paprika1910

I did not expect to end up with a sunburn in Sweden.  It has been so incredibly sunny and warm here, and I have seen so little sun in Seattle lately, I have become a sun-whore.  My uncle has a nice back deck for soaking up sun.  It is also a great help with recovering from jetlag.  After two nights I am pretty much adjusted to the timezone and feel somewhat human again.  The highlights hasve been: http://www.wanas.se/ and my uncle's homemade chocolate pot de creme.  I feel very peaceful and relaxed here, but tomorrow morning I am off to Berlin.  Now, I need to get back to my sunning.

Originally posted on kgi.vox.com

mrs_fujiwara

This review is especially for my dear and intelligent LJ friend arylla! As promised, I just finished re-reading this book and I was right: if you don't want to read an entire academic work on the Japanese homosexuality of the Tokugawa times, you can read this. And I am sure you'll enjoy! Not only because it's really interesting and the perfect companion for a cup of tea in a rainy day as today. But especially because it's incredible well-written, even though I only had access, of course, to this translated version. However, as a Doctoring theses I believe the translator tried to be as close as possible to the original meaning. He writes a wonderful Introduction to the Japanese History and Culture of that time which might help a lot readers not used to the theme. And he also, of course, presents Ihara Saikaku, a poet (his skills writing haiku seems to have been amazing!) and writer, and probably a shudo (male love) follower. Saikaku wrote this series of short stories based on his knowledge of this way of love and presents to the reader this fantastic world I truly admire. Especially because of its rituals and manners. Through his writings it is even more clear how common and wide-spread the custom of loving men was in Medieval Japan and how much it was exalted in high society. But Saikaku writes in a period where the bourgeois was growing and trying to follow this higher classes ways; thus he divides his work in two parts. The first one deals with the samurai class, the highest, and the way they exalted and used to follow the nanshoku (a synonym for shudo). Although this is the class I study, I have to confess that their extreme ways of loving is quite shocking sometimes, especially when they would cut off parts of their bodies to prove their love. Not to mention the way they would always minimize relationships with women in order to prove boys were the best to have as lovers. The second part deals exactly with the citizens and their way of following shudo. It shows the underworld of the kabuki theaters and prostitution houses, and the way both mixed perfectly. Saikaku also describes many of the most famous actors, their relationships with their patrons and the fascinations they inspired in the audience with their representation techniques and beauty. It's a fantastic work, extremely agreeable, interesting and perfect for those students of this period of Japanese History as it is also a publication of primary documents.