What’s Really Going on With All These Vampires?
http://www.esquire.com/features/thousand-words-on-culture/vampires-gay-men-1109?src=rss#ixzz0U42HvI74

“Forget everything you’ve read about vampires so far. The current bloodsucking trend, achieving maximum ferocity in November with the release of the sequel to Twilight, isn’t about outsiders or immigrants or religion or even AIDS, as critics and bloggers have argued ad nauseam these past few months. There’s a much better, simpler, more obvious explanation: Vampires have overwhelmed pop culture because young straight women want to have sex with gay men.”

You Know You Have a Tired YA Fantasy Theme When…

http://pubrants.blogspot.com/2008/03/you-know-you-have-tired-ya-fantasy.html

The big trip is coming up soon.  I leave for Japan on Friday.  3 Months exploring Asia and Eastern Europe.

In preparation for my visit to Russia and Ukraine I’ve been reading some Russian and Ukrainian books.  I think you always get more out of a visit to the country if you know a bit of history.  Plus I like to have read some popular authors from that country.

Of course Russia has plenty of the giants of literature (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, etc).  I haven’t read them this time, I’ve been aiming at more contemporary work.

Some of the books I’ve read recently:

* The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

Victor Pelevin

A Chinese fox spirit working in Moscow as a prostitute gets involved with a Russian werewolf.  It started off interestingly and has some fun ideas, but the story drags to a halt to allow for an endless amount of philosophical discussion. (I like philosophical asides, but some story action is also appreciated).

* The Winter Queen

Boris Akunin

The first in a series of very popular Russian detective novels.  The historical detail is interesting, but I found the main character unlikeable and the prose stilted.

*A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Marina Lewycka

An elderly pensioner living in the UK brings over a young Ukrainian wife.  Some humorous moments, but wasn’t a standout for me.

* Death and the Penguin

Andrey Kurkov

In synopsis it sounds great: a Ukrainian obituary writer lives with a penguin (because the local zoo couldn’t afford to feed it).  His editor asks him to prepare obituaries of well-known public figures in advance and then these people start dying.

But it’s not nearly as much fun as it sounds and I lost interest halfway through.

* Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy

Anna Politkovskaya

A Russian journalist’s look at the nastier aspects of the Russian political and military systems.  The writer was murdered on Putin’s birthday, a couple of years after the book came out.

* Russia: A Journey to the Heart of a Land and Its People

Jonathan Dimbleby

Some interesting historical details, but the writer spends a lot of time complaining and although he does lots of interviews with people all over Russia, he can’t seem to ask them anything except whether they think they live in a democratic country.

* Stalingrad

Antony Beevor

All the details you could ever want about the siege of Stalingrad, supposedly the battle that has cost the most lives in human history.  Grim, but fascinating reading.  Great source material if you wanted to write a battlefront story.

So, overall the fiction was pretty disappointing.  I still have The Secret History of Moscow (Ekaterina Sedia) and The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov) to read.

I lived in Japan for 4 years, so I learned a bit about Japanese science fiction.

In 2007, I went to the WorldCon in Yokohama.

Last year the Internet Review of Science Fiction published my article on Japanese SF.

A lot of Japanese SF isn’t translated and so is hidden to English readers.

A new American company, Haikosaru is aiming to translate some of the best of recent Japanese SF.

Haikosaru’s web site claims that -

With a small, elite list of award-winners, classics, and new work by the hottest young writers, Haikasoru is the first imprint dedicated to bringing Japanese science fiction to America and beyond. Featuring the action of anime and the thoughtfulness of the best speculative fiction, Haikasoru aims to truly be the “high castle” of science fiction and fantasy.

One of their first titles is “All You Need is Kill”.

They have an interesting article on some of the differences between American and Japanese SF.

From Warriors of Medieval Japan by Stephen Turnbull

Head collecting is a tradition found throughout samurai history… When a battle was won, the taking, recording and presentation of these ghastly trophies was as systematic and as thorough as the battlefield situation allowed.  In an ideal situation of a clear-cut victory the heads would be viewed in a highly ritualized ceremony by the victorious daimyo, who was seated on a camp stool and surrounded by his closest retainers.  He would not wish to be presented with a bloody trophy, so the heads were carefully cleaned and dressed, the hair combed, and the resulting trophy made presentable by cosmetics.  They would then be mounted on a spiked wooden board with labels for identification.
This routine was a task traditionally done by women, and there exists a rare eyewitness account that was recorded by Oan, the daughter of a samurai.  She experienced the horror of sleeping beside a collection of severed heads in Ogaku castle at the time of the battle of Sekigahara in 1600.  The castle was under constant attack from the superior forces of Tokugawa Ieyasu, and her description of her work with the heads is a follows:

“My mother and I, as well, as the wives and daughters of the other retainers, were in the castle’s keep casting bullets.  Severed heads taken by our allies were also collected in this area of the castle.  We attached a tag to each head in order to identify them properly.  Then we repeatedly blackened their teeth.  Why did we do that?  A long time ago, blackened teeth were admired as the sign of a distinguished man.  So, we were asked to apply a generous coat of black dye to any heads with white teeth.  Even these severed heads no longer held any terror for me.  I used to sleep enveloped by the bloody odour of those old heads.”

The invasion of Korea presented the logistical problem of shipping heads home to their commander-in-chief Toyotomi Hideyoshi.  Hideyoshi’s increased irrationality made him demand proof that his generals were carrying out his wishes, so a compromise was reached.  When Namwon, the first objective of the 1597 invasion, was captured, out of the 3726 heads counted that day only the head of the Korean general was kept intact.  The others were discarded after the noses had been removed, the beginnings of the process of nose collection in lieu of heads that was to become a horrible feature of the second invasion.  Toyotomi Hideyoshi began to receive a steady stream of shipments of noses pickled in salt and packed into wooden barrels, each one meticulously enumerated and recorded before leaving Korea.

It was also recommended that “samurai should grow moustaches so that their severed heads would not be mistaken for those of women.”

Advice for treating wounded samurai:

Cover the intestines with dried faeces, then close the wound with mulberry root sutures and spread cat-tail pollen over the area.  Activities to be avoided were anger, laughter, thought, sex, activity, work, sour foods and sake.

From Lost Japan by Alex Kerr. 
 

Japan is fascinated by secrets.  They are the defining feature of the way traditional arts are taught and preserved.  They cause problems for governments and business, since different departments of the same organization tend to guard their knowledge jealousy and not speak to one another.  In museums, the finer an artwork, the less it will be shown to the public – which is why you will often find that the National Treasure you travelled so far to view is actually just a copy.  The real piece stays in storage, and is shown only to a chosen few curators.

This tradition goes back to ancient Shinto, when the objects inside shrines, typically a stone or a mirror, became invested with mystical secrecy.  At Izumo, Japan’s oldest Shinto shrine, the object has been hidden from view for so long that its identity has been forgotten; it is referred to merely as "the Object."  At the Grand Shrine of Ise, the object is known to be a mirror, but no one has laid eyes on it for at least a thousand years.  When asked about Ise, the nineteenth-century Japanologist Chamberlain replied, "There is nothing to see, and they won’t let you see it."

…

Buddha statues with great power became hibutsu (hidden Buddhas), and were displayed only once every few decades, and there are some that have stayed in hiding for centuries at a stretch.

…

That evening, we stayed at Kongo Sanmai-in, one of the sub-temples that offer rooms to pilgrims and travellers.  We arrived at our lodgings at around half past four.  One of the monks asked us if we would like to see the Buddha in the main hall, but we were all exhausted.  After an early supper, I went to my room to read a book and relax for a while.  That night, on my way to the bath, I passed a monk in the hall.  "Good evening," he said pleasantly.  "How fortunate for you to have come here today.  You were able to see our great Buddha of divine power."
"Well, actually we were planning to see it tomorrow," I said.  The monk shook his head.  "I’m afraid that won’t be possible.  Sanmai-in’s Buddha is a hibutsu.  Mt. Koya’s other statues are sometimes put on display, or even lent to other temples and museums.  But this one has never left the mountain.  This is the first time it has ever been shown to the general public.  It’s called a five-hundred-year hibutsu.  the doors closed at five o’clock today, and you’ll have to wait another five hundred years if you want to see it."

This was my greatest failure ever as a travel guide.  I was so embarrassed that I could not bring myself to confess to my friends, and to this day I don’t believe they realize that they missed seeing a five-hundred year hibutsu by only thirty minutes.