Saturday, May 04, 2024

Idle Days


Thomas Desaulniers-Brousseau: Idle Days (2018)
Thomas Desaulniers-Brousseau. Idle Days. Art by Simon Leclerc. First Second. New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2018.

A long time ago now - has it really been fifteen years? - I wrote a post called "Unpacking my Comics Library". I see that, to date, it's received 11,671 views, and attracted 15 comments. That's pretty good going - for my blog, at any rate.

I don't propose to write another survey post like that one, but a number of graphic novels have found their way into my collection since then. One of the strangest I've run into would have to be Thomas Desaulniers-Brousseau's Idle Days, a family saga set in the Canadian woods, where a deserter is living with his grandfather during the last days of the Second World War.


Simon Leclerc: Art for Idle Days (2018)


Simon Leclerc's art for the comic is almost equally obsessive and internalised. As he himself puts it in a joint interview with Paste Magazine (February 2, 2016):
Jerome, being a deserter, finds himself forced to live in his grandfather’s house, isolated in the woods nearby. The story then unfolds around that house; the forced reclusiveness gets Jerome interested in the previous generations of the house owners and their mysterious and tragic fates that weirdly relate to his. Along the way, the forest unveils its haunting characters: a dead woman, alcohol smugglers, a witch, a black cat, all while Jerome has to deal with his grumpy grandfather!
The interview as a whole confirms the strongly personal nature of the story's background. Author Desaulniers-Brousseau explains:
My father’s father, whom I never knew, deserted just before his regiment was deployed in Vancouver, worried that he would eventually be sent to fight in Europe. He apparently regretted it because the regiment never left British Columbia, and his friends otherwise “enjoyed a nice trip.” I hope I’m not being insensitive towards our veterans right now, that’s not my intention. But anyway, he hid with his uncle, a doctor in the village, and his experience has inspired the character of Jerome and some of the events of the story. Maybe it was a desire to know more about his life that led me to write this story. But Jerome is also me in a lot of ways, and the relationship that develops between him and his grandfather is a sort of imaginary dialogue with pretty much all the male authority figures in my life, of which Maurice is the melting pot.

Simon Leclerc: Art for Idle Days (2018)


Leclerc seems more focussed on the technical challenges of the comics medium:
A book like Idle Days (and graphic novels in general) is great because it gives me the opportunity to art-direct my project entirely.
Personal projects demand that you raise your level of creativity, that you level up your inventiveness, because the thing you are making is your own. In my opinion, comics is one of the last mediums where the editors as well as the audience expect the authors to push and play with its boundaries as much as they do.
I choose the level of stylization I want to inject, the amount of time I decide to put drawing these tiny leaves on that weirdly shaped tree, or whether I want to leave that scribbly line that doesn’t really make sense on the nose of my character, but that I find oddly beautiful and satisfying.
In the end, whereas Desaulniers-Brousseau admits that 'it certainly has a meaning and a message for me.'
it’s basically a ghost story. I hope people have an enjoyable time reading it, and if they can find echoes in their own lives, well that’s just tops.
Leclerc, by contrast, just wants people to 'look at it and go: “Cool! That drawing of a tree looks gnarly!”'

I guess I have a soft spot for this oddly formless, intensely atmospheric graphic novel for a number of reasons. I found it lurking in a pile of other comics in a Hospice shop, and it always gives me a warm feeling to rescue interesting books which have been abandoned there.

More than that, though, it was probably the title that attracted me most. I do have a taste for intense, autobiographical Canadian comics - I used to read all I could find in the days when they were constantly on display on the ground floor racks in the Auckland Central Library.

But Idle Days ... what an evocative concept!




W. H. Hudson: Idle Days in Patagonia (1893)


Far away and long ago I lived in an east-windy, West-Endy city called Edinburgh, which prided itself on being the 'Athens of the North' (though Tom Stoppard referred to it 'the Reykjavik of the South'). One of the things I did there was collect and read the works of W. H. Hudson, an Anglo-Argentinian naturalist, who specialised in dreamy books about birds and the romance of the plains and jungles of South America.

Idle Days in Patagonia is one of his most celebrated works, perhaps the first in which he achieves fusion between the scientific classification of bird species and the belletristic fine writing about nature for which he became famous. Years later it would inspire Bruce Chatwin to make his own visit to Argentina, the subject of his first travel book, In Patagonia.


Bruce Chatwin: In Patagonia (1977)


Bruce Chatwin was a born liar. When his book became famous, many of the people he'd interviewed (or claimed to interview) came forward to denounce him for putting words in their mouths. This is a not uncommon dilemma for travel writers, who inhabit a curious no-man's-land between truth and fiction, and who therefore tend to regard themselves as entitled to distort chronologies, ginger up otherwise flat narratives into something more exciting, and generally confuse things in the hopes of confounding any subsequent attempts to check up on them.

Chatwin did take this trait further than most, however, and it's therefore best to regard all of his books as either directly or indirectly fictional, whether or not he (or his publishers) described them as "novels" or "travel books". Perhaps it's true that the devil finds work for idle hands ...


So I came down through the wood to the bank of Yann and found, as had been prophesied, the ship Bird of the River about to loose her cable.
There doesn't seem much doubt that Lord Dunsany's long fantasy story "Idle Days on the Yann" (from A Dreamer's Tales, 1910) was inspired by W. H. Hudson's Idle Days in Patagonia - or at any rate by its title.
The captain sate cross-legged upon the white deck with his scimitar lying beside him in its jewelled scabbard, and the sailors toiled to spread the nimble sails to bring the ship into the central stream of Yann, and all the while sang ancient soothing songs. And the wind of the evening descending cool from the snowfields of some mountainous abode of distant gods came suddenly, like glad tidings to an anxious city, into the wing-like sails.
This story had a deep influence on H. P. Lovecraft, particularly on his early novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926-27). According to Wikipedia, Dunsany's story was written "in anticipation for a trip down the Nile."
And so we came into the central stream, whereat the sailors lowered the greater sails. But I had gone to bow before the captain, and to inquire concerning the miracles, and appearances among men, of the most holy gods of whatever land he had come from. And the captain answered that he came from fair Belzoond, and worshipped gods that were the least and humblest, who seldom sent the famine or the thunder, and were easily appeased with little battles. And I told how I came from Ireland, which is of Europe, whereat the captain and all the sailors laughed, for they said, 'There are no such places in all the land of dreams.' When they had ceased to mock me, I explained that my fancy mostly dwelt in the desert of Cuppar-Nombo, about a beautiful blue city called Golthoth the Damned, which was sentinelled all round by wolves and their shadows, and had been utterly desolate for years and years because of a curse which the gods once spoke in anger and could never since recall. And sometimes my dreams took me as far as Pungar Vees, the red-walled city where the fountains are, which trades with the Isles and Thul. When I said this they complimented me upon the abode of my fancy, saying that, though they had never seen these cities, such places might well be imagined. For the rest of that evening I bargained with the captain over the sum that I should pay him for my fare if God and the tide of Yann should bring us safely as far as the cliffs by the sea, which are named Bar-Wul-Yann, the Gate of Yann.
The story itself bears a certain resemblance to C. P. Cavafy's most famous poem, "Ithaka" (1911), which gives a similarly meandering account of a journey whose true purpose is not its destination so much as the incidents along the way.
And now the sun had set, and all the colours of the world and heaven had held a festival with him, and slipped one by one away before the imminent approach of night. The parrots had all flown home to the jungle on either bank, the monkeys in rows in safety on high branches of the trees were silent and asleep, the fireflies in the deeps of the forest were going up and down, and the great stars came gleaming out to look on the face of Yann. Then the sailors lighted lanterns and hung them round the ship, and the light flashed out on a sudden and dazzled Yann, and the ducks that fed along his marshy banks all suddenly arose, and made wide circles in the upper air, and saw the distant reaches of the Yann and the white mist that softly cloaked the jungle, before they returned again into their marshes.
I wrote a version of Cavafy's poem once - not a direct translation, since I speak no Greek, but a beefed-up version of a literal, word-for-word version I located somewhere. You can find it here.
And then the sailors knelt on the decks and prayed, not all together, but five or six at a time. Side by side there kneeled down together five or six, for there only prayed at the same time men of different faiths, so that no god should hear two men praying to him at once. As soon as any one had finished his prayer, another of the same faith took his place. Thus knelt the row of five or six with bended heads under the fluttering sail, while the central stream of the River Yann took them on towards the sea, and their prayers rose up from among the lanterns and went towards the stars. And behind them in the after end of the ship the helmsman prayed aloud the helmsman's prayer, which is prayed by all who follow his trade upon the River Yann, of whatever faith they be. And the captain prayed to his little lesser gods, to the gods that bless Belzoond.
There is something irresistibly attractive in the idea of long river cruises, drifting past temples and villages, with fishermen plying their trade, and pilgrims coming down to the shore to wash away their sins. I've only experienced it once or twice, and then only for a brief time, but it's an agreeable thing to think about.
And I too felt that I would pray. Yet I liked not to pray to a jealous God there where the frail affectionate gods whom the heathen love were being humbly invoked; so I bethought me, instead, of Sheol Nugganoth, whom the men of the jungle have long since deserted, who is now unworshipped and alone; and to him I prayed.
Dunsany was once a writer who was spoken of in the same breath as Yeats: a playwright, a poet, a fantasist whose works are now only read for their "influence" on such colossi as Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard. And perhaps that's appropriate. But there's no denying the charm of such stories as "Idle Days on the Yann."
And upon us praying the night came suddenly down, as it comes upon all men who pray at evening and upon all men who do not; yet our prayers comforted our own souls when we thought of the Great Night to come.
The story is not entirely episodic, mind you - like so many of Dunsany's works, it hinges on a central terrifying fact which his dreamer protagonist is unwilling to accept, lest it destroy the whole fabric of the world as he knows it. In this case the unassimilable truth is a cyclopean city gate carved out of a single tusk. And his fear is that the owner of the tusk may still be looking for it, up in the hills that look down on the town of Perdóndaris.
And so Yann bore us magnificently onwards, for he was elate with molten snow that the Poltiades had brought him from the Hills of Hap, and the Marn and Migris were swollen full with floods; and he bore us in his might past Kyph and Pir, and we saw the lights of Goolunza.
Perhaps the clearest analogue to all this is Italo Calvino's classic novel Invisible Cities, where the peripatetic Marco Polo describes the cities of his empire to the invincibly static Kublai Khan, who will never otherwise be able to experience them at all.
Soon we all slept except the helmsman, who kept the ship in the mid-stream of Yann.
The truth of Marco Polo's account has (of course) been under question since it was first written - and the same has to be said of Calvino's fictional Marco's tales told to his master. Do any of these cities actually exist? They sound allegorical rather than real, but then the same might be said of any traveller's tale.
... And the time was come when the captain and I must part, he to go back again to his fair Belzoond in sight of the distant peaks of the Hian Min, and I to find my way by strange means back to those hazy fields that all poets know, wherein stand small mysterious cottages through whose windows, looking westwards, you may see the fields of men, and looking eastwards see glittering elfin mountains, tipped with snow, going range on range into the region of Myth, and beyond it into the kingdom of Fantasy, which pertain to the Lands of Dream.
I used to teach a course on Travel Writing, where we explored such questions. In particular, we spent a good deal of time discussing the distinction between Marco Polo's true experiences of the East, and their transmission through the medium of a manuscript written by Rustichello of Pisa, who shared a cell with him in Genoa, and beguiled his leisure by taking notes on his garrulous fellow-prisoner's travel stories. Rustichello had previously made his living as a composer of chivalrous romances.
Long we regarded one another, knowing that we should meet no more, for my fancy is weakening as the years slip by, and I go ever more seldom into the Lands of Dream. Then we clasped hands, uncouthly on his part, for it is not the method of greeting in his country, and he commended my soul to the care of his own gods, to his little lesser gods, the humble ones, to the gods that bless Belzoond.

Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities (1972)





Saul Bellow: Dangling Man (1944)


It isn't actually called "Idle Days", but Saul Bellow's debut novel certainly unpacks the concept with mordant precision. Published in 1944, the same year that Desaulniers-Brousseau's graphic novel is set in, Dangling Man is the diary of a young draftee, waiting to be called up for the army, and thus unable to settle to any other task.

It's the perfect situation for a prototypical existentialist novel of self-doubt. And, like Camus's Meursault, Bellow's Joseph duly proceeds to get up to didoes, interfering in his neighbours' lives, and generally making a bit of a mess of his last days of freedom. The war intervenes to save him from himself, though, just as execution for murder does for Camus's unfortunate protagonist.

Dangling Man bears little resemblance to the later, more sprawling American sagas we associate with Saul Bellow, and seems, still, to have a quite separate audience.

I suppose that the general message that an idle man is a menace in the making rings through all of these diverse narratives. Bellow's book has been compared to the superfluous man tradition in Russian literature: anti-heroes such as Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Lermontov's Pechorin, and Turgenev's Tchulkaturin fritter away their inane lives with pointless love affairs and other self-destructive acts.

Perhaps the most famous of them all is Goncharov's Oblomov, whose slothful and indecisive nature makes him incapable even of getting out of bed in the morning.






The model for all these angsty idlers is not hard to find. Byron's first book of poems, Hours of Idleness, set the tone for his future work, though it made little impression at the time it first appeared.

The Byronic hero, glamorous, heroic, misanthropic, and (dare I say it?) intensely romantic was, however, to dominate European literature for decades after the appearance of Byron's breakthrough work Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Doing a lot while seeming to do nothing seems to be the essence of the character. In this he resembles Hamlet, but there was something new there, too.

What T. S. Eliot once described in Burnt Norton as being:
Distracted from distraction by distraction
is implied by these exemplars - Byron, Marco Polo, W. H. Hudson, Lord Dunsany - to be the ideal state for poets and creative artists generally.

If Art is what takes place when you're looking elsewhere, then perhaps - like thought - it can only happen if you've allowed yourself (or been permitted by fate) to explore the perilous pleasures of idleness:
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
- Ash-Wednesday

Lord Byron: Hours of Idleness (1807)





Thursday, April 25, 2024

Judge Dee



It's hard to imagine any TV show being much more enjoyable than the latest Chinese adaptation of Robert van Gulik's "Judge Dee" mysteries. I strayed on it accidentally on Netflix, but was initially put off by my memories of reading a couple of rather dull detective novels starring the (semi-) historical sleuth some years ago.



Judge Dee's Mystery certainly starts off with a bang. The new incarnation of Di is apparently a master of Kung Fu as well as possessing a photographic memory: no details ever escape his notice, and - despite his reputation as a ne'er-do-well - his travels in the wastelands around China have clearly taught him a good deal about the world and its ways.



The effortlessly cool cast is led by forty-year-old Yiwei Zhou, with Wang Likun as his love-interest Cao An, and Zhong Cuxi as the all-powerful (yet beleaguered) Empress.



But of course every detective needs his Watson. In this case, as an official magistrate, Di travels with quite an entourage. There's his father's old friend Hong Liang (played by You Yongzhi), Ta Ji as his muscle, Qiao Tai, and Lingzi Qu as the irrepressible Ma Rong.



This latter is by far my favourite character. She plays a kind of Sancho Panza to Judge Dee's Don Quixote, and is always ready to scull a drink or start a sword-fight. She's also (clearly) deeply in love with Di Renjie, but is forced to accept the fact that he sees her as a comrade rather than one of the delicate, lute-playing ladies he prefers to keep company with.



The plots are (for the most part) absurdly convoluted, and sometimes contain hints of the supernatural. They tend to start in the middle of the hour, presumably to encourage us to continue watching, and last for three or four episodes each. They often begin when Di Renjie is posted to a new district, and is thus forced to try and make sense of the particular intrigues and corruption in his new home base.







Sharon Lathan: Robert van Gulik & Family


Robert Van Gulik, the originator of the series, was born in Holland but brought up in Indonesia, where he first acquired his taste for Eastern cultures and languages. He met his wife Shui Shifang, daughter of a Qing dynasty Imperial, in China during the Second World War. In 1940 he "stumbled across an obscure and anonymous 18th-century Chinese novel," as Sharon Lathan puts it in her brief online biography of the author:
The novel, titled Wu-tsé-t’ien-szû-ta-ch’i-an (Four great strange cases of Empress Wu’s reign), was a fictional account of the deeds of Judge Dee, one of the heroes of traditional Chinese detective fiction, and was set during the 7th-century Tang Dynasty. ... Robert not only translated the novel into English, he delved into the history of Chinese Penal Code and other legal literature of the period. Between WWII and his diplomatic duties, it was not until 1949 that Robert was able to publish his translation — Dee Goong An: Three Murder Cases Solved by Judge Dee ...
My English text was meant only as a basis for a printed Chinese and/or Japanese version, my aim being to show modern Chinese and Japanese writers that their own ancient crime-literature has plenty of source material for detective and mystery stories.
- Robert van Gulik
His fascination with old Chinese detective stories, and with Judge Dee, prompted Robert van Gulik to write original stories for modern readers. His first original story was The Chinese Maze Murders published in 1951, but only in Japanese and Chinese as he believed the stories would have more interest to readers from those cultures. He was correct ... so he soon followed with two more novels about Judge Dee.
"Not until 1956 did he translate and publish his first three novels into English and Dutch. All of his subsequent novels were published in English first, with the translations coming afterwards."



If you compare the picture above with the one below, you may get some idea of the superior attractions of the detailed period recreation of Dee's world in the TV series to the original crude drawings van Gulik insisted on inflicting on his text.

To put it bluntly, he was no artist. He was, however, a craftsman in the classical tradition of the Western detective novel. And this mixture between chinoiserie and golden age detection has proved a potent and (saleable) mixture ever since.


Robert Van Gulik: Dee Goong An (1949)




Nor would it be impertinent to add that the seventh century CE, the highwater mark of the Tang dynasty in China, is a conveniently distant period to set stories in. The costumes and architecture of the era, lovingly recreated in the TV series, represent the golden age of Chinese civilisation, and are thus familiar to history buffs everywhere. As Ezra Pound once put it, with his customary concision:
a snotty barbarian ignorant of T'ang history need not deceive one
- Pisan Cantos, LXXIV: 32.


I guess that what interests me most about this act of cultural cross-pollination is the complete ease with which it's been carried out. The credits of the TV show are quick to assure us that the stories that follows are fictional, and thus not historically accurate, but the producers seem to anticipate that the fact they were created by "the Dutch author Robert van Gulik" will be of far less significance to their target audience.



Van Gulik was, admittedly, no mere fan of all things Oriental. He had a PhD in Chinese language and culture from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and his publications include a number of Academic works on Ancient Chinese art, music and sexuality: all subjects which recur in his fiction. The Judge Dee stories themselves can be dated fairly precisely between 663 and 681 CE, the apogee of the Tang dynasty, before the interregnum of 690-705. His wife's intimate insider's knowledge of Chinese culture and mores must also have been invaluable to him.



One of the online critics of the TV series complains that:
Despite the short stints of multiple cases, the second half of the drama became rather muddied and less intriguing compared to the first half. Ultimately, this drama didn’t live up to its potential given the high production value and strong cast.
Given that she also casts aspersions on my favourite character, however, I find it hard to take this critique very seriously:
Ma Rong was bringing about problems left and right to the main cast ... She may be used as a vehicle for Judge Dee to impart certain lessons but the character and the actress were more irritating than entertaining.
However, as one of the more succinct comments on her post so eloquently puts it: "Don’t matter to me just give me more."

The series may not be flawless in all aspects, but the Ma Rong / Judge Dee / Cao An triptych seems to me a clear enactment of the classic id / ego / superego paradigm familiar from so much popular fiction: Think Bones / Kirk / Spock in the original Star Trek, or Deanna / Picard / Data in Star Trek: the Next Generation.

You need an emotionally driven character to represent the primacy of bodily appetites: Pigsy in Monkey (for instance) - or Ma Rong. Then you need a more lofty character who embodies wisdom and logical thinking: Tripitaka in Monkey - or, here, the ethereal Cao An.

Finally, you need a fusion of the two - an Everyman character steered from impulse to impulse by these conflicting influences upon them: Monkey himself - or Captain Kirk - or (as in this case) Di Renjie. They represent the ethical person, controlled neither by heart nor head but by both at once ... Where would adventure stories be without them?







Sharon Lathan: Robert van Gulik with pet gibbon

Robert Hans van Gulik
(1910-1967)


  1. Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. Translated from Dee Goong An (1949)
    1. The Case of the Double Murder at Dawn
    2. The Case of the Strange Corpse
    3. The Case of the Poisoned Bride
    • Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An): An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Detective Novel. Trans. Robert van Gulik. 1949. New York: Dover, 1976.
  2. The Chinese Maze Murders (1950 / 1957)
    • Included in: The Haunted Monastery & The Chinese Maze Murders: Two Chinese Detective Novels. 1961 & 1957. New York: Dover, 1977.
  3. The Chinese Bell Murders (1958)
  4. The Chinese Gold Murders (1959)
  5. The Chinese Lake Murders (1960)
  6. The Chinese Nail Murders (1961)
  7. The Haunted Monastery (1961)
    • Included in: The Haunted Monastery & The Chinese Maze Murders: Two Chinese Detective Novels. 1961 & 1957. New York: Dover, 1977.
  8. The Red Pavilion (1961)
  9. The Lacquer Screen (1962)
  10. The Emperor's Pearl (1963)
  11. The Monkey and the Tiger (1965)
    1. Morning of the Monkey
    2. The Night of the Tiger
  12. The Willow Pattern (1965)
  13. Murder in Canton (1966)
  14. The Phantom of the Temple (1966)
  15. Judge Dee at Work (1967)
    1. Five Auspicious Clouds
    2. The Red Tape Murders
    3. He Came With the Rain
    4. The Murder on the Lotus Pond
    5. The Two Beggars
    6. The Wrong Sword
    7. The Coffins of the Emperor
    8. Murder on New Year's Eve
  16. Necklace and Calabash (1967)
  17. Poets and Murder (1968)



Tuesday, April 09, 2024

Finds: A Japanese Doll


Yaegaki-hime doll (purchased 7/4/24)
photograph by Bronwyn Lloyd


This doll, which I found a few days ago in a Vintage shop, is clearly a rather distressed version of the one in the auctioneer's picture below. As you can see, while her showcase is intact, it appears to have suffered a little water-damage at some point. I guess what attracted me to her most was the curious white-fur-lined horned helmet she was carrying, though.


Yaegaki-hime doll in showcase (late 20th century)


Nor did I realise that the pale cardboard backdrop (in my one - not the one above) was supposed to represent falling snow.


Utagawa Kuniyoshi: Yaegaki-hime (1852)


This nineteenth-century print gives a better idea of the story, I think. As the description puts it:
In one of the most beautiful prints in the series, an elegantly dressed young lady dances with ghostly fox spirits while holding a samurai helmet above her head. She is Yaegaki-hime, heroine of the popular kabuki play Japan's Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety ... The play was originally written for the puppet theater and was first performed in Osaka in 1766; it debuted as a kabuki play in Edo in 1776. The story, which takes place on the shores of Lake Suwa ... is a fictionalized version of the real-life rivalry between the Takeda and Uesugi clans during the sixteenth century.

Brussels Yaegaki-kai: Yaegaki-hime (2011)


But who exactly is she, and what is she doing with that helmet?
Yaegaki is torn by conflicting loyalties to her father, Nagao Kenshin, and her beloved fiancé, Takeda Katsuyori, who has come in secret to the Nagao mansion to recover an heirloom helmet stolen by Yaegaki's father. In the scene known as the 'Fox Fires in the Inner Garden' ... Yaegaki removes the helmet, which is decorated with long white hair, from the shrine in her father's garden where it has been kept. The God of Suwa, who wants the helmet returned to its rightful owners, sends fox spirits as his messengers to help and guide Yaegaki. By following the footsteps of foxes over the ice, she will be able to make a safe crossing over frozen Lake Suwa and deliver the helmet to Katsuyori.

Brussels Yaegaki-kai: Yaegaki-hime (2011)


In her fascinating online article "Identifying 'Geisha Doll' Types," Dr. Judy Shoaf lists the following set of distinguishing motifs, under the general category of "Dance or theater roles":

Woman with helmet: Yaegaki-Hime
A princess (hime) with a silvery crown in her hair. She holds a horned helmet with a tuft of long white hair trailing from it; foxes may also figure in the design in some way. This is the heroine of the play Honcho Nijushiko, set in the 15th [sic.] century. She carries the precious helmet across a frozen lake, with the help of spirit-foxes, to rescue it and also her lover.
So, while the doll I found yesterday is a very different version of the figure, the presence of a horned Samurai helmet decorated with long white hair is quite sufficient to identify it.


Utagawa Kuniyoshi: Yaegaki-hime (1852)







Burmese String Puppet (purchased 25/5/22)
photograph by Bronwyn Lloyd


So now that I know that, what do I do? Why all this detail about a dusty old Japanese doll, found lurking in the corner of an SPCA shop?

I guess mainly because it's fairly typical of the little knick-knacks I've picked up from time to time to decorate my study.

The Japanese doll, Yaegaki-hime, is particularly attractive to me, especially now that I know who she is. She won't stop moving, for one thing: the little dangling metal strips of her headdress keep on vibrating, whether there's any movement outside to provoke it or not. And the whole subject of spirit-foxes, kitsune, in Japanese folklore also greatly appeals to me.

In fact, I can't recall coming across an object that interested me so much since Bronwyn and I found an ornate Burmese puppet - pictured above - in a Northland Hospice Shop, together with a pair of twin male-female marionettes from Rajasthan.



As you can see, my one is in much better condition than the one pictured above for sale. Mine still has his sword, for one thing, and the intricacy and detail of his costume has to be seen to be believed. He stares down at me as I work, daring me to do a bit better.

Then there are a number of book-ends and figurines of various types I've collected over the years:



Glossy examples of Ancient Egyptian kitsch figure largely, I have to admit, as do such pieces of Chinoiserie as the two temple lions below:



There's nothing really valuable in this collection, I'm sure. But I still like the sense of individuality about the various pieces, crafted initially (no doubt) for the international tourist market, but somehow made special by their peregrinations through the world.

How did they end up in the little vintage shops where I found them? Some are damaged, others pristine, but that just seems to add character.


Edmund Engelman: Freud's desk (1938)


A great deal has been written about the choice - and arrangement - of figures on Sigmund Freud's desk in Vienna. I doubt that any such significance can be attributed to my own selection of mainly Eastern puppets and figurines.

But they all feel like friends to me, and I like to examine them and recall the circumstances of our first meetings ...