Asakiyume mita

In Japan at New Year's, one traditional pastime is to play a poetry matching game involving the Hyakunin isshu, a collection of 100 highly regarded poems from the classical period. I've never actually played it, but it's done by reading out the first portion of the poem and then having people compete to be the first to grab the card that completes the poem (... except when I look online it seems that maybe what you're grabbing is just a version of the poem with an illustration? ... Not sure how this actually goes down...)

Anyway: the principle is that everyone knows the poems so well that if you read just the first portion, everyone will know the second portion.

In our family, we have something like that, but it's not poems. It's the dialogue from Warriors of the Wind, a translation of Hayao Miyazaki's movie Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (風の谷のナウシカ). It edited the movie badly, removing some of the most important scenes and inexplicably changing the names of the characters. Which is all to say, it's not a great film--at all. And we're pretty big fans of the actual film, which we saw originally in Japan (though nearly a decade after its release).

However! The dialogue of Warriors of the Wind has an over-the-top, overacted delightfulness, with exchanges like this [not present in the original script]:

"I don't believe you're as evil as you pretend to be, Queen Selena"
"ah-ha-ha, oh, but I am!"

And some of these lines have become real family touchstones. For example, when Nausicaa (called Zandra in this version) falls beneath the Swamp of Corruption (called in this version the Toxic Jungle), she has a thought monologue that begins "The endless ironies of life" (not what she thinks in the original). So, we often will say that to one another when something ironic comes along.

You get the idea.

So I thought it would be fun to make a matching game with the dialogue. We'd say one half of an exchange, or one portion of a monologue, and people would have to race to get the second half.

I didn't have it ready for New Year's, but I've got it ready now. Here are what some of the paired cards looked like before I glued them to backing and cut them out:



And here's the endless-ironies-of-life card and its mate, on the backing, but before I've cut them out:



I'll try to take a picture of all the cards when we play. I'm realizing as I type this that it's pretty much the innest of in-jokes, and therefore kind of inaccessible, but ... I'm going ahead and sharing about it anyway.