Spring in Japan is a strange affair. There is next to none of the storybook, post-winter balminess of meadows in which swallows dart and children play. Spring in Japan is little more than the tail end of winter's frigidness, and is very quickly taken over by early summer mugginess. It is now late March and not quite cold enough to see your breath anymore, but requiring on most days almost as much dressing up for as mid-winter does, all the same.
Nevertheless, if humans don't really feel it, vegetation does. Plum blossom has begun appearing here and there, and the tight dark buds of ten days ago on our potted apple plant have suddenly released vivid little leaves.
Shodo is intimately associated with poetry of which much is seasonally based. This week's assignment is resolutely vernal, but with a bit of a martial twist. The four characters are, from top right to bottom left: "peach," (momo) "plum," (sumomo) "contend," "beauty."
The gloss goes: "The blossoms of the peach and the plum vie in beauty"—a simple but gorgeously evocative scene that will be a reality in a couple of weeks from now. Note that this poem does not include the famed sakura (cherry blossom), which is actually quite welcome, beause sakura is so archetypal of Japan in spring that its less praised yet arguably equally beautiful sisters deserve some serious complimenting of their own.
The interesting twist for me in this poem is the inclusion of the character for "contend/vie" (arasou), because spring is usually a byword for tranquility. But its pairing with "beauty" certainly adds spice to the idea of attractiveness. The character used here for beauty is a somewhat unusual one. Beauty is usually bi, written 美, whereas in this case it is ken, written 妍. 妍 consists of the radical for breasts/woman 女 (the radical to the right of it is purely for phonetic purposes), and, as such, has a slightly different nuance from the stately 美, in that 妍 is more about charm, prettiness, seductiveness, cuteness, coquettishness.
So we have here not the solemn waving of respective banners of classical beauty on the chivalrous battleground of spring, but the fierce posturing of the floral equivalent of blondes and redheads in air that is messy with jealousy.
And speaking of messy, you will note that the inkan (stamp) bearing my initials I produced a couple of weeks ago (see Blood Red Sealed in Stone) is now officially part of my shodo repertoire. At the lesson on Thursday, my teacher inked it up and tried it out. I hadn't etched it out deep enough in some spots, so he kindly excised those bits and enhanced the sinuousness of the S, which the way I had done it looked more like three lines than a single snake.
Being the proud owner of a new inkan, I also bought myself a pot of the red stuff, indei (literally "stamp mud"). It is remarkably thick and stodgy. You mix it up with the spatula into a lump, and then repeatedly pound the inkan into it before affixing the inkan to paper.
It looks very distinguished, not only in the somewhat archaic idiosyncrasy of its font, but by the simple fact, too, that it adds a splotch of color to the black and white sheet. You could say, perhaps, that my shodo has suddenly blossomed.
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