nnozomi | Entries tagged with books: dwj

Four things vaguely related to writing

I had to translate a document including the periodic table recently, a nice easy task, although there are some elements that didn’t have names the last time I took chemistry. Meitnerium is a nice one to have; oganesson looks like a place name from Le Guin, but I looked up Yuri Oganessian, the scientist honored, and found that his name is a variation of what would be Johnson in English, the more you know. Dysprosium was, I think, around the last time I checked; it always sounds to me like an SF word for writer’s block.

I was thinking about the tin soldiers in Charmed Life. When Julia and Roger play with them, they imbue them with magic to move and fight on their own. When Cat joins in, he doesn’t have (access to) his own magic, so he has to move his soldiers by hand, not surprisingly losing the battle to Roger’s forces. Roger begs Julia to help Cat out, which she does, reluctantly (she is busy reading, knitting, and eating sweets all at once, a state of being I approve of), but all the soldiers run away at the first sign of combat (“Because it’s just what I would do,” said Julia. “I can’t think why all soldiers don’t.”). Finally, after fending off Gwendolen’s attempt to snatch Cat away, Julia is fired up enough to “[fill the soldiers’] hearts with courage.” Although it doesn’t really hold up to close examination, I was thinking about this as an analogy for writing characters—sometimes they feel flat and empty and as if you have to move them clumsily around the plot by hand, sometimes they become an extension of the self, and sometimes you can make them do things you seemingly never would have managed on your own. Sadly it’s not as easy as tying a knot in a handkerchief!

I’ve been watching Parallel World and enjoying it, though I’m only a few episodes in; I have no clue what’s going on, but Bai Yu and Ni Ni are wonderful.
It must be so weird to be a scriptwriter and see the characters you create defined in ways you can’t control. I was thinking that there’s a definite Bai Yu-ness about Chang Dong in Parallel World, a warmth and wryness; if Zhu Yilong were playing the role it might be a little darker-toned and more vulnerable, Tan Jianci and so on different again. A very different experience for the writer from just creating a character in text. (I’m sure this has been discussed in depth elsewhere, it was just on my mind.) And then of course there’s NPSS who has a whole cornucopia of different realizations of his characters to choose among…

From my latest entry on senzenwomen I learned about the Republic of Ezo, a short-lived 1869 attempt at setting up an independent country in Hokkaido in semi-rebellion against the Meiji Restoration; now very tempted, if I ever finish my current original thing, to write something set in an alternate history where Hokkaido remained independent of the rest of Japan (what would have happened with Sakhalin? What about during the war? etc. etc.).

Quite a lot of new Seong-Jin Cho (new on YouTube, anyway); here he’s playing the Mozart A Major Concerto, my favorite of the classical piano concertos. Technically it’s so easy that I spent time learning the first movement myself in college, indifferent pianist that I was; SJC’s rendition is incredibly charming. Also, in a very different mood, the Ravel Concerto for the Left Hand, and Jörg Widmann’s cute little Sonatina, not quite as classical as it sounds. And while I’m at it, not a new recording, the Liszt B minor sonata—I heard someone else’s version on the radio which didn’t begin to match SJC’s fireworks and grand scale, so I had to go listen to his performance again.

A friend from grad school had a baby and I sent them my standard care package, a little stuffed animal and some picture books: the Very Hungry Caterpillar, Where the Wild Things Are (which I still love, the last line always makes me tear up), and Horton Hatches an Egg, mostly because it was the only Dr. Seuss on the shelf in Japanese. Not my favorite one—that would be a competition among Red Fish, Blue Fish, The King’s Stilts, Wocket in my Pocket, The Sleep Book, Green Eggs and Ham and so on—but I like the hatchling. Also the title seems to contain an inadvertent pun in Japanese—ホートンたまごをかえす, which is a literal translation of the English title but, written phonetically as it is, could also mean “Horton gives the egg back,” relevant to the plot in an ironic way.

Photos: Mostly flowers, the plums have already started to bloom; also a boss cat taking up its fair share of space at the end of an alley where the cats had clearly taken possession, and Koron-chan doing her 見返り美人　(beauty looking over her shoulder) thing.

Be safe and well.

So A-Pei and I were talking about chocolate chip cookies, and I had cause to ask her for the Chinese word for “pecan.” She said 胡桃, which horrified me, since in Japanese that means “walnut.” Come to find out that (I think) in Taiwan 胡桃 is pecan and 核桃 is walnut, while on the mainland 胡桃 is walnut and 山核桃 is pecan…give me strength! [Then again, as long as neither of them ends up in my chocolate chip cookies I’m okay—cookies should be warm and melty and goopy, not crunchy.]

Reading Naomi Mitchison’s short autobiography You May Well Ask, which is all kinds of entertaining: a couple of things about her early writing that I found very relatable.
“The Conquered, my first book, came out at white heat and, what is more, I wrote all the best bits, the juicy bits, first, the bits that were most exciting and satisfying to write, like the very end. Then I filled in the rest, but I enjoyed that too.”
“I got a great many letters about The Conquered. This is something writers need, and a phone call isn’t the same; you can’t pick it up and look at it again years later, when you are exhausted and unhappy.”
Also, I know where I’ve heard of that book before! “She had time to…wonder what she would do if They said nothing could be done, her hand must come off, and produced block and chopper, and hacked—like Meromic in The Conquered--with dunking in hot tar to follow.” It delights me that Nicola Marlow has read Naomi Mitchison. [For the non-Forest readers, nobody chops Nicola’s hand off, she gets it stitched by the one character of color in the whole series, a cricket-loving Pakistani doctor, and recovers sufficiently to win a cricket match a few weeks later.]

Listening, not for the first time, to an old mixtape [now a mixCD] of my father the classical musician’s favorite pop songs. “Once upon a time I drank a little wine, was as happy as could be. Now I’m just like a cat on a hot tin roof, baby what do you think you’re doing to me,” to which my mind immediately appended “—Lan Wangji, probably.”
Also, on the Brazilian side, I don’t think I’ve posted Se todos fossem iguais a você before—another of my very favorite Jobim songs, very singable and very loving, with the irresistible Portuguese plural of iguais for igual. (Link goes straight to the song, but just listen to the whole album, it’s about the best full album ever recorded in any genre).

I’ve read Diana Wynne Jones’ Charmed Life so many times I can recite good chunks of it from memory, and even so—and reading it in Chinese yet!—the climactic scene still grabs me so hard I missed my stop on the train. Comical and thrilling and quietly numinous and upsetting, all at once.
The Chinese translation is terrible, even I can tell, flat and inconsistent and inaccurate, but you take what you can get. ”And he needs us like he needs two left legs,” Bernard remarked, jerking around in the hammock as he tried to eat a jelly comes out as “我们对他来说就像左膀右臂。“伯纳德从吊床上一跃而起，去拿冰淇淋, that is (I think) “And according to him we’re the staff he depends on,” Bernard said, sitting up in the hammock and going to get an ice cream.” [The ice cream, at least, is a source text difference.] And that’s just one thing. Between the “he needs us like…” and the stocks and shares and the name, it suddenly occurs to me that Bernard might be Jewish. Neat.. When Chrestomanci tells Gwendolen “Stay here and learn how to do it [use magic] properly,” it comes out as 留在这里学学怎么做人吧, stay here and learn to behave properly. I like 做人 as a phrase, though—be a mensch. Translation faults aside, I will say it cracked me up that when Cat yanks the silver handcuffs off, Chrestomanci’s “Ow!” comes out as 哎哟！.

Still rehearsing the Brahms violin concerto in orchestra—I love this piece so much, especially but not uniquely the first movement. Last week was our first time with the solo violinist.

interpersonal grumbling

I was low-key infuriated the whole time for reasons unrelated to the music—I’m sitting inside first stand this time around, meaning that the person on my left is the first chair = leading the cello section. At this rehearsal a younger guy was asked to substitute for the usual first chair, and IN SPITE OF not being totally sure of the music he didn’t refuse when he should have done, so I spent the whole rehearsal mentally snarling that’s a tricky entrance, if you don’t come in properly with confidence no one else can either! or pizzicato on the OFF-BEAT wtf is your PROBLEM and so on, on account of if he didn’t get it right, I had to be the one responsible for doing so. Which was not ideal at the first soloist rehearsal, when it really matters to be able to follow the conductor and get it right.

That aside, it was a wonderful experience anyway. The soloist (a professional violinist) was a smallish, mild-mannered, fortyish guy from Hiroshima with a big wide lush tone, very secure. Going through the concerto without stopping felt like setting off on a life-or-death adventure, exciting, knife-edge, important, heartwrenching. The best thing about rehearsing a piece for six months is that you get to know not just the parts you hear in concert or on a recording but also all kinds of little things in your own part and others—there’s a place in the violas near the end of the first movement (around 23:27 in this recording), for instance, just a little three-note motif under the solo line that absolutely moves me to tears every time.

Zhu Yilong doing his usual thing, behaving like one of his own frequently whumped characters (I wish somebody would explain to him that putting his health at risk also means putting his career/his work at risk, then he might listen?) and still somehow managing to look absurdly beautiful.

Photos: The beauty salon cat having a nice outdoor bath in the sun, another cat glaring at me, geometric creepers (?), a village lane in the middle of the city, a rose, a camellia (either tsubaki or sazanka but I can’t tell the two apart to save my life).

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):
Chronicles of Chrestomanci – Diana Wynne Jones (Chrestomanci, Michael Saunders)
Interested to see Michael Saunders in the tagset—I don’t think I’ve ever come across fic about him! It would be fun to find out how Michael came to the castle, how he and Chrestomanci work together, how he interacts with the other denizens there, what his backstory is. I love the carefully measured glimpses we get of Chrestomanci coming out of his vagueness to show just how formidable he is, and some of that would be neat from Michael's perspective! Other characters also very welcome, especially Milly, Janet, and Julia, or from the previous generation (?) Tacroy and Flavian.

False Doctrine Series - Alice Degan (Peachy, Kit, Elsa, Harriet)
As an amateur musician I'm interested in Peachy the disorganized composer--I'd love to read his perspective on the events of the book, with a good helping of music if at all possible. Or something from Harriet's point of view, I enjoy her down-to-earth practicality and wonder what her narrative voice would sound like too. (We get plenty of Kit and Elsa in the book itself, but I am very fond of them and have no problem if you want to write more about them as well!) Something about the four of them after the book would also be neat; pretty much anything in which I get to spend more time with the characters works for me....
(Also, as a long-shot, if you want to bring in an original character or two to show me what the conceit of the book looks like from a Jewish or otherwise non-Christian perspective, that would be FASCINATING.)
(Note: I have only read the first of the two books, so I'd like a fic that does not focus on the second book, although I'm not worried about spoilers if they come up.)

Lost Tomb Reboot (Huo Daofu)
I just find Huo Daofu and his sarcasm and his competence and his sharp dressing and his reluctant care a delight, and I will read anything you want to write about him—what he does post-canon, something from his point of view set during LTR, you name it. (I haven’t seen the other Lost Tomb things but I’m open to something involving Sha Hai and other parts of his backstory, as long as it’s not the whole entire fic; no worries about spoilers.) If you want to pair him off with someone, I have a thing about Huo Daofu/Bai Haotian (I’ve written one fic about them under my other AO3 name, scherzanda, and also received a terrific gift fic with this pairing, but more is always good), and I tend to subscribe to past Huo Daofu/Wu Xie, but I’m okay with other ideas as well.

Pseudo-Edo SF art – Yamaguchi Akira
See my comment on the Yuletide promo post for details. As linked there, you can also find the paintings in question here among other places. I’ve narrowed down the paintings to three, but pretty much anything by Yamaguchi in the same style would work. I’d love a random story set in this setting—a slice of life, a bit of alternate history, you name it. Especially if it features trains!

Steerswoman Series – Rosemary Kirstein (Steffie, Zenna)
Steffie is probably my favorite character in the whole series, against stiff competition--I like his meticulous way of thinking things out, his practicality, his kindness, and his deadpan quasi-humor. I’ve been given a wonderful Steffie fic in the past, but I’m always up for more. I’d love to see him working with Zenna in Alemeth, learning to be a steersman and figuring himself and his town out, while Zenna gets started on her new life as well. (I love Zenna too--her easy-going calm, which seems partly innate and partly a coping mechanism she's worked out, and her interest in the people around her. I love the way all the steerswomen (and proto-steersman Steffie) have their own distinct ways of solving problems.)

Thank you!

Rehearsing the Schubert Great symphony in orchestra (it’s un-numberable, nobody agrees what number it is, which on reflection may have been Schubert’s way of trying to get around the Curse of the Ninth?) and while some people are complaining that it’s too LONG, and they have a point, I love it! The last movement in particular—you listen to what the cellos are doing around 43:19 here and tell me that’s not a jazz walking bass line, the whole thing is danceable. I’m very annoyed that nobody seems to have made an actual jazz arrangement of it.

My friend a-Pei, who knows her way around Taobao, was very helpful in getting me a couple of Chinese editions of books I wanted, namely 胖子国和瘦子国 and 魔法生活, better known as Patapoufs et Filifers and Charmed Life. The latter in particular is one I’ve read (in the original English, obviously) so many times I almost have it memorized, so I can make my way through it in Chinese even where the language is over my head, and I’m making very slow progress and having a wonderful time. I should really keep mdbg (mbdg? can never remember) open to look up all the words I can’t pronounce. (One immediate conclusion: proper nouns transcribed into characters are a curse, even worse than katakana in Japanese. With a book like this where most of the names are significant, I wish they’d just give all the characters Chinese names… . I’m especially incensed at what they did with Cat Chant! It’s important that his nickname is Cat, as in the animal, so why did the translator call him 卡特, or phonetically kǎtè, instead of 小猫 or (via a-Pei) 喵仔 or something? Aagh!)

Not much writing happening.  It is amazing how I can write any amount of fic (quality notwithstanding) at the drop of a hat, but as soon as it comes to revisions, I fall back on any excuse not to do it. Still! Has to be done, and I will be glad when I’ve done it. I need to hold out book 3 to myself as the carrot.
In re Yuletide, I did leave a short, belated comment on the promotion post for my weirdo idea of this year, Yamaguchi Akira’s paintings, to be found at the top of the page here.

Thanks to…I think philomytha? I’ve been amusing myself with bits of Angela Brazil school stories via Gutenberg; my conclusion is that Elinor Brent-Dyer is probably a better writer (Antonia Forest is in another dimension altogether, you can’t compare them), but Angela Brazil has wonderful character names and surprisingly entertaining dialogue, slang and all. “Girl alive!” is a particularly satisfying exclamation. (One has to read around the period-typical racism present elsewhere in the slang, though, ugh sigh.) Also, an enjoyable exchange in hindsight:
“I wish I could go to a school where there isn't any homework, and that somebody would invent a typewriter that would just spell the words ready-made when you press a button." / "There's a fortune waiting for the man who does!" agreed Ingred. "'The Royal-Road-to-Learning Typewriter: spells of itself.' It would sell by the million, I should think." Ingred is also the character who would like to dangle her walking-tour luggage from a hot-air balloon lashed to her waist, which seems to me like a very good idea even if technically impractical.

Photos: Assorted flowers and unripe persimmons, the sky alongside our train line, and several views (taken by Y) of Koron-chan, the cat who enlivens his morning commute, getting very interested in some vines.

Be safe and well.

Happy New Year! I wish everyone a joyful, healthy, fulfilling year (and thereafter). I'm very grateful to friends on Dreamwidth for the mutual support and interest of this comfortably loose-strung community. Much love to all.
I have been on-and-off sick for most of the week--not corona as far as I can tell, just my usual headache/pain in the neck thing (literal and figurative, obviously) plus alpha. Mostly sleeping a lot and limply reading Yuletide. Still sort of iffy but mostly in one piece; there are one zillion DW posts I want to comment on among other online responsibilities, but I thought I would start with New Year's greetings and a bunch of Yuletide-related stuff I mostly had written up earlier. (Effect of writing in advance: this got quite long! Sorry.)

My Yuletide gift, as previously noted, was the amazing The One that Got Away by achray--I was so certain of the author that I almost cited her in my previous post, and delighted to be correct. This was a Yuletide of firsts in many ways for me and one was writing my assignment in the same fandom as my gift: mine was The Language of the Enemy. Between the fandom and the content, I feel like anybody already familiar with me probably guessed this one in two seconds flat (I know at least one person did!), but there it is. Much grateful to sakana17 for all her help. This was also the first time, out of sixty-odd fics on my AO3, I’ve posted an E-rated one there (albeit pretty mild as Explicit fics go), and also the first time I’ve used Choose Not to Warn. (For the record, I don’t think any of the major warnings actually apply, but in this fandom major character death is always sort of hovering ominously in the background, and it’s not easy to define the consent-related status of Chen Moqun/Lin Nansheng).
I doubt I will write any more Rebel fic (hah, when I say something like this I'm usually lying), but between achray’s fic and mine I still have so many thoughts about Lin Nansheng and Chen Moqun and Wang Shi’an and the way integrity, respect, self-respect and self-defense (and the lack of all of the above) intertwine in their relationships. Nothing I could actually write out, but still.

I also wrote a couple of treats, to translate a passion, to divide a sorrow (Harriet Vane writes a murder mystery) and Awful's Turn (the aftermath of Archer's Goon). Both were a lot of fun. One unexpected side-effect of the latter was that I finally got around to watching the 1980s BBC six-episode drama version of Archer's Goon that I've had bookmarked on YouTube for years and years, and was pleasantly surprised at how good it is! ( Read more... ) (I have also realized that my post-canon feelings for this book include not only Howard/Ginger but Quentin/Torquil/Catriona, and I’m not sure I managed to keep either of these out of the fic in question.)

Finally a handful of photos that struck me as auspicious.
( Read more... )

Be safe and well.

As a self-distraction because my neck hurts and I'm gloomy for no especial reason, have some thoughts on non-magical endings to fantasy books and, completely unrelated other than in reference to the post title word, some very angsty Zhao Xinci and Zhang Shi from the fic I'm still not writing.

( cornflakes and other non-magical options )

( miss you, yes, forgive you, never )

(Everything is not terrible, or at least not going to stay that way, knock wood.) Be safe and well.

I discovered Diana Wynne Jones when I was just the right age, eleven or so and living in London. We were going out to an Indian restaurant with friends of my parents, and I had Charmed Life. I love Indian food, but on that evening I didn't care what I ate or if I ate at all, I just wanted the dinner to be over quickly so I could get back to my book. (My parents, otherwise understanding, didn't approve of reading at the table.) The next one I got was Howl's Moving Castle, which didn't grab me quite as much on the first readthrough, but as soon I was finished I discovered I somehow had to go back and read it again, and again, and... And so on and forth. Probably one of the most satisfying days of my life up until then was the day a few months later in Paris, when I got Archer's Goon from the American Library on the same day my father took me to see Fantasia for the first time.

I've been trying to pin down what made her books so distinctively good. Wildly imaginative, deftly characterized, funny, well paced, definitely all that, but more than anything, maybe, the incredibly tight construction. I'm having trouble expressing what I mean here, but in the best of her books, every prop, every action, literally every single word is exactly right and is there for a reason, creating a kind of perfect, compelling sphere of plot/mood/atmosphere. The only other writer I can think of who routinely does anything like that is Peter Dickinson, in the best of his mysteries.

Mostly my favorite of her books are the ones I read early on, from the eighties, I suppose. The later ones tend to be less amazing, although only in the way that Brahms' First is less amazing than his Second, meaning it's still quite a lot more amazing than ninety percent of everything else. The Year of the Griffin, though, makes me wonder if she wrote it partly in impatience with the Harry Potter series. Read through the chapter describing the essays on "What is wizards' magic?" if you want to start seeing the magic in the Harry Potter books as incredibly childish and simplistic.

I wrote a short essay on LJ a few months back about Howl's Moving Castle and a Japanese folktale, so I won't talk about it here. What else? Witch Week is hilariously funny, and horrifying, and a good example of the way absolutely everything in the book works together for a purpose. And one thing I always like about it: in the epilogue, when Nan and Charles and the others are part of our world as they should have been, their non-magical lives are not less exciting or less filled with possibility for being non-magical.

The Dalemark books should be fantasy classics, and hopefully will end up that way. I read Drowned Ammet first, and then lost sight of it for many years and always remembered it, and found it again with enormous excitement. Cart and Cwidder is in some ways the most straightforward of the lot, but now that I read it again I see that though it was sold as a kids' book, and is told from the perspective of a young boy, it's not for the faint of heart. Moril and Brid see their father murdered, to begin with, and then find that their mother doesn't want the life they do--but even those are in a way standard tropes, necessary to put the kids on their own for their adventure. What chilled me the most, this last reading through, was that Kialan saw his brother hanged. I'd forgotten that.
The Spellcoats is primeval. I don't know what else to call it. It is not like anything else.
The Crown of Dalemark, I have to say, disappointed me compared to the others. It has wonderful moments, but the ending felt awkward, abrupt, unresolved, and the plot undirected. I wish she could have rewritten it.

The ending to Fire and Hemlock used to bother me too--is this a happy ending or not? what's going on here?!--but has come to do so less. Fire and Hemlock is a joy for me because I'm a cellist too and I love Tom's cello playing, and the quartet rehearsal--one of my all-time favorite scenes--and the little musical touches, the orchestra playing the Eroica Symphony. (See also Jan Mark's Handles, but that's completely different.)

I'm also pretentious enough to associate Eight Days of Luke with music--it always makes me want to go and listen to "Siegfried's Rhine Journey" (can't remember the German) and other bits of Wagner. In that book, the way she evokes gods and eternal things is so different from the way anyone else would. It begins with the most everyday, humdrum scenes of chewing gum and lost luggage and bad food and marrows, and without ever breaking stride or changing pitch jaggedly, ends in, well, the Ring cycle with all its mystery and tragedy and un-human power. One thing that I notice more as I reread it as an older woman is Astrid's sadness at the end. (I've always read it as meaning that she spent the three days of David's fire journey being in some way involved with Thor, and now knows she had that time but will never have it again.) I can't help wondering why Diana Wynne Jones chose to add that touch, unless it's to emphasize the Ring themes of love and loss.

The Ogre Downstairs is in some ways a classic British children's fantasy book--strange, episodic magical adventures end up solving real-world problems for a family of children--but so good, and so funny, and so serious. The process of de-Ogrification reminds me a little of Edwin Dodd in Antonia Forest's Ready-Made Family--a newcomer who isn't able to adjust his methods of living to his new relations, who in turn take a long time to realize that they've been missing the point of him. The kids, too, learn (and demonstrate) the "only connect" principle, finding where they fit together--Malcolm and Gwinny as the gentle ones, Malcolm again and Johnny as the malcontent younger brothers, Caspar and Douglas and their Indigo Rubber, and so on.

If I had to choose one favorite DWJ book, it might be Archer's Goon. There are so many splendid things about Archer's Goon that I don't even know where to start. If I wanted to take it (maybe too) seriously, I might say that it's about family and about growing up, and the point it makes (apart from the marvelous ten points on the first page) is that you learn to grow up by nurturing someone else. Howard with Awful, Quentin and Catriona with both their children (as lacking as Quentin may be in some ways, he comes off as a genuinely caring father), Hathaway with his family in the past, Erskine unexpectedly enough with Howard and Awful themselves. The "bad guys"--Archer, Shine, Dillian, even Fifi and Miss Potter--are the ones who haven't learned this, haven't grown up, and never will. (And then there's Torquil, who is in a class of his own.)

And Charmed Life. I've always had a crush on Chrestomanci.

Because I didn't have the honor of knowing her personally, it's very hard to think of Diana Wynne Jones as dead, when her books are still here. May her memory be a blessing.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Tchaikovsky Fifth (h/t NHK)

A short essay I wrote a while ago, thinking about the relation between one of my favorite books and a somewhat obscure Japanese folktale.

Diana Wynne Jones’ fantasy novel Howl’s Moving Castle has recently become well-known in Japan, after the making of a Studio Ghibli movie based on it (or more accurately, inspired by it). While I doubt that either Ms. Jones or most of her Japanese readers are aware of the correspondence, I would like to suggest that one reason for the book’s popularity is its unexpected similarity to a particular Japanese fairy tale. “Hachi-Kazuki,” or “The Girl with the Flowerpot on her Head,” is not as familiar in Japan as are, say, “The Peach Boy” or “Urashima Taro,” but its roots go well back in Japanese literature. (insert historical stub, someday). It goes like this. The girl of the title (call her Kazuki, as we never find out her original name) is born into the household of a minor noble and lives happily until age thirteen, when her mother dies. Her mother’s last act is to take a handy flowerpot, turn it upside down, and cram it over her daughter’s head. The flowerpot proves to be unremovable by any means, and there Kazuki’s troubles begin. Her father shortly remarries, and his second wife, as in all good fairy tales, treats her flowerpot-headed stepdaughter cruelly. Finally Kazuki runs away and tries to drown herself in a nearby river. Unfortunately, the flowerpot floats on the water and keeps her alive. She is fished out of the river by the soldiers of a local lord, who takes her into his household because he has a fancy for collecting curiosities.
There she becomes the bathhouse attendant. The lord has three sons, the elder two already married; as we expect from a fairy tale, the youngest son is the handsomest and kindest of the three. Kazuki promptly falls in love with him, and—although all he can see of her under the flowerpot is her pretty wrists and ankles—he returns the favor. When he announces to his father that they are to be married, the lord is nonplussed. The older sons propose a mean-spirited “bride competition,” assuming that the flowerpot-faced Kazuki will be too humiliated to go up against their own wives. To spare her embarrassment, the youngest son suggests they run away together, and they are just about to do so when, with a thunderous crack, the flowerpot splits in two and falls off her to the ground. Amazed, Kazuki and her bridegroom discover the valuable jewels and kimono her mother had prudently packed into the flowerpot. Thus bedecked, Kazuki turns out to be not only the most beautiful bride of the lot but the most gifted at poetry and music; she and her husband live happily ever after, and somewhere in there she even manages to reconcile with her father.
Diana Wynne Jones’ Sophie has her own version of Kazuki’s flowerpot: a spell of seeming old age, cast on her by the Witch of the Waste. Is the Witch Sophie’s mother? Well, no, literally speaking, but can we see her that way? The Witch is certainly old enough to be Sophie’s mother (and then some) and more importantly, she is Sophie’s immediate predecessor as the strongest woman of magic in the kingdom: she is Sophie’s enemy, but she conveys Sophie into the discovery of her own powers. Meanwhile, Sophie’s stepmother, Fanny, plays a dual role as both the traditional mean stepmother and Kazuki’s unhelpful but ultimately affectionate father, given their reconciliation at the end of the book.
While Sophie does not actually try to kill herself after the spell is cast on her, she does leave home and plunge herself into the dangerous spaces of Wizard Howl’s castle, where—as Kazuki would have drowned if not for the offending flowerpot—she would have been in (metaphorical) danger of having her heart eaten if not for her appearance of old age. Howl in his various guises is both the curiosity-collecting lord and his son. As for Kazuki’s job as bathhouse attendant, Sophie’s first action on settling in the castle is to clean it from top to bottom, not to mention taking on the task of washing Howl clean of the green slime he has drenched himself in.
The lord’s other sons appear in the forms of Wizard Suliman, Prince Justin, and Howl’s apprentice Michael, with their brides represented by Sophie’s sisters Lettie and Martha. While there is no outright competition as in Kazuki’s story, the gathering of all concerned in the castle near the end of the book seems to fulfill that role. Kazuki’s bridegroom offers to give up his birthright to run away with her; Howl casts away his casual demeanor of playboy dishonesty: at that moment Kazuki’s flowerpot falls off and Sophie’s spell of old age is broken. (Howl points out that after a certain point Sophie was casting the spell on herself; the Witch had passed on her magical gifts as Kazuki’s mother had concealed gems and kimonos in the flowerpot itself.) Like Kazuki, then, Sophie proves to be as pretty as any of her sisters and the most gifted (in her case magically) of them all.
“Hachi-Kazuki” is not just a Cinderella story, although it can come off that way at first reading. It’s full of oddities and double meanings. After all, the flowerpot which is the source of Kazuki’s troubles is thrust on her not by her wicked stepmother but by her real mother, who up and dies before she can explain what her point was. Having caused her to try to drown herself, the flowerpot then saves her life by floating, and by making her a living curiosity is the cause of the lord’s taking her into his house. It thus not only causes her difficulties but is the agent of saving her from them. Sophie’s spell of old age functions in exactly the same fashion. What seems to be a mother’s—or a Witch’s—curse is in fact a saving grace.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Arensky Piano Trio