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douqi posting in

Yao Yao is a collection of short stories with historical settings, each featuring a central relationship between a human and a, well, yao (妖, often loosely translated as demon, spirit, etc). To avoid setting off the little voice in my head that keeps going 'but they aren't exactly demons or have a one-to-one analogue to supernatural beings in the Anglo world', I'm just going to carry on calling them yao for the duration of this review.

Most of the stories in the collection have tragic or bittersweet endings. Because I'm Old (and am well past my mournful 'literary youth' phase), my favourites were two stories with unambiguously happy endings: 'Carry Me to the Heights of Success' (请君为我步青云, pinyin: qing jun wei wo bu qingyun) by Liuli Wangguan (琉璃王冠, literally 'crystal crown'), where a lazy cat yao and a layabout scholar do their level best to sponge off each other (the cat yao also ends up opening the fantasy Chinese version of a cat cafe at one point, which was brilliant), and 'The White Pigeon' (白鸽, pinyin: baige) by Renjian Feiliao (人间废料, literally 'mortal dross'), where a girl escapes her rich and oppressive family with the aid of her newest stepmother, a pigeon yao. The latter is heavier in tone and subject matter than the former (and also has some nicely creepy scenes), but still has moments of levity (mostly courtesy of the pigeon yao's himbo brother).

Of the stories with tragic endings, the two I liked best were 'At the Fourth Tolling of the Bell' (第四响, pinyin: di si xiang) by Qingjiu Yi Dao (清酒一刀), literally 'wine and a slash of the blade/a blade'), about a rabbit yao who tries to reverse the fate of a human girl with great cultivator potential, and ends up paying a heavy price for it, and 'Sorry, Little Snake' (小蛇勿怪, pinyin: xiao she wu guai) by A-Sheng and Xiaoshan (阿生和小山, though I'm not sure whether they're actually two people or just one person who happens to have chosen a pseudonym that makes them sound like two people) about a green snake yao who plots revenge on the swordswoman who injured her, only to realise too late that it was all part of a plot to assassinate the malevolent emperor. The latter also contains quite apposite references to the well-known legend of the white snake

Of the other stories, 'The Light of Ten Thousand Households' (万户人间, pinyin: wan hu renjian) by Yan Zhong (檐中, literally 'in the eaves') and 'Mount Changming' (常明, pinyin: chang ming) by Zhu Yixuan (朱奕璇) I thought were fine, but both had an inscrutable near-goddess type being as one half of the relationship, and I usually find those hard to get invested in. 'The Beginning of the Tribulation' (大劫之始, pinyin: da jie zhi shi) by Jiu Mo Jun (九墨君) and 'Worldly Thoughts' (思凡, pinyin: sifan) by Qingzhou Congshi (青州从事, literally 'official of Qingzhou') did some interesting things with historical and mythological figures (in the former case, imperial consort Su Daji, who is often portrayed as a malevolent fox yao in folklore; in the latter case, the Jade Rabbit, Chang'e's pet and companion on the moon), but I felt they were a bit uneven and needed clearer direction. The same critique also applies to The Hawthorn Tree (山楂树, pinyin: shanzha shu) by Jian Xue (溅雪, literally 'spilled snow'), about an empress and a very young, very new imperial consort who doesn't seem to appreciate the gravity of the situation she's in. 'Lady Kite' (as in, both the bird and the toy; 鸢娘) by Helan Xie (贺兰邪) had some intriguing world-building. The protagonist is an indentured servant in an establishment that grants people their dearest wish in exchange for their souls, which are then made into kites. However, it felt a bit overstuffed — there were too many ideas going on in it, which meant most of them ended up under-developed.

Since this is a print-first collection, with no online equivalent, none of the stories is expressly romantic (nobody actually says 'I love you' out loud, etc), but it would take a huge act of reading in bad faith to interpret them as anything other than that.

(This is a very brief review because I am Tired due to Life, but please feel free to ask me for more details of the stories you're interested in!)

rocky41_7 posting in

fffriday

Last night I finished Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a sci-fi book about a motley crew of spacefarers who "drill" wormholes to enable rapid travel across space for the diverse galactic alliance known as the GC. At the start of the book, they are offered a bid on a particularly difficult, lucrative job, and can't resist taking the bait.

This should be (another) lesson to me in not going all-in on a creator because I've enjoyed one of their works. I loved Chambers' To Be Taught, if Fortunate, and I've heard plenty of internet praise for The Long Way, so when I saw it at the bookstore recently, I dropped $20 on it readily. If I hadn't, I probably wouldn't have bothered finishing it.

First - if you picked up this book looking for the femslash, it's barely there, and it's a lot more friends-with-benefits than romance. The other two romances in the book get a lot more attention. If what you really want is F/F romance, it's not really here.

This is a character-driven book with barely a plot, which wouldn't be a problem if the characters were interesting. As it is, they are functionally interchangeable: a crew of people who are all optimistic, friendly, emotionally open, painstakingly polite, and obsessively well-intentioned (except for the one guy who's a Jerk, who exists to be a jerk whenever the scene calls for someone who needs to be less-than-fanatically-polite or there's a chance for Chambers to squeeze in another instance of his being a jerk, even when he's technically right). There is no character growth to speak of; none of these characters changes at all between the start of the book and the end. There's no complexity to anyone.

( Read more... )

nnozomi posting in

senzenwomen

Hayashi Kimuko was born in 1884 in Tokyo; her birth name was Kin. Her father Toyotake Wakunidayu was a joruri reciter, and her mother Takemoto Soko one of his disciples, and later a noted reciter in her own right. At age seven Kimuko was adopted by Uchida Hana, who ran a noted ryotei frequented by the leading politicians of the day, to be trained as her successor. She began studying traditional dance at nine in the Nishikawa-ryu school, along with the koto, the shamisen, the tea ceremony, and flower arrangement. At twelve she began to write waka poetry. By her teens she was considered one of the three great beauties of the period, along with Kujo Takeko and Yanagiwara Byakuren.

In 1901, at seventeen, she was married to the politician Hinata Terutake, who had made good as a broker in Hawaii promoting Japanese immigration; he had come to the ryotei and fallen in love with her at first sight. Although not in love with him, she appreciated his sincerity and gentlemanly manners, and the marriage eventually took place in the face of Kimuko’s adoptive mother’s protests. Kimuko and Hinata, who had been baptized in Hawaii, attended church together, and in 1905 moved into an enormous mansion known after its location as the “Tabata Palace,” where Kimuko held court as mistress of the salon (and learned to like the snakes her husband kept as pets for his amusement; the newspapers claimed she kept snakes up her kimono sleeves and bathed in perfume). They had six children between 1902 and 1913. In between, Kimuko found the time to study languages, art, and theology, as well as to write and publish well-regarded stories, essays, and poetry. In 1913 she became involved in the New Real Women’s group with Nishikawa Fumiko and others, arguing against loveless marriages and marriage with men who did not respect women.

In 1914, Hinata was arrested for alleged involvement with the Oura Incident (a vote-buying scandal involving military expenditures); he became unbalanced in prison and died in 1918 in a psychiatric hospital. Kimuko sold the mansion and focused on her existing sideline, taken up when her husband’s businesses wavered, producing and selling Aurora beauty lotion (she used her already legendary looks to put the product over) in addition to her writing and dancing. Her cosmetic work put her in contact with the pharmacist and poet Hayashi Ryuha, nine years younger than she, whom she called her first love; they married in 1919 and opened their own pharmacy, the brief gap between husbands (as well as Hayashi’s age and Kimuko’s existing children) setting off an enormous scandal. (Her oldest daughter Chie, then seventeen, remembered being told “it’s time for you to stand on your own two feet” at the time.) Kimuko found support in the activist Hiratsuka Raicho; although Raicho’s Bluestocking group had been ideological opponents of Kimuko’s New Real Women, both of them had set out on unconventional marriages with younger men, leading Raicho to sympathize.

In 1924, Kimuko launched her own “Hayashi-ryu” dance school, focusing on creative and folktale-based dance; she produced numerous dances of her own, some drawing on Western concepts and music as well, and promoted dance as a source of physical and mental health for women. She kept her dance lesson fees low and taught her students classical literature on the side; in addition, she and her husband both wrote poetry for the children’s literary magazine Akai Tori [Red Bird]. Kazue, the fourth of her six daughters, eventually inherited the school (of the other children, Chie married a pastor, Nana became a typist, studied in the States, and married a judge, Harumitsu was a sailor and an actor, Kiyomitsu was a cameraman, Saeko wrote for radio, and Momoko and Midori died in their twenties).

In 1945, just as Midori was dying of tuberculosis, Hayashi got another woman pregnant; Kimuko told him that the child would need a father and sent him off, although they never formally divorced. She received the Order of the Sacred Treasure, 5th class, in 1966, and died the following year at the age of 82.

Sources
Mori 2014
https://kusanomido.com/study/history/japan/shouwa/97010/ (Japanese) Photos of Kimuko, her mother, her first husband and others.

nnozomi posting in

senzenwomen

Yaeko Batchelor was born in 1884 in Date, Hokkaido; her birth name was Mukai Yaeko, or Mukai Fuchi. Her father Tomizo|Morotcharo was a leader of the local Ainu community; her brother Yamao later became an Anglican pastor and educator. Yaeko herself was baptized under the influence of the British missionary John Batchelor, an outspoken partisan of the Ainu; after her father’s death when she was eleven years old, Batchelor brought her to Sapporo to attend the Ainu Girls’ School he ran there. She also attended the well-regarded mission school St. Hilda’s School in Tokyo.

In 1906, when Yaeko was twenty-two, she was formally adopted by Batchelor and his wife Louisa. They took her to England (via the Siberian Railway), where she was anointed as a lay missionary by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Back in Hokkaido, she did mission work in Biratori and Noboribetsu, as well as traveling to Karafuto (present-day Sakhalin) with John Batchelor for the same purpose.

In 1931 she published a volume of tanka poetry called To the Young Utari (a word for the Ainu), notable for its references to both Christian and Ainu theology. Her adoptive mother Louisa died in 1936 and John Batchelor in 1944, having left Japan in 1940 as the war developed. Yaeko herself reverted to the name Mukai to avoid using a name in the “enemy” language, able to call herself Batchelor again only after the war was over. Known for her financial and moral support for anyone she felt was in need, she ended her life as a preacher in Hokkaido (accounts vary on whether she was lonely and poor or surrounded by siblings and their families), dying in 1962 at the age of seventy-seven.

Sources
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1206&context=transference (English) Excerpts from Yaeko’s poems, with interesting note on translation
https://www.hokkajda-esp-ligo.jp/jp/WakakiUtariNi/utao.htm Just because I thought it was neat: someone translated the whole book of poems into Esperanto…
https://www.hertfordmuseum.org/products/images/people/the-batchelor-family (English) Photo of the Batchelor family

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Reading

Yao Yao (夭夭) Short Story Collection: Review

Book review: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Hayashi Kimuko (1884-1967)

Yaeko Batchelor (1884-1962)

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November 2024

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