Skipped WIP Wednesday this week because I am ✨ adjusting to new medication ✨ We will be back to our regularly scheduled hijinks whenever I get my brain back from the war ✌
Author: Hope Zane
A happy story
Research again. This time coming by just to drop off something I found while reading. From the Wikipedia page on kitsune:
![An excerpt from a Wikipedia entry that reads:
A widely known folk etymology of the word[12] relates to sleeping and returning home: in classical Japanese, kitsu-ne means 'come and sleep', and ki-tsune means 'always comes'.[13] This appears to be tied to a specific story; it is one of the oldest surviving kitsune tales,[12] and unlike most of those in which a kitsune takes the form of a human woman and marries men, this one does not end tragically.[9][13] From Hamel's translation:[12]
Ono, an inhabitant of Mino (says an ancient Japanese legend of A.D. 545), spent the seasons longing for his ideal of female beauty. He met her one evening on a vast moor and married her. Simultaneously with the birth of their son, Ono's dog was delivered of a pup which as it grew up became more and more hostile to the lady of the moors. She begged her husband to kill it, but he refused. At last one day the dog attacked her so furiously that she lost courage, resumed vulpine shape, leaped over a fence and fled.
"You may be a fox," Ono called after her, "but you are the mother of my son and I will always love you. Come back when you please; you will always be welcome."
So every evening she stole back and slept in his arms.](https://hopezane.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/image.png)
“Come back when you please; you will always be welcome,” is so specifically lovely. I hope you’re all well, wherever you are.
You can leave!!!
This is the corollary to the other skeleton meme, which I think about literally all the time.
COPS IF YOU’RE QUICK
Japanese Language Learning & A Workbook Score
So I’m learning Japanese. Have been learning Japanese? I took a few years of Japanese in high school and have been dusting it off in recent years as I’ve gotten more into Japanese media. It’s going okay! (Except for my ability to write, which is very bad after 15 or so years of disuse!) I know enough to hear some nuance that gets missed in English subtitles sometimes, and I can sometimes struggle bus my way through JP-only games (Clean Dishes, my love…)
Anyway, after doing some research, everyone seemed to recommend the Genki Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese (textbooks). I visit a local thrift store with my dad every week and have been lowkey on the lookout for these books for years, and I finally scored one! A couple weeks later, I got the workbook, too.
Actually, I ended up with two because I fucked up the first time and bought a workbook with ~50 pages torn out, whoops. There’s some writing in the new one, but between this one (whose writing I can erase) and the blank one (with 60 pages missing), I think I’ll be alright.
Anyway, I got all of these for around $9 total, which is still miles better than the $60ish it costs on Amazon. Sweet.
Today I fell down a rabbit hole of learning the kanji 触 after hearing 触れたい over and over again while playing Dramatical Murder. Preserved for posterity, my very bad handwriting:
I mean to buy a genkouyoushi paper notebook to practice my kanji, but for now it’s getting shoved in my sketchbook.
Did you know that the intransitive verb for “to touch” (fureru) is a homophone for the intransitive verb “to go mad” (fureru). I thought that was neat. I keep thinking about it.
Also, in Mandarin, 触 is pronounced chu. I would like to learn to read Chinese at some point, considering how far down the danmei rabbit hole I’ve fallen. My friend told me it might not be such a bad idea to learn both languages concurrently, since at least it’ll stop me from getting locked into any one reading for kanji/hanzi. Either way, I’m enjoying myself.
A surprising number of people have had the reaction, “No you won’t!” when I tell them I’d like to learn Chinese, but one of my friends reminded me of this very great meme. The time will pass anyway! Why not! At worst, you’ll end up knowing a few more things that you didn’t know before. It’s not like I’m in a hurry.
Library score! Exciting!
So I went out for a soda and came back with an enormous stack of books; what else is new? BUT I’M VERY EXCITED. Check it out:
I’m excited for literally all of them, but I’m especially interested in Ambassadors from the Islands of Immortals, which covers China-Japan relations during the Han-Tang period, which is a little before my blorbos but nevertheless seems like excellent background! Shigeru, who also appears in Winter Sun, is from Japan, which would be going through the Kamakura period during that time. Which would probably mean that if he was in Lin’an, it would be as an ambassador.
Also very excited for Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats, which seems to be about infrastructure and city planning in the Tang and Song dynasties— finally, an answer to my question JUST HOW BIG WAS LIN’AN IN ITS HEYDAY ANYWAY? Weirdly hard to figure out? Because modern-day Lin’an is Hangzhou, which is a prefectural-level city and so is… not exactly a city in the way San Francisco is a city. It is Lorge. Like 6,495 square miles large.
You have no idea how much time I spent down the rabbit hole scouring the internet for this information. I looked up maps. I did math. Ultimately, I settled on the answer “roughly the size of Manhattan”, but I’m extremely excited to find out if I was right.
The other books are just generally useful for this project or background reading for other things I have percolating. Do I actually need to know about the sex trade in Kamakura Japan? Not really, but I’m curious, and all background is helpful background, right?
Chicken is a little relevant for a different project revolving around a sex worker that I have shelved right now, but that’s… a whole other thing.