Second paragraph of third chapter:

時計は四時を指しており、窓を見るとまだまだ強い日差しがびくともせ ずにガラスー面に張りついている。
The clock said four, but the window was a flume of sunshine.

This was one of my impulse purchases in Paris last summer, arising from the realisation that I haven't read a lot of non-genre fiction by Asian women, and seduced by the blurbs on the front cover ( Read more... )

Second frame (more or less) of third story in original and translation - you must read the text from right to left, of course. Both sentences are spoken by Sui's genius father.

( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third story ("What the Seasons Brought the Almanac Maker"):

爰に大經師の美婦とて浮名の立つゞき。
都に情の山をうごかし祇薗會の月鉾かつらの眉をあらそひ。
姿は清水の初櫻いまだ咲かゝる風情。
口びるのうるはしきは高尾の木末色の盛と詠めし。
すみ所は室町通。
仕出し衣しやうの物好み當世女の只中廣京にも又有へからず。
In Kyoto lived a lady known as the Almanac-Maker’s Beautiful Spouse, who stirred up a mountain of passion in the capital and figured again ( Read more... )

Second frame of chapter three:
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A relative got this for me, having spotted that it was being described as a great Japanese sf novel - in fact, it was ranked in a 2006 poll of Japanese readers as the greatest Japanese sf novel of all time. I was a little baffled at first, as we moved from Plato to Buddha to Jesus as incarnations of non-human entities; was this a Shaggy God story? ( Read more... )

An Eleventh Doctor plus Amy audiobook, read by Matt Smith himself, set in Japan under the Shogunate. A fairly standard story - the Jade Pyramid off the title is an alien artefact with mystic powers in a village temple, and thus an object of desire for the local rulers. But it is written well, and Matt Smith is good at the voices (himself as the ( Read more... )