Asakiyume mita

Here are three photos for you. Two I've shared elsewhere on the interwebs, so some of you will have seen them before, but the first one is making its world premiere right here, right now!

Dancing a cumbia with a candle.

Last month we went to see Yeison Landero and his band play cumbia in Amherst. (Here's what his music is like--he throws his head back and goes into a beatific trance as he plays.) It was marvelous.



When we were last in Colombia, we had one very brief session of learning to dance ;-) The teacher showed us several different styles of cumbia dancing, including one where one partner (traditionally, the guy) takes off his hat and holds it high, then low, as the two partners twirl round. That night in Amherst, the venue was full of people dancing their hearts out, including this one girl wielding a candle like a hat. How great to be dancing with fire!**

Ice Eye

Sometimes the frozen beaver pond glares up at you with a critical eye! (The eye is created by people opening a hole in the ice for ice fishing. It refreezes, and then it's opened again, and so on.)



Popcorn Blossoms



From swollen buds, just about to unfurl, to a double-petaled flower in all its glory, popcorn blossoms are rightly celebrated for their beauty. As the classical poet wrote

Seeing them explode
ought to be the end of it.
These popcorn blossoms!
--Nothing can keep their buttery goodness
from lingering on my fingers.

(apologies to the poet Sosei and the translator larryhammer for my abuse of Kokinshū poem no. 47. You can read more of Larry's for-real translations in Ice Melts in the Wind: The Seasonal Poems of the Kokinshu.)


**Actually we think it was an electric candle. But let's imagine!

The ninja girl has been teaching English in Japanese public schools for ten years now. She's got an American mother (me) and an English father (Wakanomori), and she's lived in both places, though primarily in the United States. It means she's familiar with words and songs and games from both England and the United States... but native English-speaking English teachers in the Japanese schools come from other parts of the Anglosphere as well, and it can make for interesting conversations when they get together, as when a teacher from Jamaica was talking about a playground game called, in Jamaica, "Chinese skip." A teacher from South Africa recognized the game, but said they called it "Chinese elastic."

"I didn't know what they were talking about," said the ninja girl.

"I think I do," I said. "We had a game we used to play with a large loop of elasticized cord. Two people would stand inside the loop, about three or four feet apart so the loop was pulled taut at their ankles, making a little elastic rectangle. Then a third person would stand in between them and do a jumping pattern, landing inside, outside, and on the elastic. We called it 'Chinese jump-rope.'"¹

But neither in her years of school in Massachusetts, nor in her year at a school in Dorset had the ninja girl encountered the game. Maybe it fell out of fashion in the United States and was never a thing in England? Or maybe it's just chance of where she happened to live?

On the other hand, both the Jamaican English teacher and the ninja girl knew the song "I'm a Little Teapot," but the South African English teacher didn't.

All of them--including a Filipino English teacher--knew "The Itsy Bitsy Spider," but they had different hand motions to go with it.

¹ We both acknowledged how all these names are examples of that naming convention where you stick some faraway/other/foreign group-name on a thing to show that it's different from another, common, this-is-how-WE-do-it version of it, or something like it.

many Tims
The other day I saw the two neighbor girls onto the bus as both parents had to leave the house very early. I went over at 7:15, and they were still in their bedroom playing an imaginary game together. They are nine and eleven years old (or maybe eight and eleven; not sure), and it was the most charming thing to hear them talking and dramatizing together so happily.

"There's many Tims; what do you expect?!" --that was the one line I wrote down from their game.

And they were so good about getting themselves organized and out the door on time. Their parents should be proud.

favorite word
The ninja girl tells me that one thing her students in Japan like to ask her is what her favorite Japanese word is. By this they don't actually mean just any old random-ass word; they're really meaning more like favorite concept, but they ask in terms of favorite word. She said she usually turns the question back to them and asks them what their favorites are, and it's interesting to hear what they say: they are concepts that are very approved of, admired, promoted, etc., like 一所懸命 (isshokenmei: all one's might/effort) or 思いやり (omoiyari: considerateness, attentiveness, thoughtfulness). You couldn't ask the question "what's your favorite word?" in English to get answers like this; you'd have to make it "What's your favorite virtue?" or something.

Tower of Babel
And that got me thinking how we can understand the story of the tower of Babel as a blessing that God gave people rather than a punishment. When everyone was working together on the tower of Babel--and incidentally, all speaking the same language--they were single minded. One language, one idea. But when the tower was broken and they all found themselves speaking different languages, suddenly they were multi-minded. Many languages, many ideas. Many ways of expressing how it is to be human. And, when we learn each other's languages in a world of many languages, we're expending effort to understand each other--not just "see through another's eyes" but "borrow another's tongue." If we all spoke the same language, we'd lack that diversity and that opportunity to make an effort to understand one another.

This week Mike Allen's Mythic Delirium Press published Like Smoke, Like Light, a collection of short stories by Yukimi Ogawa. Yukimi Ogawa is remarkable: she lives in Tokyo and doesn't feel hugely confident speaking English, but she writes in English, and her stories are imaginative, surprising, and memorable. She's been published in Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and, back in the day, Mythic Delirium--among others.

There are more or less three types of stories. First, there are yōkai tales, that is, stories in which traditional Japanese monsters or creepy beings are main characters. Although the yōkai comes from folklore, the stories Yukimi puts them in are completely new. In talking about the yōkai tales with Mike Allen, she says, "I try to not be too inventive about yokai because they are traditional to our culture, but not be restricted by the folklore too much either. The balance is important, but difficult to keep!" (The rest of the interview is here.)

Second, there are her tales set on an unnamed island where people's skins are patterned and colored in unusual ways. Several of these stories feature Kikiro, a member of the stigmatized underclass of people born without dramatic coloring or a pattern. She's something of a detective, and her investigations reveal things about the society (but also about personal relationships). All the colorful-island stories touch on issues of status, exploitation, discrimination, dignity, trust, and loyalty.

And then there are some stories that don't fall into either of those two categories. In one, a girl's opal blood can be used as a narcotic--or to heal people. In another a woman steals beautiful parts of other people's anatomies to keep herself attractive, always making sure to leave them with something in return, and in another, a caretaking AI gets increasingly fed up with human idiosyncrasies.

Here's what I said at the end of my introduction:

Good science fiction and fantasy stories remind us that other worlds are possible—better ones … and worse ones. They give us space and time to think about how we really feel about tricky questions—like what makes a monster. Yukimi shows us over and over that true monstrosity has nothing to do with appearance and everything to do with one’s treatment of others. Her stories are full of monsters—but the monsters are not skeletons, severed heads, or creatures with eyes on their arms. Similarly, she presents us with a beautiful palette of types of love and family: we have only to accept them in the forms they choose to wear.

Needless to say, I recommend the collection! You can find ways to buy it at the bottom of the page here.

I got five questions from osprey_archer!

1. What's a skill that you're proud of having?

... I'm realizing that it's hard to write an answer to this because as soon as I start composing in a direction, I think, Now you really sound like an insufferable asshole.

Am I perhaps proud of the skill of being able to guess when I'm about to sound like an insufferable asshole? ... Mmmm, I am not particularly proud of that. And I'm not even sure if my assessment is correct, so.

So ... skill implies something that you've worked on and honed--so not, say, a one-off accomplishment, and not something that's just part of your personality without your particularly exerting yourself.

Okay, how's this: I don't know if I'm proud, exactly, but it gives me great joy and exuberance to have discovered, in my fifties, that it's possible to learn multiple languages more or less simultaneously well enough to read them and attempt rudimentary communication in them. It literally feels like having developed a new sense, like my brain has changed its shape. ... Other people knew this delight from a young age, but not me. And there's something about coming to it later in life--you can be very consciously grateful, appreciative.

2. What's a treasured memory?

Sleeping together as a family on summer nights in Japan--the tactile-ness. The in-out of our breathing, together; our hearts are beating, together. Our foreheads are touching, or someone has an arm flung this way, or someone's toes are touching someone else's calves. Outside, insects are singing.

3. Do you have any unusual yearly traditions?

Not really; I have a hard time repeating things cyclically. For a while our family did Boston's Walk for Hunger yearly, but that's not a very unusual thing, and anyway, we since stopped. There are certain things I like to forage when the time is right (cattail pollen in June, chestnuts and hickory nuts in September and October), but I'm not consistent.

4. If you could have a telepathic companion animal, what kind of animal would you want?
I waver between something small enough to sit on my shoulder and something large enough that I could drape my arm over its shoulders. Much as it would be fun to have a telepathic connection with a dolphin (hello Ring of Endless Light) and fascinating to have one with a celphalopod, I think I'd prefer to have a connection with a terrestrial animal because delightful as water is, I can't breathe in it or even keep air in my lungs for as long as dolphins and other water-living mammals can. OTOH, if there are some telepathic marine creatures out there who are hankering for a connection, I withdraw that caveat! Come to me, friends!

... I guess not someone really small, like a tardigrade. I want to be able to see my companion. Probably someone adapted to the type of climate I live in--hello coyotes, bobcats, foxes, bear, deer, squirrels, chipmunks, mice. And I don't want to exclude birds, though I think I would want a very friendly type of bird for an animal companion--someone like a catbird or chickadee, or like the starling that drank the last of my sister's wine the other day.


5. Favorite museum?

Without a doubt, the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

Anyone else like some questions?

When started my Livejournal in 2006, I asked the ninja girl--at that time 16 years old--to make me an icon. "Draw me as a wanderer with a little gray in her hair," I said. She created this picture:



Not only have I used that as my default icon for 16 years now, but I've used it on other sites, too--so much so that I really think of it as me.

Today I received this mother's day portrait from Little Springtime--who is currently 29 (she was 13 back in 2006). She did it on a form they had at the local convenience store for kids to do portraits of their mothers--you can see she's given her age at the bottom right. When I got this, I at first thought it was manga art from a magazine. And then I realized it was my icon! I love it.

The sunken walls of Firelei Báez's vision of Sans-Souci Palace are decorated in blue to recall the indigo dye used in West Africa, and at the end of the installation, in a separate space, is a giant painting by Stephen Hamilton, celebrating the use of indigo in textiles:



There are also samples of indigo-dyed fabrics created by Agnes Umeche, based on traditional designs.



And this informational plaque tells you a little more about Agnes Umeche and her work. (To read the text you'll have to click through and embiggen.)



Interestingly the indigo used in West Africa (Lonchocarpus cyanescens ) is different from the indigo used in Japan (Persicaria tinctoria), and both of those are different from woad (Isatis tinctoria) which also produces a blue dye. (Thanks goes out to the ninja girl for conveying that fact to me--I wouldn't have known!)

Here's some Japanese tie-dyeing--interesting to see the similarities with the West African tie-dyeing.


... and I happened to be using my copy of Lloyd Alexander's The Fortune Tellers as a hard surface on which to write a letter the other day, and I noticed that Trina Schart Hyman had made indigo borders around the edge of the cover design. NICE.

This remarkable movie, Kiku to Isamu, is about the lives of biracial siblings, older sister Kiku and younger brother Isamu, being raised by their frail grandmother deep in the Japanese countryside. It was made in 1959 and is an amazingly clear-eyed, unsentimental depiction of Japanese prejudice--that also contains a stinging indictment of American racism. People keep telling the old granny that she should see about getting the kids adopted through a program that brings the offspring of Japanese women and American servicemen back to the United States, but one kindly neighbor says,

You think it will all be fine if they go to America, but I read the papers. The discrimination between white and black is terrible in America. People say blacks stink and spit on them. It happens even among the soldiers here on the bases.

And when another neighbor says, "The seed is from over there and should be returned," the kindly neighbor says, "It's not as if they were pumpkins or something. With humans it's women who have the eggs." Whereupon the other retreats into well-I-don't-know-about-all-that-book-larnin'-type-stuff.

What's really remarkable about the film is that they don't cast some tiny, adorable little girl for Kiku. She's only eleven, but she's *big*. She's not only a girl, not only Black, not only poor--she's not even conventionally pretty (though she shines with beauty at moments). But she's *such* a complete, real person. She gives as good as she gets ... until it all gets to be too much. You believe in her 100 percent, and your heart breaks for her. (Isamu also is teased, and feels it, but he's smaller, thinner, cuter--and a boy. All of which makes things easier for him.)


(CW for suicide attempt, racism, family separation)

And then you stop and realize, the actress (Takahashi Emi) no doubt faced some of the very things that the character faced. Wakanomori found several articles about her. She did indeed have a hard time, but her love of acting gave her a path forward. You see some of that in the character of Kiku too. Here's a short clip of her performing, all while babysitting (notice the baby on her back?)



Here's an image of her as an adult:



It's a really good movie, and also a beautiful look at how daily life was lived in rural Japan in the period of Tonari no Totoro. As Wakanomori said, it's highly likely Miyazaki saw it.

Wakanomori went for a bike ride beneath high-tension wires and took this photo of the wires reflected in a little stream.



The water is rippling and moving, so the reflection is broken up. It looks ...



... like calligraphy



The very calligraphy that Waka spends his days deciphering and teaching--as in this example, an essay by an 18th-century female scholar, writing on the Kokinshū, an imperially commissioned poetry anthology of 10th-century Japan.



If I can get Waka to read me the water calligraphy, I will tell you what it says. He also took a video in which you can hear the wires singing their high-tension song, which may provide clues to the text.

As the translator of this Japanese short story says in the tweet that brought it to my attention, "I won't blame you for not knowing you needed an Olympics ghost story in your life, but at least now you do." (source)

It begins promisingly...

I was ever so keen to visit the Aran Islands, but unfortunately, I died before ever making it out of Japan.

And continues that way!

And yet. In the months just prior to my death the idea had been mooted among the members of the neighbourhood association to go away on holiday. Over cups of tea after our weekly meeting, the vice-chair Mr Nakarai had let slip that he’d never been overseas, and then, one after another, all the other members of the group had begun to chime in, saying: ‘Me neither!’ ‘Oh, me neither!’ ‘No, I’ve never been abroad either.’ My voice had been among them. In that case, it was suggested, those of us who’d never once left the country should go along to a travel agency, organize a tour guide to accompany us, and take a yokels-abroad sort of vacation. We would go to some place that was the furthest imaginable from Japan. Doubtless the trip would completely wear us out, but we were all of the same generation, and if being abroad for the first time would wear us out to a similar degree, then at least we could be worn out freely and openly, just as our hearts desired. We could embarrass ourselves thoroughly and find it all too much, knowing that we were in good company ...

In the end, we settled on the Aran Islands in Ireland, on the basis they seemed peaceful, and thus probably well-suited to a bunch of pensioners like us.

Apparently my desire to go to the Aran Islands was even greater than I thought, because I was unable to proceed smoothly to the next life, and ended up instead stopping in this world as a ghost.

What follows are the adventures of Mr. Mita figuring out how to accomplish his purpose--visiting the Aran Islands, so he can depart this life--despite being a ghost. The story's called "A Ghost in Brazil," so you know it's going to take interesting turns.

And the guy's **voice** is just very amusing, very dry in a way that reminds me of Martha Wells's Murderbot.

It's free to read at the Granta website here. If you enjoy it, come and tell me which parts you like best.