August 28, 2014
Poseidon of the East (34)
Shouryuu again uses the alias of Fuukan in "Kizan" (from the short story collection, Dreaming of Paradise).
Labels: 12 kingdoms, poseidon
August 25, 2014
The Great Passage
"The Great Passage" is the (fictional) name of an unabridged dictionary being created by the microscopic dictionary department in a large publishing firm.
The title of the movie in Japanese is Fune o Amu (舟を編む), which is even more obscure. It literally means "knitting together a boat," Japanese lexicographer's slang for compiling a dictionary.
The Japanese name of the dictionary is Daidokai (大渡海), literally "great sea voyage." Because a dictionary, the managing editor explains, is the ship by which readers navigate the vast sea of words that encompass life.
These people take words seriously.
Ryuhei Matsuda, who did very well as a roving talent agent in Amachan, plays against type as Majime Mitsuya, a clinically introverted linguist who gets chosen (practically at random) to replace a veteran editor at the onset of the project.
The not-uncommon name "Majime" is an Oscar Wilde-worthy pun, as it has the approximate meaning as "earnest" (or "Ernest").
Majime has been living by himself in a boarding house (plus a cat and the landlady), having taking over all the other rooms to store his books. And then the landlady's granddaughter (Aoi Miyazaki) moves in.
Aoi Miyazaki, who put in fine performances in Nana (also with Ryuhei Matsuda) and Atsuhime, is perfectly cast here, cute without being unrealistically pretty for the part.
You could be forgiven at this point for expecting a classic "geek gets the girl" story. However, that subplot is pretty much wrapped up in the first half.
This really is a movie about making a dictionary. The whole fifteen-year process. Collecting and collating the entries. The endless revisions. Looming deadlines and shrinking budgets. Frantic searches for missing entries.
It's a fascinating tale from start to finish. Granted, you have to love lexicography to enjoy this movie, which apparently some Japanese movie critics do.
"The Great Passage" won Best Picture at the 2013 Japan Academy Awards. Alas, right now, the only available DVD version with English subtitles is the region 3 (Chinese) release.
Amazon Prime picked up the streaming rights for the anime version in October 2016. Amazon Crossing published the English-language translation in 2017.
The title of the movie in Japanese is Fune o Amu (舟を編む), which is even more obscure. It literally means "knitting together a boat," Japanese lexicographer's slang for compiling a dictionary.
The Japanese name of the dictionary is Daidokai (大渡海), literally "great sea voyage." Because a dictionary, the managing editor explains, is the ship by which readers navigate the vast sea of words that encompass life.
These people take words seriously.
Ryuhei Matsuda, who did very well as a roving talent agent in Amachan, plays against type as Majime Mitsuya, a clinically introverted linguist who gets chosen (practically at random) to replace a veteran editor at the onset of the project.
The not-uncommon name "Majime" is an Oscar Wilde-worthy pun, as it has the approximate meaning as "earnest" (or "Ernest").
Majime has been living by himself in a boarding house (plus a cat and the landlady), having taking over all the other rooms to store his books. And then the landlady's granddaughter (Aoi Miyazaki) moves in.
Aoi Miyazaki, who put in fine performances in Nana (also with Ryuhei Matsuda) and Atsuhime, is perfectly cast here, cute without being unrealistically pretty for the part.
You could be forgiven at this point for expecting a classic "geek gets the girl" story. However, that subplot is pretty much wrapped up in the first half.
This really is a movie about making a dictionary. The whole fifteen-year process. Collecting and collating the entries. The endless revisions. Looming deadlines and shrinking budgets. Frantic searches for missing entries.
It's a fascinating tale from start to finish. Granted, you have to love lexicography to enjoy this movie, which apparently some Japanese movie critics do.
"The Great Passage" won Best Picture at the 2013 Japan Academy Awards. Alas, right now, the only available DVD version with English subtitles is the region 3 (Chinese) release.
Amazon Prime picked up the streaming rights for the anime version in October 2016. Amazon Crossing published the English-language translation in 2017.
Labels: japanese, japanese movie reviews, language, personal favs, romance
August 21, 2014
Poseidon of the East (33)
In T.S. Eliot's version of the death of Thomas Becket, Murder in the Cathedral, King Henry II complains aloud, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" A contemporary of Becket, Edward Grim, records a less poetic version:
In either case, several of the king's men took this to not be a hypothetical question and killed the priest. The difference here is that Atsuyu intended the ends to justify the means from the start. All he wants is plausible deniability.
What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?
In either case, several of the king's men took this to not be a hypothetical question and killed the priest. The difference here is that Atsuyu intended the ends to justify the means from the start. All he wants is plausible deniability.
Labels: 12 kingdoms, politics, poseidon
August 18, 2014
August 15
Emperor (with Matthew Fox and Tommy Lee Jones) is a needlessly boring and unjustifiably self-important melodrama that misses the great thriller lurking right under its nose.
Early in the morning of August 15, 1945, a group of young Imperial Japanese Army officers attempted to forcibly prevent the Emperor's surrender address from being broadcast that afternoon.
It was an eerie repeat of the "February 26 [1936] Incident" (and even the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877), when a similar coup d'état was launched with the goal of "purging the government and military leadership of their factional rivals and ideological opponents."
The "August 15 Incident" ran out of steam when die-hard War Minister General Korechika Anami refused to lend his moral or material support (unlike Saigo Takamori back in 1877, whose participation ensured a lot more people dying for no reason).
The best cinematic account of the events of August 15 is Japan's Longest Day.
Kihachi Okamoto's 1967 docudrama (based on the book by Kazutoshi Hando), with Toshiro Mifune as General Anami, is rather too hagiographic about Hirohito's role. But it faithfully portrays the suicidal spasm of fanaticism that ended the war for good.
What makes it all the more fascinating is that, almost immediately following a "war without mercy," the war did indeed end for good, as John Dower lays out in detail in his history of the Occupation, Embracing Defeat.
Popular culture perhaps makes an even stronger argument. A number of surprisingly decent Hollywood movies with marquee stars were set in—and even made in—Japan not long after the end of the war.
Go for Broke! (1951, with Van Johnson) is about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of Japanese-Americans. They fought in Europe. It depicts the Nisei soldiers in a quite positive light. The screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.
Then into the 1960s, we have:
You Only Live Twice canonized the silliest of modern stereotypes about Japan. Japanese audiences, though, were delighted with the whole thing. The same can be said about The Last Samurai, which is about as historically insightful as an old western B movie.
It seems a little Orientalism can be good for art. I'm sure Hollywood found the "exoticism" of Japan fascinating. But it was exactly this fascination that allowed them to take the non-exotic parts at face value, rather than filter them through their own biases.
It was an eerie repeat of the "February 26 [1936] Incident" (and even the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877), when a similar coup d'état was launched with the goal of "purging the government and military leadership of their factional rivals and ideological opponents."
The "August 15 Incident" ran out of steam when die-hard War Minister General Korechika Anami refused to lend his moral or material support (unlike Saigo Takamori back in 1877, whose participation ensured a lot more people dying for no reason).
The best cinematic account of the events of August 15 is Japan's Longest Day.
Kihachi Okamoto's 1967 docudrama (based on the book by Kazutoshi Hando), with Toshiro Mifune as General Anami, is rather too hagiographic about Hirohito's role. But it faithfully portrays the suicidal spasm of fanaticism that ended the war for good.
What makes it all the more fascinating is that, almost immediately following a "war without mercy," the war did indeed end for good, as John Dower lays out in detail in his history of the Occupation, Embracing Defeat.
Popular culture perhaps makes an even stronger argument. A number of surprisingly decent Hollywood movies with marquee stars were set in—and even made in—Japan not long after the end of the war.
- Tokyo Joe (1949, with Humphrey Bogart)
- House of Bamboo (1955, with Robert Ryan and Robert Stack)
- Teahouse of the August Moon (1956, with Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford, Eddie Albert, and Harry Morgan)
- Sayonara (1957, with Marlon Brando, Patricia Owens, James Garner, Miiko Taka, Red Buttons, and Ricardo Montalban!)
- Escapade in Japan (1957, with Jon Provost of Lassie fame)
Go for Broke! (1951, with Van Johnson) is about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of Japanese-Americans. They fought in Europe. It depicts the Nisei soldiers in a quite positive light. The screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.
Then into the 1960s, we have:
- Cry for Happy (1961, with Glenn Ford, Donald O'Connor, and Miiko Taka)
- My Geisha (1962, with Shirley MacLaine, Yves Montand, and Edward G. Robinson)
- Walk, Don't Run (1966, with Cary Grant, Samantha Eggar, Jim Hutton, and Miiko Taka)
- You Only Live Twice (1967, with Sean Connery as James Bond)
You Only Live Twice canonized the silliest of modern stereotypes about Japan. Japanese audiences, though, were delighted with the whole thing. The same can be said about The Last Samurai, which is about as historically insightful as an old western B movie.
It seems a little Orientalism can be good for art. I'm sure Hollywood found the "exoticism" of Japan fascinating. But it was exactly this fascination that allowed them to take the non-exotic parts at face value, rather than filter them through their own biases.
Labels: embracing defeat, history, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, movies about japan, showa period, ww2
August 14, 2014
Poseidon of the East (32)
The tonkou (遁甲) is the way shirei can move through the winds in the sky, through veins in the earth, and through the currents in the water, while remaining hidden from view. A similar term, tonjutsu (遁術), is defined as the "art of ninja escape."
In Japan, the Tsuina (追儺) festival is known as Setsubun (節分). It's a spiritual spring cleaning ceremony for driving out evil spirits along with the dust, accomplished by peppering people dressed up like ogres with roasted soybeans.
In Japan, the Tsuina (追儺) festival is known as Setsubun (節分). It's a spiritual spring cleaning ceremony for driving out evil spirits along with the dust, accomplished by peppering people dressed up like ogres with roasted soybeans.
Labels: 12 kingdoms, japanese culture, poseidon
August 11, 2014
Eric Raymond on SF
Computer programmer and open source software advocate Eric Raymond is also a big fan of "classic" science fiction, by which he means "linear narratives, puzzle stories, competent characters, happy endings, and rational knowability."
Such preferences, of course, are anathema to
Raymond identifies the malady at the root of the problem as LSE or "literary status envy."
In a later post, he warns that
He provides a list of symptoms to watch for, such as:
I especially like number 7:
The rest can be found here. As Kate points out, the symptoms of LSE show up in in lit-crit critiques of pretty much all "classic" genre fiction, for example, the works of Agatha Christie.
Such preferences, of course, are anathema to
critics/authors/editors who are bent on imposing the deep norms of other genres onto the SF field. Such people are especially apt to think SF would be "improved" by adopting the norms and technical apparatus of modern literary fiction.
Raymond identifies the malady at the root of the problem as LSE or "literary status envy."
Literary status envy is the condition of people who think that all genre fiction would be improved by adopting the devices and priorities of late 19th and then 20th-century literary fiction . . . They have almost no interest in ideas outside of esthetic theory and a very narrow range of socio-political criticism. They think competent characters and happy endings are jejune, unsophisticated, artistically uninteresting. They love them some angst.
In a later post, he warns that
LSE is a wasting disease. It invades the brains of writers of SF and other genres, progressively damaging their ability to tell entertaining stories until all they can write is unpleasant gray goo fit only for consumption by lit majors. One of the principal sequelae of the disease is plunging sales.
He provides a list of symptoms to watch for, such as:
1. [Author] desires to be considered a "serious artist."
2. Idea content is absent or limited to politicized social criticism.
3. Heroism does not occur except as anti-heroic mockery.
4. All major characters are psychologically damaged.
I especially like number 7:
7. Inability to write an unambiguously happy ending. In advanced cases, the ability to write any ending at all may be lost.
The rest can be found here. As Kate points out, the symptoms of LSE show up in in lit-crit critiques of pretty much all "classic" genre fiction, for example, the works of Agatha Christie.
Labels: science, science fiction, thinking about writing
August 07, 2014
Poseidon of the East (31)
Choumei Palace (長明宮) is one of the buildings of the Naiden (Inner Palace or Inner Court). It means "long light." The Inner Palace is the residential compound of the emperor (or the province lord).
Labels: 12 kingdoms, poseidon
August 04, 2014
Twelve Kingdoms (update)
I've revised Shadow of the Moon and A Thousand Leagues of Wind. The biggest changes are in the terminology, replacing "royal" references with "imperial" and "king" with "emperor/empress" (I still refer to Shoukei as the "princess royal").
This, of course, had a downstream effect on other word choices.
Along the way, I've edited for clarity and readability, standardized the formatting and nomenclature (especially capitalization), corrected several translation errors, and have undoubtedly introduced a whole bunch of additional typos.
A Thousand Leagues of Wind is in a bit rougher shape, as it's longer and I haven't given it as much attention as Shadow of the Moon. But I think this version is a definite improvement.
This, of course, had a downstream effect on other word choices.
Along the way, I've edited for clarity and readability, standardized the formatting and nomenclature (especially capitalization), corrected several translation errors, and have undoubtedly introduced a whole bunch of additional typos.
A Thousand Leagues of Wind is in a bit rougher shape, as it's longer and I haven't given it as much attention as Shadow of the Moon. But I think this version is a definite improvement.
Labels: 12 kingdoms, shadow revisions, wind