(no subject)
29/9/09 23:02![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyRecent reading:
Novelette(?) about a young girl whose father gets drunk and beats her mother, and her mother works in a hostess club, and they always fight, and they don't have any money, and she's ostracized by her classmates. And she wants the zombies to bite her and turn her into one of them because then her family would all get along and be happy. I am not making this up. Oh, Japan. Overwrought family melodrama with zombies in it is still overwrought family melodrama.
Book about contemporary Japanese novels reminds me why I love Tawara Machi:
「嫁さんになれ」だなんてカンチューハイ二本で言ってしまっていいの
"Be my wife" -- can you really say that, after two cans of Chuhai?
(Chuhai being a Japanese alcoholic beverage, distilled liquor mixed with carbonated water and fruit-flavored. I have little experience with it, having left Japan a month after turning 20, but if I had two cans I'd probably be asking everybody to marry me.)
That's a tanka. That's a very traditional Japanese poetry form. And I still get a little frisson when I see Tawara kind of storming the gates of tanka with something so conversational and so everyday, but which is also a great poem in its own right--it captures a very precise moment of emotional realization. It's hearing what you want to hear, and realizing it will never mean what you want it to mean. All that in 31 syllabes. The book quotes an Asahi Shinbun column:
"It's huge to discover that you can write poems this way, but a great discovery alone doesn't make for a good poem. What's special about this poet is that she can capture so clearly, in 31 syllables, what people can't find the words to say, but want to say anyway."
Novelette(?) about a young girl whose father gets drunk and beats her mother, and her mother works in a hostess club, and they always fight, and they don't have any money, and she's ostracized by her classmates. And she wants the zombies to bite her and turn her into one of them because then her family would all get along and be happy. I am not making this up. Oh, Japan. Overwrought family melodrama with zombies in it is still overwrought family melodrama.
Book about contemporary Japanese novels reminds me why I love Tawara Machi:
「嫁さんになれ」だなんてカンチューハイ二本で言ってしまっていいの
"Be my wife" -- can you really say that, after two cans of Chuhai?
(Chuhai being a Japanese alcoholic beverage, distilled liquor mixed with carbonated water and fruit-flavored. I have little experience with it, having left Japan a month after turning 20, but if I had two cans I'd probably be asking everybody to marry me.)
That's a tanka. That's a very traditional Japanese poetry form. And I still get a little frisson when I see Tawara kind of storming the gates of tanka with something so conversational and so everyday, but which is also a great poem in its own right--it captures a very precise moment of emotional realization. It's hearing what you want to hear, and realizing it will never mean what you want it to mean. All that in 31 syllabes. The book quotes an Asahi Shinbun column:
"It's huge to discover that you can write poems this way, but a great discovery alone doesn't make for a good poem. What's special about this poet is that she can capture so clearly, in 31 syllables, what people can't find the words to say, but want to say anyway."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
30/9/09 05:52 (UTC)Anyway, that's awesome. I'm not familiar with that writer at all, although it reminds me of those poems I posted a while back with their mundane topics and poignancy.
(no subject)
30/9/09 18:01 (UTC)(no subject)
30/9/09 18:25 (UTC)(And I just learned something weird while checking on this: the apple, peach, grape, etc. canned ones weigh in at the 4-5% end, and are favored by women, and the lemon, grapefruit, etc. ones are more like 6-7% alcohol. I had no idea?)