nnozomi

Daily life: No news is good news, I suppose? On the lighter side, my husband has mastered the concept of transformative works; he sent me a panel from a baseball manga he follows, with two boys hugging and crying, captioned by him "Are they expecting people to slash this, or what?". Today is his day off, so tomato nabe tonight.

Music: I hate solo practice, which is why even among amateur cellists I am mediocre, but I got my poor abused Momo-chan (nicknamed for the sparkly Momoyama-style cello case) out the other day and noodled the Bach unaccompanied suites for the first time in years--just the G major and C major preludes. The V pedal point in the C major prelude is incredible, even the way I play it, and the chords in the coda...

Books: With relatively little official work, I've been going back to a long-term ongoing project, translating Yuriko Chujo's 1929 letters from London and Paris to her lover Yoshiko Yuasa in Moscow, along with related diaries. Yoshiko would have been at home on Twitter, her diary entries are short and punchy and acerbic; Yuriko (like Ginty Marlow, whose "letters to her friends were never less than eight pages") likes to chatter and ramble at length, at that stage still a spoilt darling, irrepressibly curious, playful, short-tempered, sharp-eyed, grumbly, Communist-adjacent but happy to stay in fancy hotels on her father's nickel, eager to see everything and write about everything.

Chinese: Duolingo review, and working steadily if inefficiently away at the Guardian tool project; trying to work out how to say "knock wood" or "kenahora" with my Taiwanese friend and deciding there isn't really a cultural equivalent, maybe 老天保佑. --> Edited because this struck me funny in Duolingo practice: 太阳不见了! Clearly spoken near the end of the Chinese translation of So You Want To Be A Wizard.

Writing: Not much in the way of actual words, but I sat down to glare at my outline and had a minor but significant plot breakthrough. Much more fun to have everybody be right, but still opposed to each other for good reasons, than to have a villain who's only there for the purpose of being wrong.

Be safe and well.

 My workplace is going to hell in a handbasket and I don't want to write about it here, and I'm too tired to come up with something new and original, but I do want to write something, so here's a bit of somebody else's writing to tide me over. Chujo Yuriko in London to Yuasa Yoshiko in Moscow, 13 September 1929: 

Tired, I sat down in an armchair to read. Recently Sueko [Yuriko's little sister] has been coming to my room when she wants to be quiet, and she was there, reading Dumas’ “Black Tulips” or some such by the window. That was when the boy came with the telegram. Knowing it was from you, I took the buff envelope with a certain calm and pleasure, and when I opened it, everything of you— your kind eyes, your mouth, your body, everything, you entire—came softly up in me, and how happy I was! I felt warm inside. An actual physical satisfaction. Well, come now, I haven’t heard your voice in all of a month! Even the part about “are you still over there” made me feel the essential you-ness in it, how could I not be happy! I laughed and danced. Oh, I’m happy! I’m happy! I was singing it out, and Sueko, laughing along with me, asked, that much? Oh yes, that much so! And that’s what I told her. ... This is the shape things get, the way we feel things, when we’re living together [insert Venn diagram]. There’s a part that’s absolutely held in common, you can’t sort it out into mine or yours. And a lot of things get sucked into yours. When I’m alone it’s just like this (insert circle). Everything goes into the one place. The individual parts of life actually expand. And so, logically speaking, the things I have to write to you also expand...
... Your cable arrived. Don’t stay up too late, don’t walk too much. You’re right. I’m taking as much care as I can, but about staying up late... . For instance, here I am writing to you, throwing myself into this talk with you, and how much time do you think that takes, Moya [pet name for Yoshiko]? It’s a job all on its own. If I’m settled down somewhere, working, my life may look simple from the outside but it’s well designed for writing. Here, now, the business of life tends to slide ahead, and I have to write fast to catch up with it. So if I want to take my time over writing to you, enjoying each letter without rushing it, I just about have to stay up late at night.
... Ohkuma-san says I’m walking around with an unsheathed blade in my belt. He judged that I seem always ready, if something should happen, to whip it out and take on all comers. I’m laughing as I write it down, guessing that it would make you laugh too. What do you think? Am I that impressive? (Certainly my plump sweet-bun doughiness gets a little bit slimmed down when I’m alone, and maybe in London I really am an unsheathed sword, just a little one though). Anyway, you know me sniveling and getting stubborn as a clenched fist, whining like a tiresome wife and so on, you really do know “Miss Chujo” from all sides, so you’re not about to flinch whether I’m an unsheathed sword or a spear or a whatever. But think well of it, will you? When I’m on my own, being a sweet bun is just not resolute enough.
... Moya-san, when we’re back in Japan, we need to discover a way of living that will give both of us some kind of inspiration. This is important for us. You need a life where you can arrange your own ingredients in your own way, explain them yourself—I want to let you know how exciting that kind of life is. To have a part of you that feels passion over running your own interior machines your own way. I think people living our kind of lives really need this. ... Moya-san, MOYA-san, Moyasan! If I put this inner pressure on paper in a Kuno Toyohiko style, it would come out Moya-san Moya-san Moya-san! Can you tell that I’m pushing my forehead up against you? If television were to evolve and some kind of telesense were to be discovered, this moment just now would make your hair stand on end, Moya-san. You’re probably still at your desk (it’s after two in the morning, so you must be tired), perhaps looking up something in the dictionary, when suddenly, under your chin, all the way from London you feel my telesense, and say Oi! don’t dig your forehead into me that way!