Literary retail therapy

Now that I've no longer got my front desk shift, there's a big hole in my Friday afternoons. These already seem to stretch on interminably as it is, so I figured I might be in need of some distraction to get through. Usually that would mean a leisurely lunch, but I'd already stowed away something in anticipation and I thought it might be manky by Monday. So I ate it at the usual time and went out afterwards for a book-buying spree, hitting all three used booksellers within a reasonable radius.

1. COBS, Rubén. A dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish--Woohoo! Indigenous language varieties FTW!
2. DAZAI, Osamu. The setting sun [Trans. of 斜陽 by Donald Keene.]--I found a book of Dazai's tales when I was looking for something else and realised I knew nothing about him. According to Wikipedia, his No longer human (人間失格) is the second-best selling Japanese novel of all time after Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro. I didn't find that, but I did find another from the same period which is also considered a masterwork.
3. Abolqasem FERDOWSI. Shahnameh (Trans. of شاهنامه by Dick DAVIS.)--A Penguin "Deluxe Edition" in like-new condition for the bargain price of $10.50 plus tax. The find of the day!
4. IWASAKI, Mineko (with Rande BROWN). Geisha, a life--Reportedly one of the sources which Golding ripped offdrew inspiration from when composing Memories of a geisha.
5. WOODRELL, Daniel. The maid's version--FINALLY. How many years have I been combing the W section of the fiction shelves in these place in source of Woodrell's novels only to turn up a lot of Tom Wolfe and Herman Wouk? Only published this month; this is an advance reading copy with the publicity director's e-mail address pasted on the front cover.

Total cost: $29.04.

If it wasn't obvious from the string of Japanese names, I'm on an East Asian kick again. Besides the Dazai, I've just finished a Sōseki novel I've been lugging around for a few years and started in on the book of short stories from burakumin author Nakagami Kenji that monshu gifted me last year.

Missing the boat

To be honest, monshu's been something of a slacker recently in the business of keeping me on my toes. But he may just have made up for lost time with his latest object d'art acquisition. There are many ways a kanji identification request can bedevil me, but perhaps none more effective than to find a character that is perfectly clearly written, whose every element is familiar to me, but which is nonetheless unfamiliar and--worse--unfindable.

The character in question is 蜑. It looks straightforward: the radical must be 虫 ("insect"), which leaves 延 (yán "stretch") as the phonetic, right? Trouble was, I couldn't find this character anywhere. In fact, I couldn't even get close. I finally dug out my Nelson's and found 蜒, which is glossed as "serpentine". It's not that unusual to find variants with the radical in a different place. But I just couldn't get the semantics to work out. The other two characters next to it were 少女 "young woman", and what would this be doing written on a piece in the shape of a boat?

I wish I could say I cracked this on my own, but ultimately the seller came to my rescue with the translation "young woman diver". Apparently, the kun reading for 蜑 is あま ama which (in addition to all its other meanings) apparently means "diver". This obscure character appears to be the only gender-neutral way to write this. In ordinary usage, one either uses the characters 海人 (lit. "sea man") for a male diver or 海女 ("sea woman") for a female. The reading of 蜑少女 is actually あまおとめ ama-otome.

But why didn't any of my Chinese dictionaries have 蜑? Perhaps it's not actually a Chinese character? What I mean is, there are kanji which are 和製 "Japanese-made". For example, 榊 sakaki, the sacred tree of Shinto. (A simple combination of 木 "tree " and　神 "divine".) Could this be one? It is listed in Wiktionary, but with the reading dàn. That is, it seems to be treated as a variant of 蛋 "egg". Which does fit with the phonetic value of 延 but otherwise makes no sense in reference to the Japanese usage.

The one and only connexion that occurs to me is 蛋家 (Cant. Dahngā), now euphemistically called 水上人 "on-water people" in the same way as the Japanese eta have become burakumin. And like Japan's Burakumin, they have the curious distinction of being an ethnic group which is physically and linguistically indistinguishable from the majority population and yet treated as outcastes. Unlike the Eta, the Tanka have always been "boat people". And their name is also written 蜑家, with the same mystery character.