A Lover's Grudges
I finished reading The Great Mirror of Male Love, a 1687 book by Ihara Saikaku. It's about the fashionable "way of boy love", in which an adult man took an adolescent as his lover. Many of the stories are about samurai, so as you might imagine there are plenty of duels to the death. One young man, unable to get rid of a proud suitor who won't take no for an answer, agrees to fight him. But first, he writes a hilariously peeved letter to his older lover listing all of his grudges against him, which includes stuff like this:
"Next: Last spring, I casually wrote the poem 'My sleeves rot, soaked with tears of jealous rage' on the back of a fan painted by Kano no Uneme in the pattern of a 'riot of flowers'. You took it and said, 'The cool breeze from this fan will help me bear the flames of our love this summer.' How happy you made me! But shortly it came to my attention that you gave the fan to your attendant Kichisuke with a note across the poem that said, 'This calligraphy is terrible.'"
(Unlike many of the stories in the collection, this one has a happy ending! :)
"Next: Last spring, I casually wrote the poem 'My sleeves rot, soaked with tears of jealous rage' on the back of a fan painted by Kano no Uneme in the pattern of a 'riot of flowers'. You took it and said, 'The cool breeze from this fan will help me bear the flames of our love this summer.' How happy you made me! But shortly it came to my attention that you gave the fan to your attendant Kichisuke with a note across the poem that said, 'This calligraphy is terrible.'"
(Unlike many of the stories in the collection, this one has a happy ending! :)