four long sentences contains a grammatical error). The writing section (where you have to read a passage and then summarize it from memory) was all about Liu Ying, a charisma train conductor from Changchun, who is a fun person to know about. Incidentally this was the online test; I would never pass the version where you have to write an essay by hand, thank God (or rather 谢天谢地) for computers and smartphones. (The test itself was a bit odd—I was expecting, from the strict rules, a huge auditorium, lockers for belongings, etc., but it was a little battered classroom with a couple dozen people spread across HSK2, 4, and 6, presided over by a middle-aged Chinese lady speaking Japanese with a heavy local accent—“your bag? oh, just put it under your desk.” It was nice to think about absolutely nothing but the content of the test for two hours or so.)

I’ve been reflecting on how different my Chinese study experience has been from studying Japanese. I had four years of classroom Japanese in college, including six months as an exchange student and a summer at Middlebury; I also watched some anime with friends, started reading Japanese books as soon as I was up to it, went through a period when I was watching all the Toyokawa Etsushi dramas I could get my hands on…but definitely laid my groundwork in the classroom, where I was fortunate enough to have good teachers. For Chinese I haven’t done any formal study at all, unless you count a weekly hour of conversation with Yu-jie and then Xi-laoshi; otherwise I’ve had Duolingo (not good, but not bad practice for a beginner), teaching myself from the lifesaving Chinese Grammar Wiki (and the Anki deck made from it), more Anki decks (HSK vocabulary and my homemade vocab one), A-Pei and our text-chats, the lovely people who kindly hang out at

guardian_learning, and of course incomparable teachers in the form of Zhu Yilong (in part via the blessed Wenella), Bai Yu, Liu Chang, Jiang Dunhao and his fellow farmboys, and their various c-ent colleagues. I think I got extremely lucky with Chinese study, in terms of a) having the time available to spend, which many people do not, and b) getting born on third base by knowing the characters already from Japanese.
Oh dear, that got long. Anyway, unfortunately passing the HSK does not magically confer fluency, but it’s a nice milestone to hit and hopefully motivation to keep going.

Other random Chinese-related stuff. Gu Lin Ruei-Yang is a pitcher for one of the Japanese baseball teams, a Tayal indigenous Taiwanese guy from Taichung who uses two family names (his mother’s and father’s), an interesting collection of characteristics; the history of indigenous Taiwanese success in baseball goes back to the legendary prewar Jiayi Agricultural High School team.
Silkworms are called 蚕宝宝, a word which adorably contains an affectionate diminutive (a lot cuter than silkworms are to look at, appreciate their work without googling them).
Listening to an interview with my favorite singer in which, doing a little self-PR, he says 我不挑活儿，可盐可甜. I was very pleased with myself (sorry, more bragging) for hearing and understanding this; 我不挑活儿 just means “I’ll take any work that’s going,” but uses more colloquial phrasing than the classroom words 选择 and 工作. 可盐可甜 I had to look up, but got the general sense of: it’s literally “I can do both salty and sweet,” and figuratively “I can be hardcore or soft and cute,” roughly. A fun phrase.
Also Zhu Yilong’s birthday vlog, in which some inspired person got him to go to a park and have a barbecue; he looks gorgeous and seems to be genuinely enjoying himself, singing along to the car radio, relaxing in nature, and earnestly cooking noodles. <3

Music: João Gilberto’s Disse Alguem, which is “All of Me” with Portuguese lyrics, and William Bolcom’s Graceful Ghost Rag, an old favorite of my dad’s and also of mine (the link is to Yeol Eum Son’s performance, which is one of the closer ones to my father’s).

Translating a table of chemicals, some of which cracked me up. “Glacial acetic acid” sounds like what happens when you put vinegar in the freezer; “methyl cellosolve” should be the brandname for a luthier’s tool (do you think they offer violinsolve and violasolve too?). And I certainly don’t plan to go anywhere near “fuming nitric acid” until it calms down. Also, this particular source text confounded me for a LONG time with 息化, breathification, which wouldn’t turn up anywhere, until I realized it was a visual typo for 臭化, literally stinkyfication and chemically bromide.

Random other things: I rediscovered cobalt.tools and am delighted to find that it downloads not only YouTube but also bilibili; now how long will it take me to download my huge backlog of bookmarked B站 videos? and will my computer have enough storage space? (I’m grabby about things I like online, whether music or fics etc.; I want to download everything, just because you never know when someone will see fit to delete it.)
For writing purposes a few days ago, I honestly genuinely found myself googling “why is the sky blue.”
So there’s a recent commercial on Japanese TV (I see CMs when I’m watching baseball games, I can’t help it) in which a giant, besuited salaryman is fighting off a monster amid a Japanese cityscape, Godzilla-style, while his wife and teenage daughter watch from their apartment window: “Oh dear, it’s your dad again. I hope he won’t knock down the supermarket this time.” “My boyfriend asked me if I can turn giant-sized too…” with a look of teenage angst. I’m entertained by the possibilities for stories here. (I don’t think this commercial has fulfilled its original mandate, on account of I don’t actually know what it’s advertising for, but it’s fun.)

Photos: Seasonal azaleas, irises, maple leaves, and other flowers I don’t know by name, as well as some carp flags and interesting machinery.

Be safe and well.

A bit of Chinese wordplay that I thought was funny: when two people in white shirts stand on either side of one in a black shirt, someone describes them as 利奥利 (lì-ào-lì). Guess why (or see the answer here). Answer: Oreo cookies in Chinese are 奥利奥, which is just transliteration; but it makes perfect sense that if the black-white-black Oreo coloring is ào-lì-ào, then white-black-white would be lì-ào-lì… .
Also a word/character that I enjoy for its just-exactly-like-that-ness: 汆, which means to parboil, and which is made up of 入, put into, and 水, water. (Also relieved that water is water in Chinese, unlike Japanese, in which water 水 and hot water (お)湯 are separate words; Y and I had a debate over the Japanese expression in which you “boil hot water,” which doesn’t make much sense to me; a case in which the object is the result of the verb?).

Trying to transcribe something in Chinese (an interview about my favorite singer) which is unsubtitled, and finding it extremely difficult, although the speaker doesn’t go too fast and pronounces things quite clearly, apart from the sh/zh = r thing which all Chinese men seem to do. Even so there are a lot of gaps and places where I can hear the word but can’t figure out what character it might be. I did notice that sometimes a line which absolutely stumps me on one day seems quite clear when I come back to it the next; not sure why, but it’s interesting.

I’ve been enjoying everyone’s 100-formative-books lists, and finally gave in and made my own here. Featuring a lot of the same photograph (does it count as a stock photo if it’s one I took?) in place of a book cover image, because I couldn’t bring myself to search for images of ALL the Japanese books, quite a few of the English ones, etc. Why don’t they just give you a “no image” option? Also, I feel like I’ve left a lot out; I don’t remember all the books that were childhood favorites! I mean, if the titles or authors come up I naturally remember the books themselves, but I can’t list them all off out of thin air, and my physical books have undergone many shifts due to changing houses, countries, etc. etc. Where is there a giant master list of “all the books someone of my generation would have been likely to read growing up, Anglophone edition”…

One of my original-thing characters is having a professional breakthrough of sorts and I can’t tell whether I’ve managed to be as smart as she is or completely dumb (whether it’s going to make any sense to the [hypothetical] readers or seem like it was obvious five chapters ago). I should probably be relieved that I’ve managed to come up with something for her to be inspired about; it took me literally over a year to solve another character’s similar problem for him, jeez. I’m just about halfway through the whole thing now and things are starting to happen, but I still have SO MANY question marks in my outline and I’m making such very slow progress, oh dear.

Music: an older recording of Chen Ming and Jiang Dunhao singing 让, because I continue to be obsessed, and also I like this song; also last week’s radio opera was Figaro, so here’s Jessye Norman singing Dove sono, just because it’s one of the most beautiful things in the universe.

Photos: lots more sakura and cats, also one of the prettiest weeds I’ve seen.

Be safe and well.

Xi-laoshi, my Chinese conversation partner, recommended in passing that I get my reading practice from books designed for learners, like one she showed me called something like Beijing in Spring or The Four Seasons of Beijing, you can tell how seriously I was taking this genuinely thoughtful suggestion, I’m afraid. No! This kind of thing is why a lot of people don’t ever master languages! (Also an overgeneralization, I know—it works for some people—but still.) My f-list is full of people whose perfect English comes from TV shows and fic; I’ve just been reading Li Kotomi on learning her Japanese through anime and music. I got good at reading Japanese from a) middle-grade books aimed at Japanese preteens (I still fondly remember the first one I got all the way through, in which an eighth-grade girl daydreams about kissing her best friend, also a girl) and b) Japanese translations of novels I knew very well from having read them in English. I can’t imagine I’d have gotten even as far as I have in Chinese if I’d been dutifully reading graded readers, instead of watching dramas and the farming show and reading fics and the occasional article about Zhu Yilong. It only makes sense. Or am I biased? What do you think?

I finished my readthrough of the Joan Aiken Dido books, in general highly recommended. I think osprey_archer was talking about hesitating to read the later books because they get so dark, which is an interesting point. The two Is books--Is [Underground] and Cold Shoulder Road--are definitely dark in places, although not tonally so different from the rest of the series, and worth it for the characters and the wild plots and the language. The second-from-last book, Midwinter Nightingale, though, is the most bleak and depressing thing I’ve read in ages—most of the book is spent with various horrible people, and when we do see Dido and Simon they’re usually miserable and in trouble. It ends with a defeat for the villains, but I wouldn’t call it a happy ending in any sense. Not going back to reread that one. The very last one, The Witch of Clatteringshaws, which Aiken knew would be her last, also has its dark moments but is very funny here and there and ends genuinely happily. (I couldn’t resist the following selection, which is really not typically Aikeny at all but delightful.)

‘...perhaps, in a hundred years’ time, this day will be remembered by our grandchildren as the day when a not very large force of English beat off an attacking army of Wends who wanted to turn this island into a place where everybody spoke Wendish. Don’t you agree?’
’What’s Wendish like, then?’ one of the men enquired.
Rodney Firebrace spoke up. ‘Wendish is an awful language. It’s highly inflected — there are nine
declensions of nouns—
‘What’s inflected?’ somebody shouted.
‘When words have different endings to express different grammatical relations. And Wendish has thirty different kinds of verbs. You have to decline them as well as conjugate them.’
‘What’s verbs?’
‘I hit. You run.’
‘Who says we run? We ain’t a-going to run!’
‘No way!’
‘Hooray for English verbs!’
‘We don’t want no foreign verbs!’
‘Are you all with me, then?’ called Simon.
‘Sure we are!’
‘Let’s go!’
‘We'll show those Wends the way back to Wendland!’
‘Let ‘em wend their way!’

Also, anyone reading the Dido books should not miss lionpyh’s post-series fic Now, in the meanwhile, with hearts raised on high, which is one of the best fics I’ve ever read in any fandom ever as well as being an immensely satisfying conclusion.

Y brought home this hilarious winter song called 布団の中から出たくない, ie “don’t want to get out of bed.” Highly recommended to anyone studying Japanese, and accessible even without Japanese thanks to the funny animation (for the southern hemisphere, they also have a summer song along similar lines). Although COMPLETELY different in style, I feel like clearly the Chinese equivalent is Liu Chang’s 再睡五分钟.

Since it’s timely, have Cesar Camargo Mariano (best known to me as Elis Regina’s husband, but also a great musician in his own right) doing April Child.

There’s a fancy coffee shop chain in Japan which uses city airport codes for its shop names, like NGS Coffee in Nagasaki and so on; the problem is that they’re based in Fukuoka, and so the company overall is known as FUK Coffee.

Photos: Spring is doing its thing and I have too many photographs, here are some and the rest will have to wait until the next post.

Be safe and well.

More on my Li Kotomi translation project: she has an essay describing some of the details of the process of her translation of one of her own novels from Japanese to Chinese, with examples, which not surprisingly is hard to deal with (especially because for the Japanese reader, most of the quotations from the Chinese translation will be at least semi-comprehensible from the characters without needing additional explanation, but the same does NOT go for English). I enjoy her extended metaphor of Japanese and Chinese as “two independent machines” (although I’m not sure I agree with all of it).

For me … Japanese and Chinese are like two independent machines. … In almost all cases, the quality of the products produced by the two machines is similar, but one of them—the machine marked “Japanese”—is a little unstable in its operation and occasionally produces defects, so that its parts require more frequent inspection, refilling with raw ingredients, and lubrication.
Although the two machines are independent, they run off current from the same outlet. The amount of current is limited ... . When I am writing a novel or an essay in Japanese, I turn off the Chinese machine entirely and direct all the current to the Japanese machine in order to ensure its products’ quality. Conversely, when I write in Chinese I stop the Japanese machine. … [W]hen translating from Japanese to Chinese, I have to use about 30% of the current for the Japanese machine and 70% for the Chinese one, and the other way around when translating from Chinese to Japanese. However, since the products have been produced on 70% current, they must be inspected more carefully and thoroughly than usual. …
Each of the two machines has its own specialized production field, with unique functions the other does not possess. The Japanese machine includes special functions like hiragana, katakana, kanji, and ruby text, and excels in the production of fluid sentences and thoroughly variegated text. Because hiragana and katakana are capable of expressing sounds alone, effacing meaning, they have high affinity with other languages, meaning that various different languages can be used to supplement the raw materials. The kanji function has various additional options such as onyomi and kunyomi readings, which can be cleverly used in combination with the ruby function to weave a florescent world like the pattern on a kimono.
Elsewhere, the Chinese machine basically has a single hanzi function, but because this function combines overlapping aspects of sound and meaning, it enables the generation of more rhythmical, more formally beautiful couplets than in Japanese. Because each individual character takes up its own definite space, this function does not lend itself to flowing, variegated sentences, but excels at regular, definite text as well as sentences of silvan density. Also, because hanzi are highly neological, new words can be created even more freely and improvisationally than in Japanese. Further, the Chinese machine has a secret time-machine function which enables free connection to the many poems and chengyu sayings created over four thousand years of Chinese literature. This feature is not included with the Japanese machine.

Reading Measure for Measure with yaaurens and company, and finding it interesting for many reasons (also I need to go back and reread a_t_rain’s excellent epilogue fic. My brain in silly mode suddenly related it to The Mikado, with Angelo as Koko, guilty of the sex-related crime he’s cutting off other people’s heads for; which would make the Duke the Mikado, I guess, and Mariana Katisha. The plays certainly don’t map one on one, not to speak of the differences in tone, but they would make a fantastic theatrical double bill.

okay, so listen to the melody line of 祝我幸福 (Wu Qingfeng) and then of Meditaçao ; cross-cultural pentatonic scale friends. (As my dad used to remind me, there are only twelve notes, and the major pentatonic scale happens all over, see also Chinese dizi flutes etc., so it’s just a common and garden coincidence, but I still like the resemblance.)

I’m still playing the bassoon and still in a local amateur orchestra, for the moment (*circumstances unrelated to anything here may interfere). I’m also still very bad at it, but not as bad as I was. (I will never be more than a mediocre amateur as a performing musician, because I can never find the technical fingers/lips/tongue etc. parts of playing an instrument interesting at all. I like music because of melody and harmony and rhythm and timbre, not because I remembered to move my left hand just the right way or adjusted my embouchure just so! What does the one have to do with the other? I suppose it’s people who can find both interesting who become the real performers, good for them. Anyway, I kind of wish I’d taken up the bassoon years ago, because I enjoy it more than I ever liked playing the cello—I like having a part all to myself, I like the way breath vibrates into sound and the way it’s an instrument nobody notices but also penetrating and exciting. The other day we had our first rehearsal with a contrabassoon and sitting right next to the contrabassoonist was SO NEAT, I want to try playing one SO MUCH, it’s like a dinosaur that can sing in tune.

No new farmboy words today, although I did make a wrap-up post about watching the series (so far) here. Unrelatedly, A-Pei taught me a Chinese phrase for “the grass is always greener”: 外国的月亮比较圆, the moon is rounder abroad.

Discovered via YouTube, the architect Hamaguchi Miho’s Nakamura House. Unfortunately for my purposes she was too late for

senzenwomen, active after the war, but very interesting, and the house looks gorgeous on the inside (although Y rightly compared it to an elementary school gym on the outside, I have to say)—look at the high ceilings and the teal glass tiles and the light, and the wall of bookshelves (scroll down for some before/after renovation pictures). Both pretty and actually livable, which is far to seek.

Photos: the usual, including an ex-bicycle and a castle.