(no subject)
Book Reviews
Now that I'm done with classes, I have a short period between finals and graduation in which to read, or at least flip through all the books I borrowed from the library but never actually got around to reading. This week I read two books for the purposes of research for my historical-fantasy novel-thingy.
Japan's Name Culture: The Significance of Names in a Religious, Political and Social Context by Herbert Plutschow (1995) was the first book I read. Ever feel confused and overwhelmed by the bazillion name changes and names that the Japanese had before they modernized? Plutschow discusses the animistic quality of names, and how they indicate things such as rights to office and political service, an ancestor, territorial holdings, and so on. He covers taboo names, which were kept secret (ie. the emperor's personal name is a taboo name), clannames, surnames, personal names, etc. Place names were a major source of names. The book is academic but not too difficult to follow. It spends a lot of time analyzing names from premodern texts, and there are certainly lots of interesting tidbits with regards to specific names like Fujiwara or Suzuki. It didn't exactly help me pick names for my characters--due to lack of documentation on women, who were often just recorded as "woman" or "daughter/wife of X," its coverage of women's names is understandably thin--but it's certainly worth reading to gain a deeper understanding of the complicated nature of Japanese names. I wish I had more time to read this book thoroughly and take real notes (as opposed to sticking sticky notes on pages I especially want to note down later).
The second book was Eric Rath's Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (2010). This book begins from the question, what was premodern Japanese "cuisine"? (Recently I've been feeling punctuation-fail. Can someone tell me if the question mark goes inside or outside the quotes there in American grammar? I used to think inside, but it doesn't look right anymore, so I put it outside.) Given that cuisine has nationalistic undertones, and that pre- and early modern Japan didn't exactly conceive of itself as a "nation," Rath goes on to explore cuisine in the Japanese imagination. He focuses on cookbooks and menus published for elite circles and for the popular literate public. He writes about houchounin, the masters of the knife who cut up large fish and game birds for banquet displays, and it's interesting because it's an art just like the tea ceremony or flower arrangement. It's just barely practiced anymore due to the nature of the art...People don't find cutting up cranes or other birds as pleasing to the sensibilities as flowers or tea are. Anyways. So there is a discussion of foods you couldn't eat, because foods in a banquet setting can be there just for symbolic or decorative purposes, and a refined diner would have to be able to distinguish between those and foods meant to be eaten. The second half of the book discusses texts that deal more with the "fantasy" element of food. Menu collections were published for popular enjoyment, as mental journeys, much the same way that you would enjoy a travel book without going to the place or a play script without seeing it put on stage. Since a lot of the ingredients were out of the reach of the commoners and their actual diets weren't the most exciting things in the world, they had fanciful menus to enjoy fantasizing about instead. This book gives lots of sample menus and is excellent for finding out specifics of what foods were eaten, and what kinds of fish there were and how they were prepared or flavored, at least among the wealthy and elite. You learn things like there had to be one soup per tray of food, and at a banquet a person would often have more than one tray presented to him. It's not really a book you want to use when trying to figure out what the everyday person in early modern Japan was normally eating (for that, Susan Hanley's Everyday Things in Premodern Japan has a section that is probably more helpful), but it's a fun read, and helpful in trying to imagine what was at the high end of early modern food.
Now that I'm done with classes, I have a short period between finals and graduation in which to read, or at least flip through all the books I borrowed from the library but never actually got around to reading. This week I read two books for the purposes of research for my historical-fantasy novel-thingy.
Japan's Name Culture: The Significance of Names in a Religious, Political and Social Context by Herbert Plutschow (1995) was the first book I read. Ever feel confused and overwhelmed by the bazillion name changes and names that the Japanese had before they modernized? Plutschow discusses the animistic quality of names, and how they indicate things such as rights to office and political service, an ancestor, territorial holdings, and so on. He covers taboo names, which were kept secret (ie. the emperor's personal name is a taboo name), clannames, surnames, personal names, etc. Place names were a major source of names. The book is academic but not too difficult to follow. It spends a lot of time analyzing names from premodern texts, and there are certainly lots of interesting tidbits with regards to specific names like Fujiwara or Suzuki. It didn't exactly help me pick names for my characters--due to lack of documentation on women, who were often just recorded as "woman" or "daughter/wife of X," its coverage of women's names is understandably thin--but it's certainly worth reading to gain a deeper understanding of the complicated nature of Japanese names. I wish I had more time to read this book thoroughly and take real notes (as opposed to sticking sticky notes on pages I especially want to note down later).
The second book was Eric Rath's Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (2010). This book begins from the question, what was premodern Japanese "cuisine"? (Recently I've been feeling punctuation-fail. Can someone tell me if the question mark goes inside or outside the quotes there in American grammar? I used to think inside, but it doesn't look right anymore, so I put it outside.) Given that cuisine has nationalistic undertones, and that pre- and early modern Japan didn't exactly conceive of itself as a "nation," Rath goes on to explore cuisine in the Japanese imagination. He focuses on cookbooks and menus published for elite circles and for the popular literate public. He writes about houchounin, the masters of the knife who cut up large fish and game birds for banquet displays, and it's interesting because it's an art just like the tea ceremony or flower arrangement. It's just barely practiced anymore due to the nature of the art...People don't find cutting up cranes or other birds as pleasing to the sensibilities as flowers or tea are. Anyways. So there is a discussion of foods you couldn't eat, because foods in a banquet setting can be there just for symbolic or decorative purposes, and a refined diner would have to be able to distinguish between those and foods meant to be eaten. The second half of the book discusses texts that deal more with the "fantasy" element of food. Menu collections were published for popular enjoyment, as mental journeys, much the same way that you would enjoy a travel book without going to the place or a play script without seeing it put on stage. Since a lot of the ingredients were out of the reach of the commoners and their actual diets weren't the most exciting things in the world, they had fanciful menus to enjoy fantasizing about instead. This book gives lots of sample menus and is excellent for finding out specifics of what foods were eaten, and what kinds of fish there were and how they were prepared or flavored, at least among the wealthy and elite. You learn things like there had to be one soup per tray of food, and at a banquet a person would often have more than one tray presented to him. It's not really a book you want to use when trying to figure out what the everyday person in early modern Japan was normally eating (for that, Susan Hanley's Everyday Things in Premodern Japan has a section that is probably more helpful), but it's a fun read, and helpful in trying to imagine what was at the high end of early modern food.