There is a scene in the novel "Higanbana Ga Saku Shima" by Li Kotomi where Umi, a girl of about 15 who was washed up on the shore of the eponymous "Island", is taught to write kanji by her same-age friend Yona:

"""
With a black pen, Yona showed Umi how to write a character stroke by stroke. One of those deep black, square "Island" characters that Umi could not read. It started with a dot, dot, then a horizontal line drawn from left to right, from there a short sweeping stroke to the left, then again a horizontal line and another one, and finally a vertical line with a again small upward turn at the bottom. Just by piling up dots, lines, sweeps and little hooks, a complete character was created. Umi scrutinised it curiously. "This is the 'U' in 'Umi'," Yona said. "Let's see if you can write it!"
"""

The character in question is 宇. Earlier in the novel, Yona had given Umi her name and she had wanted to write it as 霧実 but she changed it to 宇実 as it was simpler.

I love this scene as it takes me back to when I first started to learn kanji. I never learned to write them properly by hand though.

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#Higanbana
#LiKotomi

I've started reading 彼岸花が咲く島 (Higanbana ga saku shima) by Li Kotomi and it is such a relief after struggling through Yōko Tawada's 献灯使 (Kentōshi, translated as "The Last Children of Tokyo"). I was starting to doubt my Japanese abilities, but this new novel is a delight to read. I still have to look up quite a few words, but that is actually fun. With Tawada's writing, for so many sentences I have to read them three times or more to get what they actually mean. By comparison, the writing in this novel is simple and transparent (only by comparison though).

The novel has not been translated yet. The title is translated on Li Kotomi's web site as "The Island Where Red Spider Lilies Bloom". I don't like the name "spider lily", I feel it does the flower a discourtesy. The other name is "cluster amaryllis" but that sounds too botanical. The Japanese word Higanbana refers to the period of Higan. The term is derived from the Sanskrit pāram which means something like "going to the further bank", with the notion of a river separating this world from nirvana. It is the name for the Buddhist rites held in the week around the autumn equinox, and this is also the period when those flowers bloom. So I prefer to translate the title as "The Island where the Equinox Flowers Bloom".

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