1.
To the lively—and very surprising—bells, drums, trumpets, and cymbals of an Ottoman janissary band, the great female essayist and influencer of the Heian period, Sei Shonagon, looks her friend and rival Murasaki Shikibu in the eye and says, “I am abandoning my son and divorcing my husband.” Then without missing a beat, she explains that she finds motherhood boring— and she wants to live where the action is, at court.
Murasaki Shikibu can only stare at her rival wide-eyed. Because, really, who says that about their kid?
This is in such stark contrast to Michinaga’s father, who again and again has stated that all he cares about is “the family”— and its legacy. Children can die—hell, even he can pass on, as long as “the household” continues on its healthy upward trend in terms of wealth and political power. He is like a mafioso talking about la famiglia. The family for him is so much greater than the sum of its parts.
Even today in Japan, family ties are recorded and form the basis of family law. For example, when I married a Japanese citizen, my name was added to his family’s koseki 戸籍 the family registry. If I had been a Japanese citizen, my name would have been removed from my own parent’s family registry, since it is thought that a person can only belong to one household at a time. In the Heian period, like today, men could marry and join the wife’s family just as easily. What matters is the household.
This is the reason why, when a marriage falls apart, traditionally there is no shared custody and the child belongs to one household or the other. This might be changing, but when I divorced ten years ago, my name was removed from my ex’s family registry and our son was also removed to come with me. I can say honestly that there was no malice within our family, and that this style was simply what was believed best for the child. Though obviously it also explains the deep pain that occurs if one parent is cut out of their child’s life completely—which is not rare in Japanese divorces.
So with this family law concept of “household” in mind, as shocking as Sei Shonagon’s words sounded, what she was really doing was exiting the family household of her husband and leaving the child behind—something which would have been demanded and therefore would have been tolerated by the society.
2.
This week in Kaiser Kuo’s Sinica Podcast “Did Netflix Ruin The Three-Body Problem? he spoke with two guests: journalist Cindy Yu and UC Irvine professor Chris Fan.
I wrote about my own reaction to the show last week, basically saying that I was disappointed by the way the big scientific and philosophical issues were dumbed down to make more of a buddy movie. I said:
The Netflix show is more of a heroes’ journey story of a group of friends trying to save the world and stay true to their friendship than a show of deep philosophical questions.
I could only laugh when Cindy Yu described it as the Scooby-doo-ification of the story. Other people online have compared the casting to the old TV show Friends—with the same emphasis on unmarried buddies, or “the gang,” solving problems and sticking together. That is certainly a time-honored trope of American TV, at least since I was a kid. Yes, Scooby Doo.
Kaiser Kuo offered another fascinating idea about this:
There’s this literary translator, this guy named Angus Stewart, who is actually the host of Translated Chinese Fiction, it’s a podcast, it’s actually now on hiatus. But he sent me some very, very funny quotes from a piece that he’s working on, which I look forward to reading. He talks about the Oxford Five and says, “Western social norms dominate our characters’ unshy attitudes towards sex, recreational drugs,” the acid you just referenced, “antidepressants, and dark humor are used to mark them as relatable, not criminal.”
It goes on to say, “The neoliberal ideology of the Anglosphere is alive and well in this adaptation. All five characters are childless and generally unattached from family concerns, which makes for a striking contrast with Wang Miao — the Tencent adaptation never lets you forget that he has a family to consider. The Oxford Five are individual, rational agents whose lives are entirely intellectual and economical. They are laid back, science-loving, cool-ironic global citizens imbued with liberal values and free from any dangerous, radical, or traditional dogmas.
I thought this was interesting, because the moral focus is so different for the Netflix show—and part of this at least is based on this change in status of the main protagonist from parent/householder to individual agent. Don’t get me wrong: the Netflix show was entertaining… it was just massively less interesting than the original vision.
To read:
The Three Body Problem and a Short Note on Male Beauty: Knowing Bitter Melon 知行合一